Students struggling with their gender identity or sexual orientation have the longest-term counselling treatment while in college, according to a new report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health. Students considering self-harm or suicide also participate in more counselling sessions -- and the number of students who reported they purposefully injured themselves or attempted suicide continues to rise. But far from a crisis, this represents more students seeking treatment, experts say.
Over time, the labour market has shifted from one characterized by stable or permanent employment to a “gig economy” of temporary or contracted employment, where an on-demand, freelance or contingent workforce is becoming the norm. A gig can be defined as “any job, especially one of short or uncertain duration.”
This type of staffing model allows an organization to fill skills gaps by hiring on a temporary, on-demand basis. These are not the “temps” of the past; instead, they are short- or long-term contracts for personnel ranging from blue-collar light-industrial
workers to highly skilled IT, engineering, accounting and HR professionals.
I’ve been especially appreciative of my colleagues this week and there are lots of reasons why.
My colleagues teach me.
My colleagues let me teach them.
My colleagues disagree with me.
A study presented Friday at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting shines some light on the way women are hired for top higher education leadership positions in searches involving third-party executive search firms.
For the study, Harvard Ph.D. student Jeraul C. Mackey obtained access to proprietary data from a search firm that remained anonymous. The data covered almost 500 searches over an eight-year period starting in 2009. Mackey ultimately analyzed a subset of the data covering 250 searches for two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions.
He was able to look at how women candidates fared at each stage of the recruitment process for upper-level positions, finding that women fared better as searches progressed. He was also able to examine recruiters’ preferences about women candidates, finding that the gender makeup of a recruitment team had no discernible effect on whether a search ultimately resulted in a woman being hired.
Speaking to an audience at Western University last week, Prime Minister Trudeau earned a round of appreciative applause by referring to it as the “Harvard of Canada.” It’s a harmless enough conceit: “Harvard of the North” t-shirts are sold at university souvenir shops across Canada. But of course, there is no Canadian equivalent of Harvard, with its prestige, limited enrollment and its $60,000 tuition. And really, it’s just as well.
When it is remarked that Canada does not have a university with the international stature of a Harvard or an Oxford, it is usually with an air of wistful regret. Or perhaps it’s used as another example of how Canadians are in thrall to the “tall poppy syndrome”: a tendency to disparage the achievements of those who have excelled. And sometimes the lack of an elite university is seen as evidence of how Canadians under-appreciate the benefits of higher education.
Background/Context: In recent years, college attendance has become a universal aspiration. These rising ambitions have been attributed to the “college-for-all” norm, which encourages all students to aim for college attendance; however, not all students are prepared for the college application process or college-level work.
Pendant que presque tous les pays du monde s’occupent, de façon tout à fait justifiée, de la récession actuelle, une crise démographiquetouchant le marché du travail menace d’ébranler les fondements mêmes de notre société et denotre économie.
Last week we reviewed the reappointment, tenure and promotion process. In this article, we will discuss strategies
for assembling your file for it.
The typical file should include a copy of your CV, a narrative and documents providing evidence of your accomplishments in the three areas of faculty work: teaching, research and scholarship, and service. Those three
components of the file should be tightly integrated to tell a compelling story about your accomplishments.
“Do you know how much this exam is worth?”
“I can’t find any office hours listed for one of my classes—are there any?.”
“What if I get sick and miss a few classes—will my grade be hurt?”
My answer was the same for all three questions—“I don’t know.” Even though these were my first-year seminar students asking these questions, they were looking at syllabi from their other courses, part of a syllabus review exercise I do each fall with first-time students.
One academic’s journey in search of new perspectives.
What you are about to read is an argument for inviting more academics, and academic administrators, to second themselves for periods of time to new roles within and beyond the university. It’s a reflection on three mid-career adventures that taught me more than I bargained for. Returning now to teach tax law and policy at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, I realize just how much I’ve learned on the road and how it is energizing my work as a faculty member. Paradoxically, I’m also keenly aware of what I missed by being away. Out of this strange mix, a few ideas are emerging about why we should promote a stronger culture of secondments in academia.
“I want to be able to engage in the grand calling of a Socratic teacher, which is not to persuade and convince students, but to unsettle and unnerve and maybe even unhouse a few students, so that they experience that wonderful vertigo and dizziness in recognizing at least for a moment that their world view rests on pudding, but then see that they have something to fall back on. It's the shaping and forming of critical sensibility. That, for me, is what the high calling of pedagogy really is.”
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.”1 However, amongst this varied group of students, there are common
concerns that they share. This policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic barriers such as restrictive course offerings and
availability of instructors or support services outside of regular business hours.3
Abstract
Para-ethnography involves collaboration with organization members who are themselves producers of cultural analysis rather than sources of raw data. It begins from the premise that contemporary workplaces involve internal theorizing that, although distinct from academic theorizing, can inform and ground organizational theory. Modern organizations, as highly professionalized, and based on conceptual design and legitimation, are a natural match for para-ethnographic methods, which have nevertheless been absent from organizational scholarship. As part of a general revisionist program in ethnographic theory, para-ethnography offers a way of reconceptualizing the role of the researcher, the nature of cultural knowledge, and the spatial boundaries of culture. After describing the simila- rities and differences between revisionist ethnographic approaches, I outline how para-ethnography differs from other forms of ethnography in practice. Finally, I discuss the challenges and opportuni- ties of para-ethnography, suggesting that this methodological development may form part of a larger reconceptualization of the relation between theory and practice, and offering practical mechanics to ground such a reconceptualization.
Background: It would be easy to think the technological shifts in the digital revolution are simple incremental progressions in societal advancement. However, the nature of digital technology is resulting in qualitative differences in nearly all parts of daily life.
Just starting out? Worried about your lectures, your students, your time-management skills and more? Eight academics offer up their advice.
There are plenty of mistakes to go around early in one’s academic career. Whether they happen in front of a class or
behind the scenes, hindsight shows us how to do better. Here you’ll find a mix of experience and advice from eight
professors who’ve been there, done that and lived to share some lessons.
School leaders are faced with stress as part of their daily jobs; however, left unaddressed, stress has the potential of becoming mentally and physically exhausting. School leaders need opportunities for stress reduction as well as the means to predict and anticipate stress in an effort to minimize its effects. This commentary discusses leadership-related stress and offers strategies to minimize and cope with stress.
The news that two publicly funded Ontario colleges are operating men-only campuses in Saudi Arabia feels wrong at first glance.
At second glance, too. There’s bound to be a level of complexity in any business transaction with a repressive country that discriminates against women, among its other human rights sins. Conscious of the yawning gap between professed ideals and entrepreneurial self-interest, we often find it easier to accept the moral contradictions built into real-world relationships as unavoidable and even necessary.
Like most professors who teach composition, I require my students to write multiple drafts — three, in fact — of each essay. That’s not because three is a magic number. It’s just a number that fits well with the amount of time we have in the semester, and it reinforces the idea of working through multiple drafts. If there is a "secret" to good writing, I’m convinced, multiple drafts is it.
And, like most of my colleagues, I regularly have students work in "peer editing" or "workshopping" sessions where they read and offer comments on one another’s work.
None of this is groundbreaking pedagogy. In fact, it’s pretty standard fare for a college-level writing course.
There is nothing new in the role popular culture plays in issues of young people and identity. Few people reading this chapter did not, at some point, present their identities or claim their affiliations through displays of popular culture content or preferences. Beatles or Rolling Stones? Tupac or Biggie? Star Wars or Star Trek? Halo or World of Warcraft? Sex in the City or Grey’s Anatomy? We have all argued, shared, reminisced, disdained, or delighted in performing our identities through popular culture and using it to gauge potential friends or possible adversaries.
In Canada, only 44% of members of academic governance bodies at universities feel that their boards are effective decision-making bodies (Jones, Shanahan, & Goyan, 2004). In this study, we examined the views of senators at a British Columbia university regarding their senate’s effectiveness in decisionmaking, including structures, processes, and leadership, and their suggestions for potential changes. Eight interviews were conducted with current or recent former senators in May 2012; each interview lasted 30 to 60 minutes. At the time of the interviews, fewer than half of the senators stated that the senate was effective, with concerns concentrated in the areas of committees, participation of faculty and students, and level of debate. This research has implications for enhancing the effectiveness, legitimacy, and credibility of institutional academic governance structures and processes, particularly in the Canadian context.