We've got some big Canadian labour news, folks, but it's a little bit sweet and sour. The sweet is that college faculty
in Ontario are currently leading the charge in Canada to secure a less precarious workplace for sessional
instructors. The sour is that it means they're out on the picket line at the height of the fall semester, and they look
likely to be there for some time.
The low-down about learning at Ontario’s 20 public universities, 24 colleges or 400+ registered
private career colleges.
predictable political camps. Gun-rights advocates called for expanded mental-health services, insisting that no law could have stopped an obvious madman like Paddock. Nonsense, gun-control supporters said; whatever Paddock’s mental state, the easy availability of firearms makes violence more likely.
I’ve been thinking about this debate following a recent suicide on my own campus, the University of Pennsylvania, where at least 14 students have taken their lives since February 2013. Whenever a suicide happens, the spotlight turns to mental-health services. Do students know whom to call in times of crisis? And are there enough services for
everyone who needs them?
Currently, chances for English learners (ELs), emergent bilinguals who are in the process of developing grade-level academic English proficiency, to receive a college education are limited in the United States. Almost half of ELs do not attend any postsecondary education (PSE) after high school (Kanno & Cromley, 2013, 2015). Even among those who attend college, ELs are overrepresented in community colleges while being underrepresented in four-year institutions. On the face of it, this may all seem like an unfortunate but natural consequence of ELs limited English proficiency. However, scholars have argued that there are structural barriers that inhibit ELs PSE access, such as limited academic preparation in middle and high school due to their institutional status as ELs (Callahan, 2005; Callahan & Shifrer, 2016; Callahan, Wilkinson, & Muller, 2010; Kanno & Kangas, 2014; Umansky, 2016). Moreover, recent statistical analyses suggest that factors that have been widely accepted as influential in the general student population s college access the majority of whom are English-as-a-first-language (English L1) speakers may not
always be as significant for ELs (Kanno & Cromley, 2015; Nuñez & Sparks, 2012). In other words, we know that ELs
do not have the same levels of four-year-college access as English L1 speakers, but we do not know exactly why.
Longitudinal investigations of ELs transition to college are particularly scarce.
National and international statistics show that across disciplines there are many more PhD graduates than academic positions. In fact, more than half of graduates find their careers outside the academy—though the kinds of positions they accept, their work satisfaction, and the relevance of their PhDs is much less clear. As regards scholarly studies on post-PhD careers, most
have examined social scientists and scientists with little attention to humanities doctoral graduates. This study addresses this gap by exploring the career experiences of Canadian PhD humanities graduates through descriptive statistics and narrative analysis. Specifically, it highlights the PhD experiences and post-graduation career trajectories of 212 Canadian humanists from 24 universities who graduated between 2004 and 2014. The study offers insight into humanities career challenges, including during the PhD, the range of non-academic careers that humanists find, as well as their work satisfaction and the perceived relevance of the PhD.
Seventy-one is the new 65 for a growing number of professors at Ontario's universities who are staying in the classroom past the traditional retirement age, a demographic shift that is putting pressure on their institutions' budgets, and that could be limiting the hiring of younger professors, a new report being released on Tuesday has found.
Harvard, MIT and Stanford are key players in a global rush to facilitate the education of millions through distance education. The goal is noble, particularly when courses are free. Anyone with a computer will welcome lectures from professors who are gifted speakers as well as experts in their field.
Students may access electronic textbooks and even have opportunities for classroom discussion — although one wonders how lively the discussion was when MIT’s first online course had more students than all of its living graduates combined.
Having coached academic writers for more than a decade, I've noticed a pattern that tends to stall the development
and publication of their research.
I’ve work with a diverse group of humanists, social scientists, and STEM researchers, but they all hear the same drumbeat: "Get it out there!" The tremendous pressure to complete quality research and then send manuscripts out quickly can warp the writing process. In such a frantic atmosphere, even rigorously trained academics who care deeply about their topics can find themselves working from the outside in, rather than the reverse.
I’ve been receiving an unprecedented number of calls from presidents across the country asking me to “talk [them] off the ledge.” Most of those conversations have been with presidents whom I judge to be effective and emotionally grounded. Yet each person has been distressed in ways that I didn’t find common during my earlier years in higher education.
Early in my career, I sat on a doctoral committee in a field outside my discipline for the first time. I recall being startled at the dissertation defense when professors in the young man’s department began delivering scorching assessments of his theory, method, cases, and conclusions. As the incendiaries kept flying I grew concerned about his health. He whitened, started sweating visibly, and several times laid his forehead on the table. When it came my turn to speak, I froze and ended up sputtering, "Well, you have answered all my questions!" and fell silent.
For academics, November through March are perhaps the most emotionally taxing months of the year. Not only are we dealing with holiday stress while preparing for the end of one semester and the start of another, we also have an omnipresent and oppressive awareness of the faculty job market.
Somehow higher education has chosen the winter months — when seasonal affective disorders are most pronounced — as the perfect moment to decide the professional fate of thousands of Ph.D.s.
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?
Background/Context: Research indicates that across democratic societies, teachers face numerous intellectual and emotional challenges when handling controversial topics in the classroom. Less attention, however, has been paid to how teachers’ willingness to teach controversial topics intersects with political and other societal factors in different sociopolitical milieu and, in particular, in an authoritarian–democratic and culturally diverse state like Singapore. Focus of Study: This study focused on constraints to the teaching of controversial topics relating to diversity and the manner in which teachers navigated their personal beliefs amidst the evolving contours of public and official discourses in Singapore. By attending to the intersections of teachers’ beliefs, state policies, and other sociopolitical factors, we aimed to inform scholarship on the teaching of controversial topics and illuminate states’ powers to demarcate the discursive spaces of teachers.
Abstract
This paper explores university corporatization and its impact on university literature, examining the frequency and placement of content in the admissions handbooks (viewbooks) of six Ontario universities from 1980 to 2010, at five-year intervals. Government budget cuts implemented in the mid-1990s served as a point of interest in the timing of corporatization. Content
analysis showed a decreased emphasis on academics and an increased emphasis on the university experience; academics moved toward the back of the viewbooks, and student experience and university-specific advantages moved toward the front. The timing of these changes, however, did not correlate, as expected, with government budget cuts of the mid-1990s.
Résumé
Cet article examine la privatisation des l’universités et ses effets répercussions sur la littérature publication universitaire. Sur des intervalles de 5 ans, les auteurs étudient Six universités de l›Ontario sont étudiées pour examiner la fréquence et le placement la disposition du contenu dans les de manuels d’admission à l›universitéde six universités ontariennes, publiés de 1980 à 2010, utilisant des intervalles de 5 ans. Les compressions budgétaires gouvernementales mises en oeuvre par le gouvernement dans vers la moitié des années 1990 servent de point central pour l’analyse de la privatisation des
universités. L’analyse de contenu est utilisée pour examiner le placement et la fréquence de contenu dans les manuels d›admission. Les résultats indiquent une diminution de d’attention l’attention portée sur le contenu académique
et une augmentation de l’emphase mise l’importance de sur l›expérience universitaire. C’est ainsi que le contenu académique a été déplacé vers la fin des manuels d’admission, tandis que les éléments de la vie étudiante, et une augmentation du contenu associé à l’expérience des étudiants et des avantages spécifiques propres de à chacune des universités étaient mis en évidence, au début de la publication. Toutefois, la période à laquelle Le moment de ces changements ont été apportés, cependant, ne correspond pas avec à celle celui des compressions coupes budgétaires gouvernementales mises en oeuvre par
le gouvernement dans le milieu vers la moitié des années 1990.
Zac Wendler needed a new syllabus. An assistant professor of English, literature, and world literatures at Ferris State University, he was tired of the same routine at the beginning of every semester: He would hand out his syllabus — five or so pages of text — and students would glance at it and wait for him to walk them through it. Then for the rest of the semester, they would ask him questions that could be easily answered if they had read the syllabus.
Does that sound familiar? It rang a bell for me. As I listened to Wendler’s presentation at this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland, Ore., I thought about my own syllabus. It has swelled to 11 pages of single-spaced text, even after I changed the departmental policies section to a nine-point font.
This report is the culmination of a three‐year research project conducted by George Brown College (GBC). As a member of the Learning Outcomes Assessment Consortium, sponsored and funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), this project responds to HEQCO’s request for colleges and universities to develop, implement and share new assessment tools that “measure and validate the attainment of these generic learning and cognitive skills.”
In this project, we focused on critical thinking (CT), with the goal of addressing a fundamental question:
How do we measure student learning of this essential employability skill during the course of a program of
study?
One of the biggest differences between the experience I had as a student and the experience students have in my classroom has to do with assignments. When I was a student, assignments often had no discernible relationship to what we were doing in class. Oh, we would have to write about a text we read for class. But once the assignment was given out, we were generally on our own — there were no opportunities to work on it in class, to reflect on the skills the assignment asked us to practice, to share and workshop our ideas with our classmates.
The courses I teach are different. A sequence of major assignments form the backbone of the semester. Almost everything we do in class is explicitly linked to one or more of those assignments. We break them down into stages, work on them collaboratively, and discuss the challenges students might face along the way. Like many teachers, I design assignments not just to assess performance, but also to give students opportunities to practice and develop important skills.
To what degree does gender impact one's career trajectory in the 10 years after earning a Ph.D.? While the majority of recent studies on the issue have found that women have a harder time earning tenure-track professorships and tenure than do their male counterparts, some studies also suggest that women are now playing on a level field with men -- or even possess some advantage.
A paper presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association examining the career paths of recent Ph.D.s finds there’s no strong, comprehensive evidence of gendered paths to tenure during the first decade after degree completion. Scholarly publications and activities, such as research, and a postdoctoral appointment in the years following degree completion were the most important factors in getting an tenure-track job for both men and women.
At the same time, the paper suggests that women do earn lower salaries than men and take longer to complete their doctoral degrees. It also says that important gender-based differences in men’s and women’s career trajectories may still exist in the second decade after degree completion, and that this period merits further study.
More than 50 doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences won’t be admitting new students in the fall of 2021 — a response to the pandemic and ensuing economic turmoil. It’s a sort of financial triage to help the programs devote funding to their current students, many of whom will be delayed in completing their degrees because of the disruptions. Suspending admissions for a year, some administrators say, will also allow them to reimagine their doctoral curricula to account for the flagging Ph.D. job market.
If graduate education is to undergo serious change, relying on the development of supervision abilities only through modeling or memory seems out of step.
In light of recent national discussions on the purpose, content, structure, and assessment of the doctoral dissertation, the highly competitive (academic and non-academic) job market and the increasing precarity of employment in the academy—it is no surprise that the design and role of graduate education has been called into question. While some might cheekily say “So
you want to earn a PhD?” and outline the employment outcomes for PhD graduates, it might be time to ask “could the process of earning a PhD be improved?” More importantly, who could do so?