Of all students who started college in fall 2016, 73.9 percent persisted at any U.S. institution in fall 2017, while 61.6 percent were retained at their starting institution. The persistence rate is the percentage of students who return to college at any institution for their second year, while the retention rate is the percentage of students who return
to the same institution.
his research project was conducted upon the unceded and un-surrendered territories of the Coast Salish people, including the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo—what is now known as the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia (BC).1 If we are to work towards communities of care, to truly dismantle rape culture on university campuses and within our wider communities, we must recognize the broader structure of settler colonialism within which sexualized and gender-based violence occurs. Sexualized and gender-based violence are inherently embedded within settler colonialism, and function as an exertion of power that disproportionally affects people of color, Indigenous women, trans, non-gender conforming, and Two-spirit folks, and people with disabilities. As Sarah Hunt elucidates, “rape culture and racism are indeed deeply intertwined, shaping [campuses] in ways that decrease safety for Indigenous students, faculty and staff, particularly women, Two-spirit, trans and queer people.”2 Recognizing who s most affected by violence is essential in creating robust and inclusive policy and initiatives that support survivors and prevent violence.
This paper draws upon research surrounding sexualized violence and prevention work, relevant provincial legislation, as well as information gathered from a collaboration with the Anti-Violence Project (AVP) at the University of Victoria. We would like to sincerely thank AVP for sharing their knowledge with us and for the critical prevention and support work that they conduct. From this research, we recommend that the provincial government mandate and fund a comprehensive survivor centred Action Plan to improve and embolden existing policy.
Information for international students interested in attending college or university in Ontario.
This article explores for a broad audience the changing landscape of education in the digital age, the changing roles of teachers in a technology rich education system, and the skills, knowledge, values, and ways of thinking that teacher will need to have to support students’ social, emotional, and intellectual development in a digital learning environment.
In the world of college composition, we spend a lot of time talking about how to teach writing — with as many opinions on that as there are instructors — but very little time talking about why we teach it.
Many professors take a philosophical approach, asserting that the purpose of teaching writing is to enrich students’ lives, promote self-exploration, or encourage political activism. Certainly all of those can be byproducts of a college writing course, but I would argue that none qualifies as its main purpose. The reason institutions offer — and often require — first-year composition is quite simple: so students learn how to communicate their expertise.
In my first essay, I reflected on the barriers I faced as a black mother in graduate school. Given the biases I had to confront, I attempted to hide my status as a mother when I went on the academic job market. I created a professional presence on social media that disclosed little about my personal life. I explicitly asked my letter writers not to mention that I was a mother. On campus visits, I asked vague questions about schools near the university.
I already carried job-market anxiety and impostor syndrome feelings as a student of color. On top of that, I worried that if word got out I was a parent, I might have worse chances of landing a job.
I did, however, keep an ear to the ground for how, or if, potential departments talked about work-life balance. When I arrived at my current institution, the University of California, Merced, I was pleasantly surprised. It seemed that work and life (including life with children) were not separate entities but rather two sides of the same coin. It was a place that valued the whole person, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.
This qualitative investigation addresses three new universities in the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta and their presidents’ ascriptions of organizational identity to their universities. Through extended, semi-structured interviews
and narrative analysis, this investigation uses organizational identity theory and institutional theory to explain the positionality and understandings of presidents in relationship to their universities’ paths to legitimacy. We found that the preservation of aspects of the institutions’ original identity (as community colleges) aids new universities’ organizational change. Furthermore,
while presidents advocated for a replacement of community college logics with university logics, data showed that these three new universities had yet to embrace the university logic fully. We propose that a blending of logics may be the preferred mechanism for the attainment of legitimacy during sectoral change for new universities.
Two trends in the evolution of quality assurance in Canadian postsecondary education have been the emergence of outcomes-
based quality standards and the demand for balancing accountability and improvement. Using a realist, process-based
approach to impact analysis, this study examined four quality assurance events at two universities and two colleges in Ontario
to identify how system-wide quality assurance policies have impacted the curriculum development process of academic programs
within postsecondary institutions. The study revealed different approaches that postsecondary institutions chose to use in response to quality assurance policies and the mechanisms that may account for different experiences. These mechanisms
include endeavours to balance accountability and continuous improvement, leadership support, and the emerging quality assurance function of teaching and learning centres. These findings will help address the challenges in quality assurance policy
implementation within Canadian postsecondary education and enrich international discussions on the accountability-improvement dichotomy in the context of quality assurance.
Keywords: internal quality assurance, external quality assurance, accountability, continuous improvement, learning outcomes
I had an experience recently that confirmed what I’d already suspected: I am no longer an early career scholar. Perhaps because of my age, or simply because I am pre-tenure, I had still considered myself to be "early" in my career until that moment.
It happened a week before my discipline’s biggest conference. As I was checking the online schedule for pre-meeting workshops, I found an intriguing one for "early career scholars of color." But after reading the agenda, I realized I wouldn’t benefit from the content. The lineup included sessions on developing career goals, publishing a dissertation, preparing for the job market, crafting a strong CV, negotiating a job offer, publishing your first book, finding a mentor. As an assistant professor, I’d already done those things. I read the list multiple times, searching, to no avail, for at least one applicable session. Then I posted on Facebook, asking the world: "When do you stop being an early career scholar?"
I’ve been following, with something like exasperation, the discussion over Harvard University’s new study on teaching. Not
surprisingly, the study found that physics students performed better on multiple-choice tests if they were taught via active learning
strategies than by lecture alone. Yet it also found that students tended to feel they learned more from listening to a
polished lecture.
Faculty everywhere are flipping their classes, but can we flip faculty development? That’s the question I asked myself when I flipped the pre-conference workshop at the 2016 Teaching Professor Technology Conference. What I discovered is that we can “practice what we teach” and design faculty-centered learning experiences much the same way we design student-centered learning experiences.
In this article, I provide a few recommendations for flipping a faculty development workshop. For further inspiration, the article concludes with a showcase of the work created by the participants in my workshop last fall.
Danny Leznoff was the first male in Simon Fraser University’s chemistry department to take parental leave after the birth of his child, something he has done twice. Early in the new millennium, Dr. Leznoff says his experience at SFU was at “the pointy edge of the wedge university-wide.” His first daughter, Sayako, was born in July 2004. Having recently received tenure, the associate professor took paternity leave for four months – one term – that September. But he wasn’t originally planning to take time off at all.
Some students are more challenging to teach than others. They require pedagogical skills of a different and higher order. Sometimes it’s easier to sigh and just turn away. And that’s legitimate in the sense that students (indeed, people of all sorts) have to figure things out for themselves. But many of us were such “works in progress” when we were in college, and a teacher (or several of them) ended up being instrumental in moving us in more productive directions. It’s for that reason I’d like us to consider some of these challenging students, each one a unique individual, but many displaying the same counterproductive attitudes and actions. Descriptions of these students come much more easily than solutions to what’s holding them back. Said more directly, my goal here is to start this conversation and ask for your wisdom, insights, and experiences with students who are tough to teach.
Across academe, the conversation about career diversity for Ph.D.s has cracked wide open up in just a few years.
That’s equivalent to the blink of an eye in academic (read: glacial) time. The proposition that graduate programs
should prepare students for the actual jobs that they’ll get — not just for professorships — no longer receives the
fierce pushback that it did even five years ago. We’ve gone from "Why should we?" to "How should we?" in a
remarkably short time.
The question has two sides: how to prepare students for diverse career paths and how to prepare employers. Most
of the attention up to now has gone to the former — debating and adopting reforms to train graduate students (and
their teachers) for what amounts to a new reality. We’ve got to change graduate school so that doctoral education
can support students who pursue a range of careers. That’s a big job, and it’s still under way.
Stupid.
This word was spoken triumphantly and repeatedly as self-speak by a talented pre-service, k-12 special education teacher during my course Library Resources for Children. Until I heard her say it several times through the semester, I hadn’t seen how one word can hold an entire teaching philosophy. I hadn’t considered how the power of that word multiplies when it takes
the form of self-speak. I hadn’t realized how much it scared me to think that that word might follow her into a k-12 classroom.
When I learned that my own teaching philosophy existed on the pinhead of a single word whenever I’ve thought it at myself, I needed to send this email to that amazing up-and-coming teacher:
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.
Here's an unsettling fact. One of Canada's most-renowned universities, with a student population the size of a small city, is chronically reliant on philanthropic donations to meet the demand for on-campus mental-health programs.
Let's think about that for a second.
Imagine having to scramble every year for donations simply to meet a minimum service standard. Now imagine being an institution without the luxury of a large rolodex of donors – relying only on tuition fees or internal funding.
Higher-education transformation, which is essential if colleges and universities are to survive in the 21st century, relies on transformative presidential leadership. Twenty-seven years ago, Judy B. Rosener, now a professor emerita in the business school at the University of California at Irvine, wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review that differentiated between "transactional" leadership and "transformative" leadership. The distinction is just as important today as it was then.
With the average undergraduate university program costing $6,373 in tuition for the current academic year, up about
40 per cent from 10 years ago, it is little wonder that many students feel the need to support their studies with parttime
work.
Having just completed her third year studying human resources at York University in Toronto, Eleisha Akin is happy
to put her new-found skills to the test. While she has been working weekends at the local McDonald’s restaurant in
her hometown of Aurora, Ont., since before she arrived on campus, she is also spending this summer as an HR
assistant in the university’s office of the dean in the faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.
When I first moved from being a contingent faculty member to a staff position in the faculty-development office, a few of my friends who were comfortably positioned in tenure-track jobs not-so-jokingly accused me of “becoming part of the problem” or
“crossing over to the Dark Side” of academe. I was, in their eyes, emblematic of the dreaded administrative bloat that was taking over the university, siphoning money away from the classroom and into the pockets of largely useless (in their eyes) administrative
offices.