Chloe’s boyfriend hit her so hard she suffered a concussion, permanent hearing loss and, according to her psychologist, post-traumatic stress disorder. She says what Concordia University in Montreal did to her was worse.
Chloe, who asked that her real name not be used, was a first-year student at Concordia in September 2014 when her boyfriend, whom she’d been dating for a little over six months, punched her repeatedly in the head.
Her neighbours called the police; he was arrested and charged with assault. Chloe says the man, also a Concordia student, assaulted her twice more on campus: the first time choking her and the second hitting her in the buttocks so hard it left a bruise. After the second incident, he was arrested again and charged with violating court-imposed conditions restricting his ability to contact her.
Most students are encouraged to seek help to combat stress, but international students who are burning out fear
that asking for help may lead to deportation.
Adolfo Ruiz, 21, is from Venezuela and studying in B.C. After months of intensive study, working part-time and living
in a cramped room, he hit a wall emotionally.
"You are just crying your guts out and you are not able to talk," Ruiz said. "It was like a total, mental emotional
the breakdown for me."
But Ruiz said he was afraid to ask for help. "If you mess up once, then your record is totally stained for the rest of
your life," he said.
As an international student hoping to stay on in Canada, Ruiz feared that any public sign of weakness could hurt his
chances
Last semester, I had a student who did so well on his second paper — after doing very poorly on his first — that I got suspicious. I must have Googled every sentence in that second essay, looking for evidence that he had lifted it from someone else. I even called him into my office and grilled him about his process, trying to catch him out. I couldn't believe that the same student had written both papers.
But I was wrong. He hadn't plagiarized. He was responsible both for the terrible paper at the beginning of the term and the excellent one later on. Eventually I learned that he’d been struggling with some personal issues earlier in the semester — issues that kept him from spending enough time on that first paper.
If we believe in the active-learning classroom — that the only way to bring about real learning is to engage students in ways that help them revise and broaden their thinking — then student participation is a non-negotiable part of the equation. Learning does not happen without the student actively taking part.
Oddly, however, given its importance, our own definition of “student participation” is often quite limited. In the scholarship on teaching and learning, that term is almost always defined narrowly as the degree to which students take part in class discussions. And while discussion is obviously an important component of an active-learning classroom, it’s not the only component. There are many other ways in which students participate in class: writing, researching, and contributing to small group activities are just a few. If we want to accurately assess and reward participation in our courses, we need to expand our definition to include more than just the amount of times that students raise their hands.
10 questions for universities developing a coordinated response to suicide in their campus community.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death, behind accidents, for young adults, so it is a sad reality that all universities will confront at one time or another on their campuses. During the annual conference of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services in June, Andrea Carter, assistant dean of student wellness, support and success at University of Toronto Mississauga, and Melinda Scott, dean of students at U of T’s University College, addressed a standing-room-only crowd about their experience with student suicides at U of T and how it led them to develop a co-ordinated response. The following is a list of some of the questions that they say postsecondary managers, administrators and crisis-response teams should consider when developing policies or procedures related to suicide on campus:
No matter where you are in the academic hierarchy (or “lowerarchy,” as one of my students once wrote on an exam), you need to learn how to manage up.
Whether student issues, structural problems with a program, unintended consequences of administrative mandates or a full-blown bureaucratic meltdown, you never want to be asked certain questions by your higher-ups.
Students in residence at the University of Guelph shouldn't be surprised if the president of the school knocks on their door starting Monday.
That's because president Franco Vaccarino along with other administrators, faculty members and counsellors will be making house calls to check on the mental well-being of students.
Many of the public battles for transgender students have centered on the bathrooms they want to use. And according to a new paper, gender-neutral restrooms are the accommodation transgender and gender-nonconforming college students want most on their campuses. But there’s much more on their wish lists that would make them feel safe and comfortable.
In his classic 1963 study Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter convincingly argues that Americans’ suspicion of purely intellectual pursuits extends even to our thinking about how to structure and value higher education. He might not have been surprised at the currently popular movement on college campuses that goes under the banners of “experiential learning,” “service learning” and “engaged learning.”
The word “crisis” is often used to describe the peer-review system, not only in terms of quality of reviews but also quantity. To hear some academics tell it, fielding peer-review requests is a nearly full-time job. But preliminary research on the input-output balance in peer review suggests there is no real crisis, at least as far as quantity is concerned. That is, the professors who are writing the most get asked to review the most, meaning the system is in balance -- sort of.
A seasoned educator shares four ideas for supporting students who have suffered emotional trauma.
Research is reviewed in a rigorous manner, by expert peers. Yet teaching is often reviewed only or mostly by pedagogical non-experts: students. There’s also mounting evidence of bias in student evaluations of teaching, or SETs -- against female and minority instructors in particular. And teacher ratings aren’t necessarily correlated with learning outcomes.
All transitions are difficult. But there is no doubt that following a long-serving leader brings particular challenges. We tend to focus on the brief administrations that so many leaders in higher education are serving right now. We’ve all witnessed such short tenures -- leaders moving on to other opportunities or unfortunately encountering difficulties that result in other people making that decision for them. But among the key transition issues discussed less often are the challenges that occur at the retirement of long-serving leaders -- in many cases, the “founding” deans or directors of key organizations or departments.
Improving student outcomes is a primary goal of all postsecondary institutions. This report includes the first set of results for a research project that aims to understand the effectiveness of an intervention designed to improve postsecondary student success.
Student orientation and transition programs constitute an important part of Mohawk College’s Student Success Plan. The college endeavours to facilitate the development of an individualized “Future Ready Plan” for students to ensure they are prepared for their college experience by organizing goal-setting workshops during orientation and initial transition activities. Recent evidence suggests that an online, guided, writing-intensive approach to goal setting and self-authorship may have significant effects on student outcomes, such as retention and academic performance (Morisan et al., 2010; Schippers, Scheepers & Peterson, 2015).
Despite the cash injection, campus services will not be able to meet everyone's mental health needs, Minister of
Advanced Education and Skills Development Deb Matthews said in a statement to the Toronto Star.
"Mental illness is a spectrum," Matthews said. "For some students, on-campus resources such as counselling
and/or peer support may be the best and most helpful provision of care. For students with more complex mental
health needs, the institution can serve as a point of referral or information in helping that student access the
appropriate community supports and get the help that they need."
One thing about student evaluations that troubles me is how they give students the impression that it’s the teacher who makes or breaks the course. A few instruments query students about their own efforts, but I’m not sure those kinds of questions make it clear that what happens in any course is the combined result of teacher and student actions. Early in my teaching career, I heard a wise colleague tell students, “It’s not my class. It’s not your class. It’s our class, and together we will make it a good or not-so-good learning experience.”
"Administration" is a cold word. Yet — whether our many campus critics believe it or not — most full-time administrators have very deep feelings about the work they do. I was no exception. I got into the racket as an advocate for doctoral students in English, and I approached all my administrative work as a calling.
Abstract Research suggests that cultural issues can make or mar the open innovation process. In this paper, we thus aim at identifying organizational culture types that enable and retard the two types of open innovation activities: in-bound and out-bound. Data were collected using the questionnaire survey method from 339 middle and top managers working in the Malaysian high-tech sector.Organizational culture emerged as a huge predictor of open innovation. We found that highly integrative culture enables in-bound open innovation, but does not significantly affect out-bound open innovation. Besides, hierarchy culture is found to retard both in-bound and out-bound open innovation. This paper is probably the first to empirically investigate the role of culture in open innovation. The findings fill an important gap in open innovation theory while practical implications extend to managers interested in open innovation adoption in their organizations.
What do you call a professor? Professor. Oh, I’m so funny…
In all seriousness, the answer to this question is much more complicated than you might think, hence my humour flow chart. Let me explain. Most students who attend university grew up in homes that valued manners to one degree or another. So unless told otherwise, they referred to adults as Mr., Mrs., or, more rarely, Ms. This was standard procedure from their parents’ friends to their elementary and high school teachers. So when these students get to university, they end up with one of two problems. Either they don’t know what to do or they say the wrong thing. So in this post, I’m going to discuss what not to do, why the title you use is important, and how to avoid feeling like an ass. The easy answer is to just call your professor, “Professor.” It’s a good catch-all and you are unlikely to offend anyone. If you want to delve further into this topic, read on!
Most, if not all, faculty and graduate students will agree with Dr. Joli Jensen’s statement that “academic writing is a perplexing burden, a source of constant anxiety, self-doubt, and confusion” (p. 4). When we and our colleagues discuss our own writing struggles or those of our graduate students, we recognize that there are many potential issues underlying writing problems: research design issues, lack of knowledge of other scholarly literature, underdeveloped academic writing skills, an
emerging identity as an academic writer, and ineffective writing processes and practices. Jensen, the author of Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics, claims that her book focuses solely on “offering academic colleagues process-oriented strategies for overcoming writing obstacles” (p. 88). In fact, we find that Jensen offers more than just process strategies in that she also details the affective and psychological barriers to writing; the things that happen in writers’ heads when they have carved out time for writing but still struggle.