I’m a tenured professor at a large public research-oriented university. This was my first job straight out of doctoral studies. It was, and still is, the job of my dreams. As opposed to the many tenure-track horror stories we hear (particularly from women), I felt valued and appreciated from Day 1 in my department. I respect my colleagues and feel respected by them.
So what’s the problem? Last fall I physically collapsed.
The current Annual Report uses visualizations developed from years of CCMH data to
explore college student mental health with an emphasis on individual counseling provided
by counseling centers. To start, it is worth briefly reviewing the findings from the last two
Annual Reports:
• 2015 Annual Report: Counseling center utilization increased at 5 to 6 times the rate of institutional enrollment, during the preceding five years. This increase is primarily characterized by students reporting a history of “threat-to-self ” characteristics, and these same students use about 20-30% more services.
• 2016 Annual Report: Counseling center resources devoted to “rapid access” services increased by 28%, over the prior six years, whereas resources devoted to “routine treatment” decreased by 7.6% on average.
When it comes to skills development, sometimes you have to make advantage before you can take advantage.
I’m sitting at my desk in the Research Institute at SickKids, putting the finishing touches on our skills and career development curriculum for the upcoming academic year. Our office has an open-door policy, so one of the institute’s PhD students pops in to talk about internships. They’re interested in participating in our administrative internship program, which places grad students and postdocs in departments like grant development, knowledge translation and tech transfer. What they really want though is to work in the project management unit. They’re seriously interested in moving into a project management role after they graduate, but they want to get some practical experience first to find out if they really enjoy the work and to build their network.
The letter is typical of those liberal arts colleges send to high school students who have done well on the PSAT.
"Which of the following would you expect to find at one of the best liberal colleges?" asks the letter, from Macalester College. It goes on to list qualities of which the college can boast: "academic challenge," "a global perspective," "1,257 miles of hiking trails," "active, politically aware students," "small classes and 10:1 student-faculty ratio." Mixed into the list are some qualities at Macalester than you won't find everywhere else. For example, bagpipes makes the
list, as the college's Scottish heritage is evident in the tradition of using the instrument to announce that a professor has earned tenure.
Le processus d’internationalisation des établissements d’enseignement technique suit une évolution qui lui est propre et qui est fortement influencée par le contexte géopolitique local (Gallagher & Dennison, 1995). Cette étude analyse l’évolution des activités internationales et des stratégies organisationnelles des collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel
(cégeps) entre 2000 et 2014, afin d’identifier la phase qui caractérise le mieux le processus d’internationalisation (Raby & Valeau, 2007), de même que l’influence du contexte géopolitique sur ce processus. Les données tirées des quatre enquêtes réalisées par Cégep international (2000, 2005, 2010) et la Fédération des cégeps (2014) montrent une croissance soutenue des
activités internationales, mais un recul entre 2010 et 2014 des stratégies organisationnelles, ce qui suggère l’entrée d’une cinquième phase – postinstitutionnalisation – que nous appelons phase de la diffusion. L’émergence d’une communauté de pratique formée par le Gouvernement du Québec, les cégeps et la Fédération des cégeps aurait favorisé cette croissance, et la
réorientation des objectifs gouvernementaux pourrait expliquer le recul récent des stratégies organisationnelles.
The internationalization of technical education institutions is influenced by the local geopolitical context (Gallagher & Dennison, 1995). This study analyzes the evolution of international activities and organizational strategies taking place in Quebec’s collèges d’enseignement general et professionnel (CEGEPs) between 2000 and 2014, in order to identify the internationalization phase (Raby & Valeau, 2007) and assess the influence of Quebec’s geopolitical context. The data come from four surveys conducted by CEGEP International (2000, 2005, 2010) and the Federation of CEGEPs (2014), and they show a sustained growth of all international activities, but a decline in organization strategies between 2010 and 2014. We formulate the hypothesis that CEGEPs have entered a fifth and post-institutionalization phase that we called “dispersion”.
A community of practice including the Government of Quebec, CEGEPs and the Federation of CEGEPs would have contributed to the growth of international activities, and recent changes in the government’s policy emphasis could explain the decline in CEGEPs’ organizational strategies.
Ah, frosh. The gateway to all the parties university has to offer. It’s a fleeting moment filled with hype and rush. It’s hot and filled with sweaty people experiencing the same things you are.
My frosh happened two years ago and it was anything but dull. However, I remember feeling a tad vulnerable. There was a little voice in my head that kept nagging about how I decided to dress for the week. Don’t bend too much or else your butt will show. Your dress is a little too revealing.
My fellow freshman girls and I wore short shorts during the day. At night, we wore tight dresses or much more revealing tops as we danced the night away. Our fashion made us out as bait to concupiscent freshman boys—those who cannot control their hands from reaching down my thighs or grinding against my body without my permission. It opened my eyes to the on-going battle between what is deemed as “provocative”—and the perceived correlation between fashion and consent.
Conventional wisdom suggests that teaching students how to be creative is a task best left to the arts and design. But faculty members from other fields are increasingly seeing the benefits of cultivating in their students the kinds of integrative and lateral thinking that creativity can foster. Two examples from psychology came to us in response to our recent request for your thoughts on this topic.
I have a question about cover letters. In your blog posts and book, you stress the importance of putting research first in a cover letter for positions at research-oriented institutions, and teaching first for openings at teaching-oriented colleges. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell which camp an institution falls under. Any advice?
Indeed, in presenting yourself as a desirable job candidate for a particular institution, it is imperative that your application materials align you with the main focus — the main mission, if you will — of the place to which you are applying. The cover letter is the first indicator that you understand what will make you both effective and tenurable at a given institution, and search committees looking to fill a tenure-track position want to be sure they "spend" that tenure line on someone who will be successful.
Schools are also looking to encourage domestic students to benefit from international students’ presence.
As the blip-blip-bloop of the classic Skype ringtone connects me with Zack (Guanglong) Pang at Wilfrid Laurier University, it occurs to me that a little box like this on a computer screen may be the only window through which this international student has seen his family for the past few years – they live half a world away in his hometown of Shenyang, an industrial city in the northeastern part of China. Mr. Pang, who at the time of this interview was finishing his bachelor of science degree at Laurier and preparing for a master’s in geography at York University starting this fall, cheerfully returns my wave at the screen.
Is there a tipping point at which students who take a blend of online and in-person coursework are doing too much online? That question goes to the heart of something called the online paradox.
The online paradox has inspired much debate, and it describes two seemingly contradictory things. The first is
that community-college student who take an online course are more likely to fail than are those who take it face-to-face. The second is that community-college students who take some online classes are more likely to complete their
degrees than are those who don’t take any.
Several years ago, I read an essay, "Notes From a Career in Teaching," written by Murray Sperber, a retired professor of English and American studies. He shared this advice: Teach according to your personality. Vary your teaching methods. Don’t take attendance.
Take a hard line on late and incomplete work. Give students lots of options for major assignments and exams. Get
out of the way.
The more open universities are about where their PhDs are getting jobs, the better equipped current students are to
forge their own career paths.
International Students in Canada 2018
At age 18, Kimberly could no longer come up with a reason to live.
The Toronto university student locked the door to her parents’ garage, stepped onto a stool in the middle of the room and looped an electrical cord around her neck.
“It’s something I couldn’t explain,” recalls Kimberly, who asked that her last name not be published. “I didn’t understand what was going on in my head . . . You want to give up.”
Within seconds, she heard a faint scratching on the garage door. It was her cat.
“He knew something was wrong,” she says. “I took the cord that I wrapped around my neck off and I went inside.”
Two years later, the now third-year student at Ryerson University has been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and depression.
She’s part of what some experts are calling an emerging phenomenon.
In this paper we use co-constructed autoethnographic methods to explore the tensions that animate the meaning of “disclosure” in university and college environments. Drawing insight from our embodied experiences as graduate students and university/college course instructors, our collaborative counter-narratives examine the ordinary ways that disclosure is made meaningful and material as a relationship and a form of embodied labour. Our dialogue illustrates the layered nature of disclosure—for example, self-disclosing as a disabled student in order to access academic spaces but not self-disclosing to teach as an instructor. Katie uses phenomenological disability studies to analyze disclosure at the intersection of disability
and pregnancy as body-mediated moments (Draper, 2002). Nancy uses Hochschild’s (1983) notion of “emotional labour” to explore how socio-spatial processes of disclosure can be an embodied form of “extra work” (e.g., managing perceptions of stigmatized identities).
It would be a shame if the lesson learned is simply to remove the controversial bits from your course.
The issues of freedom of speech and transgender rights, highlighted by recent events involving a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, remind me of my first year as a university instructor in the late 1990s, when I taught a communications course on advertising at York University. (Yes, I understand that the status of a TA is different than that of an instructor, but I think for the purposes of this anecdote, the principles are similar.)
While teaching the course, I saw an ad for Sauza tequila in the campus newspaper. It featured a photo of an attractive, swimsuit-wearing woman, with the phrase, “She’s a He,” written across her chest. The ad’s tag line read: “Life is Harsh, Your Tequila Shouldn’t Be.” (The ad didn’t identify the model, who in fact was Caroline Cossey, a transgender model.)
Conventional scholarship within the sociology of education and organizations posits that schools achieve legitimacy by virtue of conforming to normative standards, abiding by government regulations and mimicking the forms of successful peers. Through this study, an examination of a sample of 751 Canadian for-profit colleges (FPCs) is performed, revealing the presence of
an alternative logic. Rather than conformity, organizations within this sector engage in niche-seeking behaviour, using promotional materials to carve out unconventional identities. They do so by directly drawing on symbolic resources
and affiliations from the industrial sectors which they service. These findings are interpreted through the prism of contemporary theorizing within organizational sociology.
A requirement for quality assurance is becoming more prevalent in higher education today as institutions are being asked to demonstrate that they are providing robust, meaningful learning experiences for students. Many institutions are adopting curriculum review frameworks as part of their overall quality assurance strategy. Three leaders at various levels who were engaged in a year-long curriculum review process share reflections about their experiences and challenges while conducting an undergraduate program review. Their theoretical framework for an effective curriculum review process is shared in
this paper. The leaders offer institutional, faculty, and course level insights, and make five recommendations for a collaborative curriculum review process: (1) setting clear expectations; (2) maintaining open, consistent communication; (3) incorporating multiple levels of leadership; (4) engaging various groups of stakeholders; and (5) implementing through actionable items.
The first thing I do when I walk into a seminar room or lecture hall is to glance around and
register if the class is diverse. If, to the naked eye at least, there appears to be a good mix of
genders and races, and perhaps a headscarf or a turban, I’m satisfied.
But what exactly does this mean, and where does it lead?
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in the early/mid 1990s, I remember a professor saying that he maintained an online chat room for one of his courses because he found that Asian and Asian-American students who did not participate in class discussion asked questions and made comments online. He made it clear that organizing this online forum was an inconvenience to him (this was right at the start of the Internet era, when this practice was not yet de rigueur) but he wanted to be ethnically/racially sensitive.
In recent years, Ontario universities have increasingly targeted Indigenous and international students for recruitment. Focusing on three southern Ontario universities, I examine how service delivery for these student groups is organized in space. In light of Henri Lefebvre’s work, I argue that the spatiality of the information hubs created to support them differs significantly, each
being defined in the interactions between institutional assumptions about the student group, the social presence and activities hosted, and the lived experiences of the students utilizing these services. Whereas Indigenous student services are organized as a resource centre to create a separate space for Indigeneity on campuses, international student services take the form of an
experience desk to emphasize rapid integration into the mainstream. Based on interviews with students and staff, I reflect on the differences between the two models to discuss the spatial politics of information hubs within the context of Ontario universities.