About half of the refugees who have arrived in Canada from Syria have only a high-school education. Others lack proof that they completed higher education or must find a way to validate degrees from a country plunged into conflict. If they have their credentials, they must often upgrade them to meet the accreditation requirements of professional bodies here, or face working in jobs for which they are overqualified.
As a new hire, once you’ve worked out your relationship with your academic department — how to establish your voice in meetings, how to avoid factions, how to keep your head down and get your work done while maintaining a presence in decision-making — it’s time to think about where you fit into the rest of the campus.
When I interview faculty job candidates, I always point out that their department will want to own them, and keep them focused on the departmental curriculum and major. As dean, my job is to remind faculty members that outside their department lies a big university that needs them, too. The business of my college and the larger university can only get done if professors take an interest in campus governance and in (with apologies to those who are allergic to corporate language) innovation.
Why? Because the things that get done at the department level — curriculum approval, hiring, assessment, grievances — also have to get done at the university level. Colleges and universities have governance structures in place to do that business, and those structures vary from campus to campus. But they all depend on faculty stepping outside their departments and examining proposals from a whole-campus perspective. How would a proposed change in degree structure in one department affect another department's enrollments? What would a curricular change mean for external accreditation or time to graduation?
Your role in campus governance. None of the work you will do on curriculum or policy committees was taught in your graduate programs, and it’s a rare mentor who prepares you for how to participate in governance work. It’s mostly on-the-job training, and you’ll be expected to pick it up quickly.
Many countries strive to make postsecondary education maximally accessible to their citizens under the assumption that educated citizens boost innovation and leadership, resulting in social and economic benefits. However, attempts to increase access, especially in contexts of stagnant or diminishing financial support, can result in ever-increasing class sizes. Two aspects of large classes are extremely worrisome. First, economic and logistical constraints have led many such classes to
devolve into settings characterized by lectures, readings and multiple-choice tests, thereby denying students experience and exercise with important transferable skills (e.g., critical thought, creative thought, self-reflective thought, expressive and receptive communication). Second, such classes are depicted as cold and impersonal, with little sense of community among students.
This summer’s college president departure season is off to a swift start that has largely been marked by little
forewarning from colleges before exits are announced.
Many boards of trustees would consider it best practice to have a quick parting of ways with little surrounding
drama. But it doesn’t always go so smoothly in higher education -- it didn’t last summer -- making the pace and tone
of presidential partings so far this year stand out. Also noteworthy is that many recently announced transitions have
involved leaders who are relatively young or who are early in their tenures.
The president of Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore resigned just a week after word leaked that all
was not well between her and the institution’s board. That president, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
chair Sheila Bair, was two years into a five-year contract. She cited her family when she departed, but the college
did not go into depth on reasons for her resignation.
In showing respect for their favorite professors, today’s college students have ventured well beyond the proverbial
apple.
An Indiana University at Bloomington instructor was once given chicken livers … five pounds of them, from an adoring student whose father was a butcher. He gladly accepted and enjoyed the tasty treat. One Southern Methodist University instructor was presented with “a limited-edition Snickers bar” that said “goofball” on it. Apparently the student saw it and thought of her. For now, the candy bar remains in her office, she said, at least until she “gets hangry.”
Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in all its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. Because . . . technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he reg-isters his demands on it. (Benjamin, 1936/2008, p. 242)
I have been wanting to write about tired teaching for some time now. Concerns about burnout are what’s motivating me. Teachers can reach a place where teaching does nothing for them or their students. They don’t just wake up one morning and find themselves burned out; they’ve moved there gradually, and it’s a journey that often starts with tired teaching.
There’s nothing on the subject in my big file of articles and resources. I can’t remember having read about it, and I’m not sure how much we even talk about it. We do talk about being tired. Teaching is relentless. It happens every day, several times a week—or potentially 24/7 if it’s online. And it’s demanding. There’s so much more than the actual teaching. There’s considerable planning involved before each class. Plus, we need to spend time with students—those who want to talk, those needing
help, and those with questions or, sometimes, complaints. There are assignments to grade and feedback to provide—
all carrying the expectation of a quick turnaround. With multiple courses to teach, we do get tired, but I think we regularly confuse physical fatigue with the more serious emotional tiredness that comes from a heavy workload of always being there, always giving, and always juggling multiple balls in the air.
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.
As the cost of college has risen, so has the number of students who are struggling to meet their basic needs. In one
recent survey, more than one in five students said they had gone hungry in the past month. Close to one in 10 said
they had been homeless at some point in the past year.
Three rising juniors describe how they made it to college despite lacking steady housing, regular meals, and the
tools to complete their high-school assignments.
Canada needs to take an integrated and innovative approach to enhancing student mobility, according to participants at a workshop held December 2014 by Universities Canada. The workshop – held in Calgary and attracting university and private sector leaders – called for Canada to step up its efforts to get university students moving beyond their province
and beyond our borders.
It’s the first day of class. They shuffle in, spot similar life-forms, and slip in with that group. Hipsters sporting wild hair and tats, buttoned-up and serious young scholars, middle-aged moms and dads, maybe a couple of aging hippies. One or two sad souls choose spots isolated from the others; they don’t want to identify with them for reasons of insecurity, arrogance, or
something else.
Ontario is working with college students, faculty, support staff, administrators and other experts to develop a forward-looking plan for Ontario's publicly assisted college system.
The province has appointed Sue Herbert to chair the College Task Force, which includes faculty, college representatives and students, along with industry and postsecondary education experts. It will make recommendations to support the delivery of high-quality, career-oriented postsecondary education and training that is accessible to students and responsive to changing labour market needs.
The College Task Force will explore a range of topics, including:
Student success and labour market readiness
Program pathways and support for students, including student mental health
Staffing models that would enhance program quality and improve student experience
Academic governance structures and intellectual property policies in the college system.
A drum circle is just one of the many activities at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax that focuses on Aboriginal heritage. Photo courtesy Mount Saint Vincent University
Every Catholic college and university in Canada has woken up to the call for truth and reconciliation between Indigenous Canadians and the rest of us.
Last month , I opened up about one of the side effects of doctoral study that I hadn’t anticipated: the Ph.D. identity crisis.
With the date of my dissertation defense looming in four months, I’d begun to realize that I couldn’t answer two rather important questions:
Who am I outside of "Ph.D. Candidate"?
What do I want out of life and this degree?
I recently overheard a faculty member talking about students, and it wasn’t good. She sounded very much like a conference presenter whom Melanie Cooper describes in a Journal of Chemical Education editorial. The presenter’s talk had a strong “students these days” undercurrent.
Sometimes we do need to vent. It isn’t easy teaching students who don’t come to class prepared, seem to always want the easiest way, are prepared to cheat if necessary, don’t have good study skills, and aren’t interested in learning what we love to teach. Venting, especially to a trusted colleague, helps us put things in perspective. At some point, though, venting morphs into
complaining, and what we say about students becomes what we think about them. And that's when it starts getting dangerous, because it affects how we teach.
Welcome to Teaching, a newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week Dan describes one reader’s intriguing idea to improve course evaluations, Beckie shares how some of you make use of brain research in your teaching, and we look at the month ahead.
Abstract
Since the 1980s, research on employment conditions in post-secondary institutions has focused on the growth of contingent academic workers, or what the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) has labelled “nonfull-time instructors” (Field, Jones, Stephenson, & Khoyetsyan, 2014). Very little attention, however, has been paid to administrative, physical plant, and other operational staff employed within universities and colleges. Using data from a study of University of Regina students and employees, academic and support staff, this paper confronts the broader conditions of labour around the ivory tower. Employment at a post-secondary institution is analyzed through the lens of living wage research advanced by the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives (CCPA) (Ivanova & Klein, 2015). The study reframes the notion of a living wage in a post-secondary institution to include work-life balance, job security, and the realities of dignity and respect in the university workplace.
Educators view critical thinking as an essential skill, yet it remains unclear how effectively it is being taught in college. This meta-analysis synthesizes research on gains in critical thinking skills and attitudinal dispositions over various time frames in college. The results suggest that both critical thinking skills and dispositions improve substantially over a normal college experi-ence. Furthermore, analysis of curriculum-wide efforts to improve critical thinking indicates that they do not necessarily produce incremental long-term gains. We discuss implications for the future of critical thinking in edu-cation.
KEYWORDS: critical thinking, college students, changes in critical thinking
Think back to your time as a student. How did you experience feedback from your own instructors? Did reading their comments on your work bring moments of elation? Pride? Disappointment? Bewilderment? Do you still have a visceral reaction to a lot of red ink?
Feedback can be a powerful force in college classrooms, and there are ways to make the experience of providing and receiving it even stronger. That’s especially important as students continue to report dissatisfaction with the feedback they get on assignments and tests — calling it vague, discouraging, and/or late.
All of us — even those with the best perception — are always somewhat out of touch with the exact state of the world
we live in. Today, every business is living in a time of great change, and the chasm between what leaders and
employees believe about the state of things seems to be widening.
The State of Inbound, for example, found large discrepancies between how leaders and employees rate marketing
effectiveness, and what tactics they believe are the most effective — from new marketing channels to sales
strategies.
A simplistic response to this tension might be to argue that leaders need to be more realistic and ground themselves
in the everyday realities confronting the average employee. Equally simplistic is the pressure for employees to get in
alignment with the leadership’s goals. But perhaps a different mindset is needed for everyone across the
spectrum: resilience.