Experts from within and outside of academia expound on what role universities can play to further the innovation
agenda.
The buzzword “innovation” might perk you up – or make your eyes roll. Regardless of how the term sits with you, innovation is clearly on the federal government’s agenda and of big interest to universities as they try to keep pace with rapid changes in society and the economy, while staying responsive to government funding priorities and continuing to meet the needs of their students, faculty and the wider community. With the federal government grappling with weak economic growth and working on crafting a new “ innovation agenda,” (PDF) we asked six experts inside and outside the academy what role they think universities should play in fostering greater innovation in Canada. Their innovation definitions differ in their wording, but are variations on the theme that innovation is not about inventions, per se, but about the novel use of inventions and technologies that lead to transformative new or improved services, products and processes. Universities already make substantial
contributions through their teaching, learning and research functions, and have at least some role to play in the innovation ecosystem, they agree, but how far that should go and in which ways yielded intriguing ideas from each of them.
Religion. Faith. Spirituality. Some faculty may view these phenomena as significant influences on the human experience, others as challenges to intellectualism and the scientific method. There are also academics who struggle with their position, perceiving the power embedded in these ideologies and practices as potentially beneficial as well as restrictive. Most would agree that theology elicits a range of strong and often-personal reactions. Why, then, would faculty teaching secular studies courses want to raise the topic of religion in their classes when they could play it safe and leave the subject entirely to the specialists, their colleagues in religious studies?
Most mental health experts agree that keeping tabs on student suicides could help colleges and universities plan their responses and prevent future deaths.
But, as an Associated Press investigation recently found, most of the country’s largest institutions don’t track the data. And universities that do, experts said in interviews with Inside Higher Ed, gather it unevenly and need to address the topic carefully with their students and the public to avoid glorifying suicide.
Year after year, school boards receive reports echoing what many before them have concluded — that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis students don’t achieve as highly, or graduate as often as the average Alberta student.
Educators often call it the “achievement gap” — a large, measurable difference in how Indigenous students fare in school compared to students overall.
Fostering Mentorship
When he was an undergraduate at Denison University in the 1980s, Fred Porcheddu would have told you that his professors were mentoring him. They saw him as a strong student who could follow in their footsteps, and they groomed him to join the professoriate.
Today, Mr. Porcheddu, who is an associate professor of English and chair of the department at his alma mater, sees mentorship differently. It’s something that should be available to all students, not just those at the top of the class. And its goal should be helping students along whatever path they choose, not nudging them into academe.
Nine months ago I was annoyingly posting weekly countdowns on Facebook because I was so excited at the
prospect of taking my first sabbatical. Now that it’s (sadly) nearing its end, I’m feeling good about what I’ve
accomplished but there are a few things I wish I’d known that would’ve helped me better plan my “early sabbatical.”
Before I share my lessons learned, I want to define and describe “early sabbatical” — sometimes called a “pretenure
leave” or “pretenure sabbatical.” It’s a semester-long leave granted to assistant professors after a successful thirdyear
review. Not all institutions offer pretenure sabbaticals so if yours does, be thankful. Early sabbaticals have
multiple goals. Most notably, they are an opportunity to ensure you are on track to submit a successful tenure file in
two to three years. To do so, an early sabbatical should meet the following four goals.
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.
If you spend any time listening to other teachers (particularly online, where complaining is almost an art form), you’ll soon hear about an epidemic of grandparents dying in the last two months of the semester , when big assignments are due and final exams start to get closer. Students will do anything to take advantage of us, the chorus sings, and the only defense is a strict adherence to the rules: Sorry, kid, but the syllabus clearly says “no extensions.”
That attitude seems even more desirable when you read some of the criticisms of so-called “permissive-indulgent” instructors. Such teachers “fear doing anything that might create stress for students, stifle their personal growth, or hurt their self-esteem,” writes psychologist Douglas Bernstein. They coddle students, being careful not to be too harsh for fear of discouraging them. Even worse, those faculty “are eager to help students succeed, even if it means lowering standards for success.”
A recent post in Matt Reed’s Confessions of a Community College Dean column raised the question of “how research informs teaching and whether it factors in at the community college level”.
For the last decade and a half, I’ve engaged in anthropological research on higher education, identifying several
challenges and mismatches between what we know about learning “in real life” and learning in college. In my most
recent book, “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College , I identified a number of ways that formal
education has led to a lack of learning. Colleges promote credentials, obedience and the sorting of haves and havenots, but not necessarily learning.
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.
So much of the work that goes into teaching is necessarily invisible. Nobody sees your best teaching days — when everything clicks, when you get your class to truly see the world differently — except for the students in the room. Most of us don’t teach for plaudits, but it’s a shame that our best work in the classroom is usually unseen by our peers and superiors. It’s also a shame that those of us who want to improve as teachers don’t get the benefit of learning directly from excellent teachers in our fields.
Consider how you learned about your research discipline in graduate school. Sure, you got ideas, advice, and information from your adviser and from other professors, but you also had the benefit of reading other people’s work to see how scholarship in your field was done. When it comes to developing as teachers, however, most of us haven’t been able to learn by watching others. We can hark back to our own teachers, but that’s a pretty limited sample.
I don’t want to feel out of place (pauses, searching for the “right” words). I don’t want to have my difference hinder me. But, help me if anything. So, I want to express myself so they can understand me—so, that I can communicate.
But, in Jamaica, when I was a little kid, you always heard crazy little things when you’re a kid (laughs). And, you’re like: “Oh, they act like this, and they do this. They’re so silly: They spell color without the u.” And they didn’t necessarily seem to make it a bad thing to be that way, but it was understood that we were different.
And, I liked being different. I liked being Jamaican.
Employers value candidates who have developed career readiness competencies throughout their diverse academic experiences. Graduate students and postdocs in particular should aim to incorporate those transferable skill sets into their professional development so that they can be seen as more than just researchers and teachers. More than that, they need to be able to provide tangible illustrations of such skills and competencies in action to convince future employers that they are qualified for professional
roles.
I intend to never grade another paper.
At the height of my adjunct "career" teaching writing, world religions, and general humanities courses, I taught up to 12 courses a year at three different institutions in the Houston area. I juggled about 400 students a year in my courses, and each student wrote three to five papers. Do the math — that’s a lot of grading.
I worked that oxymoronic full-time adjunct load for a decade — in addition to teaching a few continuing-ed courses just for kicks and extra income. In short, I taught more students and graded more papers in a decade than most of my full-time colleagues at the same university would teach in their entire careers.
For a while, I was sort of an adjunct guru. I self-published a book called How to Survive as an Adjunct Lecturer: An ntrepreneurial Strategy Manual and ended up writing a monthly advice column on The Adjunct Track for The Chronicle. I also provided coaching to other non-tenure-track instructors to help them figure out ways to work the system and squeeze as much money out of it as possible. The idea was to come as close as they could to an income that honored their knowledge and credentials — or to at least not have to wait tables on nonteaching days to make ends meet.
In 2012 Sebastian Thrun, founder of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider Udacity told Wired magazine
that in 50 years, there would be only 10 higher education institutions in the world and Udacity had a “shot” at being
one of them.
In 2012, Thrun was honored with a Smithsonian magazine American Ingenuity Award for Education.
https://blog.udacity.com/2012/11/sebastian-thrun-wins-smithsonian.html
By 2013 Thrun, concerned that fewer than 10% of original enrollees were completing their Udacity courses, declared
that Udacity offered a “lousy product.”
The Teaching Assistant (TA) job is typically filled by an upper-level university student or graduate student. It’s a job that requires one to play several different roles. First and foremost, the TA is a student and must complete all responsibilities to maintain this status. Second, the TA has a responsibility to the hiring professor. To the professor, the TA is the assistant and must abide
by the requirements set out by the professor. Third, the TA has a responsibility to the students in the class. The role here is that of teacher, tutor, and occasionally advisor.
"Plan for the students you actually have, not those you wish you had, or think you used to have, or think you used to be like."
So John N. Gardner, the creator of the term "first-year experience," advised college officials charged with making sure that the experience is a good one. In other words, be realistic; don’t expect too much of students.
That mind-set contrasts with the one evoked by the New Yorker writer David Denby in his new book, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives. The New York Times last week noted, "Lit Up is a refreshing lesson in what motivates students and why not to dumb down reading lists." Denby opens a window into the classrooms of several gifted high-school English teachers who assign Faulkner, Orwell, Frankl, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain — and whose love of reading is contagious to their teen students.
The evidence is clear that post-secondary education leads to improved employment opportunities and career outcomes. Over the course of their lives, graduates with credentials from across the spectrum of post-secondary programs, including apprenticeships, trade certificates, colleges diplomas, and undergraduate and graduate degrees, have enjoyed significantly higher rates of employment compared with high school graduates. Median annual and career earnings, meanwhile, rise consistently in relation to post-secondary credentials.
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.”