The wave of upcoming retirements is a myth and PhD numbers have little to do with the academic job
market anyway.
In my last post I took a look at some of the history and context of Canadian universities’ hiring of contract faculty. While I was digging around for information, I couldn’t help noticing the relevance of some of the material to another ongoing debate in higher education: that of the “overproduction” of PhDs. Since “too many PhDs” is a recurring theme in media commentary about
graduate education (e.g. Nature, The Economist), I thought I’d explore the issue in more depth and connect it to some of the research I found. Are we really “producing” too many PhDs, and if so, is this a recent problem?
I was once invited to a costume party by graduate students where the theme was “what you would be doing if you hadn’t gone to grad school”. Although I never attended the party, in hindsight I would probably have dressed as a pharmaceutical sales rep for the mood stabiliser medication that I am currently taking. Something akin to the character Jamie Randall in the film Love & Other Drugs.
Academic work is often solitary, but succeeding in the professoriate arguably requires social acumen. So is that why gay men and women are disproportionately represented among academics? A new study investigating the phenomenon of “occupational segregation” argues that certain jobs -- including that of professor -- are particularly appealing to gay men and lesbians for these reasons.
In response to sweeping curriculum re-design prompted by the Common Core State Standards (CCSSO, 2010), today’s high school English teachers are in search of texts to help them shift from programs dominated by literary analysis to ones well-versed in rhetorical analysis, in which teachers instruct students to read and write arguments using a rhetorical approach. Jennifer Fletcher’s new book, Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response, gives English teachers unfamiliar with the classical tradition of rhetorical strategies a manageable yet thorough introduction to teaching and learning for argumentation.
he elevated attention paid to sexual and interpersonal violence, coupled with new legislative requirements, is eading colleges and universities to improve the ways that victims and survivors can report incidents of such iolence. Providing additional resources and educating students about reporting options can lead to a significant ncrease in those reports. That is a positive step forward. However, surges in reporting can, in turn, stress nstitutional resources and delay or stop colleges and universities from shifting their focus to actually preventing sexual violence and bringing reporting numbers back down.
The ability to reach a variety of audiences in diverse environments has made distance learning a major form of education
and training in the 21st century. Though traditionally encountered in the educational and business communities, distance learning has proven an important resource for a variety of other constituencies. Terrorist groups have exploited the digital domain as a means of recruitment, propaganda and training, and other related activities, including the use of distance learning as a strategic resource and force multiplier. The distance learning strategies and tactics of jihadists are reviewed as we explore the dark side of distance learning.
Mukhopadhyay, Henze, and Moses’ How Real is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology is a refreshing read on the significance of understanding race not as biology, but as a sociocultural construct that operates as power. The word “refreshing” is apropos because it achieves what has been challenging for many of us educators: the writers painstakingly explain and show how race has been and continues to be constructed through culture. And they do it in clear language—a true feat considering the complexity of the topic and the fact that this is the first book to take up the project of a “biocultural approach” to explaining the racial construct. With respect to the biocultural approach, the authors argue, “Race is very much culturally and socially real, and has had and continues to have real consequences, both social and biological” (p. xvi). While offering a perspective on race that connects biology and cultural anthropology, they debunk in great detail the enduring myth of race as biological by presenting key research studies in an accessible manner.
It will be some time before we know the full impact of the COVID-19-induced shift to remote learning this spring -- how it altered the arc of students' academic careers, for example, or affected the extent and nature of their learning.
But we now have some early data on how it reshaped instructors' teaching practices.
A survey released today by Bay View Analytics (formerly the Babson Survey Research Group) and its president, the digital learning researcher Jeff Seaman, offers some insights into the transition that virtually all colleges, instructors and students undertook this spring as the novel coronavirus shut down campuses across the country.
After years of taking orders, you finally get to issue them in your first administrative role. You will have the freedom to make your own plans, set your own direction, and surround yourself with people who share your work ethic and point of view. Life is good!
If we see a colleague with a fever, we say “go home and rest.” Why can’t we treat mental illness with the same understanding?
Today, I want to revisit the story David told in his last post. Someone he knew collapsed, became addicted to crystal meth and ended up homeless. We all wonder after such a story – could this have been prevented? Overall, it is difficult to provide a single answer and there is no one person to blame but I hope that after reading the list below, you will feel like you can help (even if it is only in a small way).
A seasoned educator shares four ideas for supporting students who have suffered emotional trauma.
Last semester I reinvented English composition as a community-service learning course. My students did the usual work of any composition course — developing basic writing skills, crafting narrative essays and arguments, conducting research — but it was in the service of creating print and web content for a local homeless shelter.
In their end-of-semester evaluations, students praised the experiment, and I will probably repeat it. But I don’t want to make too much of that particular reinvention, because I have reinvented first-year composition at least a half-dozen times in my 20 years of teaching it, and will no doubt do so again. The same goes for most people I know who teach composition.
Abstract
This survey study measured the association between risk and protective factors of anxiety and its implications on the
academic performance of 1,053 students at a four-year, public post-secondary institution in southwestern Ontario. Logistic
regression analyses revealed 13 significant variables at the univariable level, while the multivariable model yielded seven
significant factors. Students who felt hopeless significantly increased their odds of reporting anxiety adversely affecting
their academic performance, while being able to manage daily responsibilities was the only protective factor against anxiety
impacting students’ educational attainment. By planning, designing, and implementing proactive programs focusing on these
predictor variables, such interventions can equip students against the debilitative influence of anxiety on their academic
success.
Keywords: anxiety, academic performance, post-secondary students, student wellness, risk factors, protective factors
I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been teaching at my best this semester. Oh, there have been some good classes. And I think I'm finally getting a handle on the one group of students who don't want to speak up in class. But in general it feels like I'm going through the motions a little bit, not fully reaching as many students as I have in the past, talking too much from the front of the room. I have a theory as to why this is happening.
This is my fourth semester at the University of Iowa teaching rhetoric to mostly first-year students. After years of adjuncting, it's great to be able to teach the same course again and again. I'm able to learn from my mistakes and improve semester to semester. Even better, prepping for class takes less and less time each semester. I keep an archive of class activities from previous semesters in Scrivener, and I can quickly arrange a few of them to make up a whole class period. It's great.
Some are stocking naloxone kits, while others are pushing increased public awareness.
On April 14 last year, British Columbia’s chief health officer declared a public health emergency due to the high number of opioid overdose deaths in the province – and the death toll has continued to rise since then. In December, Vancouver police reported up to nine opioid overdose deaths in a single night. At a conference on the opioid crisis held in Ottawa in November, Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins said that, in his province, opioid overdose is now the third leading cause of accidental deaths, accounting for about 700 deaths a year.
Also attending the Ottawa conference was Aaron Orkin, an emergency physician with Sinai Health System in Toronto and a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Dr. Orkin studies opioid overdose and the distribution of naloxone, a medication that can block the effects of opioids and revive those who have overdosed. “People who are dying from opioid overdoses are not dying alone. They die in the company of friends and family members, people who care about them,” he told the conference. “This is where the idea for naloxone distribution programs came from.”
Meetings among colleagues are commonplace in every organization. Academe is no exception. We have meetings for our specific schools, departments and units, not to mention the additional task forces, subcommittees, working groups, teams, ad-hoc groups, councils or advisory panels -- with each designed to help us serve the institution.
How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success.
Emerging research suggests that for students to fare better, they need to fail better. How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success, and the notion of resilience is increasingly prevalent in conversations about higher education. Resilience has a number of characteristics, including levels of persistence, effort, positive mindset,
motivation and self-regulation.
So how do we build resilience into our classrooms? Are there ways to embed resilience into the content we deliver? As a literature professor, I have recently reimagined my medieval romance course as a learning journey about resilience. My premise: chivalric quests can provide a valuable lens to understand the process of transformative learning and provide us with models for normalizing failure as a necessary condition of success.
The timing is right for a sustainability dialogue in Ontario. The Ontario Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development (MAESD) has been working on a trifecta of key postsecondary policy levers for which institutional and system sustainability are an essential consideration. These include the next round of Strategic Mandate Agreement negotiations, a funding formula review and the recently announced tuition fee framework. We can — and should — use these tools to mitigate sustainability risk moving forward.
It’s easy to think of the Millennial generation, those born roughly between 1982 and 2002, as tech-savvy digital natives ��� and in many ways they are. Immersed in consumer technology since birth, today’s youth has mastered the art of the swipe, the
selfie and social media. So it may come as a surprise that Millennials often lack essential digital skills needed to succeed in the workplace — be it a conventional office setting, an auto mechanic’s shop, or in a tractor on a farm.
OISE’s pathways to education and work team has been commissioned by Education International to prepare a
paper, to be entitled “Global Trends in VET: A Framework for Social Justice.”
Education International is a federation of 396 associations and unions which represent some 32.5 million teachers and other employees in all forms of education: early childhood, primary school, secondary school, vocational, university and adult education. Education International represents organisations from 171 countries which are served in 5 regions: Africa, North America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Latin America.