It is a standard question that my fellow consultants and I hear at the outset of any search, especially at the presidential level: Should we have a student on the committee?
The issue has always been somewhat fraught, but it has become more and more important as undergraduates around the country assert themselves on any number of topics facing their colleges — tuition costs, loan debt, racial inequities, gender identity, sexual misconduct, bullying and violence on campus, to name but a few. In many ways, the campus environment today is reminiscent of an earlier age, one in which campus unrest ultimately led to real change — the end of in loco parentis policies, inclusion of students in shared governance, and, oh yeah, stopping a war.
As women move up the leadership ranks in higher education, they find fewer and fewer female peers. That’s been fairly well documented by the American Council on Education and other sources, and is no surprise to those of us in the executive-search industry.
Why that’s the case is a topic fraught with complexity. There is the matter of stepping up and Leaning In to be sure, but there is also sexism — sometimes the overt kind and sometimes the subtle kind that occurs all along the leadership trajectory and affects who is mentored, who is labeled "leadership material," and who gets the kind of opportunities and assignments that lead most directly to advancement.
Of the many factors that limit women’s advancement, two are things we ought to be able to resolve: how candidates present themselves in job interviews and how search committees interpret those interviews.
After struggling for months to receive the accommodations she was entitled to, one student shares her story as a lesson for university administrators, faculty members and front-line staff.
Abstract
Emerging from the contested site of a new university campus, this article reflects on the transformative process of reconceptualizing and rebuilding a professional and an academic stream in a 21st-century Faculty of Education. In order to maximize her own capital, an assistant professor sought tenure in an innovative new stream introduced to her campus,
professor of teaching. The novel rank reflected the commitment of the university to provide educational leadership, outstanding teaching, and curriculum innovation to higher education. However, guidelines for promotion to professor were not directive and
exhaustive but more suggestive of being situated in place-based environments. Within the context of a market driven and policy-laden post-secondary institution, this was problematic. Since evidence supporting promotion to full professor is dependent on the discipline and the faculty, a myriad of interpretations of what exactly constituted a professor of
teaching emerged. Based on the ambiguity of these policies, the discussion surrounding the experiences of otherness and marginalization which arose as this scholar-practitioner focused on her work as a teacher educator and a researcher in an emerging rank became of singular interest.
Keywords: professor of teaching, higher education, tenure, promotion, research, marginalization
Résumé
Tirant sa source du site contesté d’un nouveau campus universitaire, cet article propose une réflexion sur le processus de transformation lié à la reconceptualisation et à la refonte d’un volet professionnel et universitaire au sein d’une Faculté d’éducation du XXIe siècle. En vue de maximiser son propre capital, une professeure adjointe a cherché à obtenir sa
permanence dans un volet novateur introduit dans son campus, celui de « professor of teaching », un nouveau niveau de poste reflétant la volonté de l’université de promouvoir le leadership en éducation, l’excellence dans l’enseignement et l’innovation en matière de curriculum au postsecondaire. Toutefois, au lieu d’être directifs et exhaustifs, les critères à remplir pour accéder à ce niveau de poste étaient plutôt de nature suggestive et fondées sur le milieu. Dans le contexte d’un établissement postsecondaire axé sur le marché et ancré dans des politiques, cela posait un problème. Comme les données venant appuyer
la promotion au poste de professeur titulaire dépendent de la discipline et de la faculté, une foule d’interprétations de ce qui constitue exactement un « professor of teaching » a surgi. Étant donné l’ambiguïté de ces politiques, la discussion entourant les expériences d’altérité et de marginalisation qui est survenue lorsque cette universitaire-praticienne a concentré son attention sur son travail comme professeure de pédagogie et comme chercheuse dans un nouveau niveau de poste s’est avérée particulièrement intéressante.
Mots-clés : professor of teaching, enseignement supérieur, permanence, promotion,
recherche, marginalisation
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.
Over the past 30 years, more and more faculty members and institutions have embraced undergraduate research
as a way to further faculty research and to enhance student learning. It has been used to attract and retain talented
students, to improve the educational experience of minorities, and to prepare more students for graduate school.
Engaging students in original scholarship is a time-intensive and expensive activity, but the outcomes are almost
always powerful and positive. Perhaps most important, research keeps students and the faculty connected and
engaged in high-level intellectual collaborations. Studies have shown that student learning depends strongly on
faculty involvement, and that when faculty members who have a strong research focus don’t include students in that
research, it has a negative impact.
It’s now simply a given among student affairs professionals that parents will be involved in their children’s lives at
university.
John Hannah notes, with a laugh, that his kids are “nauseatingly close to postsecondary age.” The father of two will soon watch as his teenagers begin the exciting but often bureaucratic and stressful journey of applying to university. Mr. Hannah must make a tough call: how much, exactly, should he hand-hold, guide and support them during this pivotal step towards adulthood?
No matter how much we debate the issue, end-of-course evaluations count. How much they count is a matter of perspective. They matter if you care about teaching. They frustrate you when you try to figure out what they mean. They haven’t changed; they are regularly administered at odds with research-recommended practices. And faculty aren’t happy with the feedback they provide. A survey (Brickman et al., 2016) of biology faculty members found that 41% of them (from a wide range of institutions) were not satisfied with the current official end-of-course student evaluations at their institutions, and another 46% were only satisfied “in some ways.”
Colleges are feeling heat to prove that their students are learning. As a result, a growing number of colleges are
measuring intended “learning outcomes” as well as issuing grades. But fewer are using standardized tests than was the case a few years ago.
Those are findings of a new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The liberal education organization received responses from chief academic officers at 325 of its member institutions, including community colleges and four-year institutions (public and private as well as a couple of for-profits).
Using a cross-case analysis of online, on-campus and online university teacher preparation courses, this study critically examines the constraints and affordances of online teacher education in preparing teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLO) urban schools. The results of the study indicate that while there was no significant difference between online and on-campus courses in terms of teacher acquisition of knowledge related to CLO instruction and assessment, questions remain about whether online teacher preparation can promote critical self-reflection, culturally responsive teaching practices, and collaboration within schools, when teacher learning is not supported and situated in schools and communities in an ongoing and structured way.
Keywords
teacher education, urban education, linguistically responsive pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, language education, identity, teacher beliefs
The union representing Ontario college faculty is taking the Progressive Conservative government to court after it terminated a task force that was trying to fix the growing problem of part-time and contract work.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says the College Task Force was a key part of the arbitrator’s decision last year, ending a bitter dispute between faculty members and Ontario’s 24 colleges that culminated in a record-long, five-week strike.
Many universities have implemented campus-based initiatives addressing students’ mental health with the goal of promoting well-being. One such initiative is the newly developed Counsellor-in-Residence (CIR) program at the University of Calgary, which targets students’ mental health by providing residence- based counselling services and mental health programming. In this
process evaluation, students completed three waves of data collection conducted over the academic year. Each wave measured students’ mental health literacy, using the Mental Health Literacy Scale (O’Connor & Casey, 2015), and resiliency, using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-25 (Connor & Davidson, 2003). Males reported lower mental health literacy than females (p < .001), and international students reported lower mental health literacy than domestic students (p < .001). No differences in resilience levels were found between groups. These findings suggest that male and international students experience additional barriers to accessing campus-based mental health services. Implications for residence-based mental health programming that target male and international students are discussed.
Each year, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) presents the results of its annual survey. These results give community colleges objective and relevant data about students’ experiences at their colleges so they can better understand how effectively they are engaging their students and identify areas for improvement.
This year, the CCSSE report also includes results of the first administration of the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (CCFSSE), which provides insights into faculty perceptions and practices. Because many items on CCSSE and CCFSSE are aligned, the report includes side-by-Lori Gates side views of faculty members’ and students’ responses.
Near the beginning of a new study on racial attitudes and college attainment, the authors note the story of Desiree
Martinez, who attended a high school in a low-income part of Los Angeles and longed to enrol at the University of
California, Los Angeles. She confided her ambitions to a teacher. The teacher frowned and said, “I don’t know why
counselors push students into these schools they’re not ready for … Students only get their hearts broken when
they don’t get into those schools, and the students that do get in come back as dropouts.”
Why are writing groups so difficult to sustain? How can they be cultivated and nurtured? We would like to share our
experiences of being a productive and successful writing group over the last seven years. We began with seven
non-tenured and/or contractual members who saw academic writing as an important process for developing research ideas and, consequently, for career growth. We also recognized that it was vital to have a circle of friends where everyone can receive supportive critique and informative feedback on their writing. Over the years, the group has grown to include 17 academics at all ranks and stages.
As Canadian universities seek to attract more international students, there is a need to recognize and respond to the diversity within this group and to question the binary categories of domestic students and international stu- dents. Relying primarily on 116 qualitative interviews with international undergraduates at the University of British Columbia, we utilize American students as a case study from which to explore the complex and blurred boundaries between these two categories. Americans resemble domestic stu- dents in some respects and international students in others, yet they are often less prepared to meet adaptational challenges because they have low expecta- tions of cultural and institutional differences. We compare the experiences of
Americans and international students from other countries, as well as other groups of students who fall between the cracks of the domestic and inter- national student classifications. We argue that, by targeting services on the basis of these broad administrative categories, categories that were created for financial purposes, the university reduces the take-up of the very services students need.
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.
As a new semester approaches, the academic's to-do list can fill up pretty fast. All of that course planning you’ve been putting off all summer now seems pretty urgent. Your chair wants a copy of your syllabi by the end of the week. And there’s still the matter of those writing deadlines. I’m here to add one more item to your list. Now is the time — not later — to think about accessibility in your classroom.
For many of us, accessibility is a topic handled by a brief section toward the end of our syllabus — a paragraph detailing the steps a disabled student can take to receive accommodations. Such policies are very much figured as an exception to the norm, an appendix pinned onto the end of the syllabus, as if to say: “Oh yeah, and if you’ve got a disability, we can probably work to find some kind of solution.” For Anne-Marie Womack, assistant director of writing at Tulane University, that way of conceptualizing accessibility is all wrong.
Online learning has reached a tipping point in higher education. It has grown from a peripheral project of early tech adopters or a practice of the for-profit industry into an accepted way of delivering education that is now deeply embedded in the majority of colleges and universities.
This article outlines a framework of creativity based on functional neuroanatomy. Recent advances in the field of cognitive neuroscience have identified distinct brain circuits that are involved in specific higher brain functions. To date, these findings have not been applied to research on creativity. It is pro- posed that there are four basic types of creative insights, each mediated by a distinctive neural circuit. By definition, creative insights occur in consciousness. Given the view that the working memory buffer of the prefrontal cortex holds the content of consciousness, each of the four distinctive neural loops terminates there. When creativity is the result of deliberate control, as opposed to spontaneous gener- ation, the prefrontal cortex also instigates the creative process. Both processing modes, deliberate and spontaneous, can guide neural
computation in structures that contribute emotional content and in structures that provide cognitive analysis, yielding the four basic types of creativity. Supportive evi- dence from psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific studies is presented and integrated in this article. The new theoretical framework systematizes the interaction between knowledge and creative
thinking, and how the nature of this relationship changes as a function of domain and age.
Implications for the arts and sciences are briefly discussed.