The literature on teaching and learning has improved so much over the years. Researchers are now covering important aspects of both in depth, analyzing with creative designs and exploring for practical and theoretical implications. One case in point is a 2015 syllabus review published in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (a cross-disciplinary teaching and learning journal that ought to be on everybody’s radar).
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.
Of all the mysteries in graduate school, the greatest may be the dissertation committee.
When it works well, it offers academics an opportunity to shape both burgeoning scholars and future research in the field. Unfortunately, for many academics, the allure of serving on a doctoral committee — also called a thesis committee — fades quickly.
Any committee assignment comes with its share of challenges, of course, but the dynamic of a dissertation committee accentuates some of the more subtle and nuanced ways in which faculty members exercise privilege, not only over students but over other committee members.
Good boards ask good questions, and great boards ask great questions. The ability to ask meaningful questions is an important skill in the boardroom and fundamental to effective governance. Said the chairman of Bain & Company, Orit Gadiesh, in a 2009 Harvard Business Review interview, “The most distinguished board is useless and does a real disservice to the organization, in my view, if the people on it don’t ask the right questions. If you’re not asking questions, you’re not doing your job.”
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.
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.
While we want to instil discipline and responsibility in our students, there is also pedagogical
value in compassion.
It’s that time of year again, when panicked students start asking for extensions. They will send
desperate emails and come knocking with trepidation on our office doors. They will arrive with
excuses and cite extenuating circumstances, and faculty far and wide will have to make tough
decisions about whether or not to accept late work.
Looking to incorporate some learner-centered teaching principles into your courses but aren’t sure where to begin? Here are 10 activities for building student engagement and getting students more actively involved in their learning.
Scholarly reading is a craft — one that academics are expected to figure out on our own. After all, it’s just reading. We all know how to do that, right?
Yes and no. Scholarly reading remains an obscure, self-taught process of assembling, absorbing, and strategically deploying the writing of others.
Digital technology has transformed the research process, making it faster and easier to find sources and to record and retrieve information. Like it or not, we’ve moved beyond card catalogs, stacks of annotated books and articles, and piles of 3x5 cards. What hasn’t changed, however, is the basic way we go about reading scholarly work.
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.
In Prime Minister Trudeau’s mandate letter to the Ministry of Canadian Heritage, copyright policy received not a single mention. The mandate letter, which sets out the ministry’s main agenda, contains extensive directives to establish programs and artists’ subsidies, but none to the fundamental rights on which the arts rely.
Yet, as demonstrated by the ministerial briefing book (prepared to inform incoming ministers of active issues in their
portfolios), many important copyright issues are outstanding, including implementation of treaties, Internet piracy, the
2017 review of the Copyright Act, extending the term of protection for copyright-protected works, and the efficiency of
copyright collectives. Perhaps most urgent, and instructive, is another issue mentioned in the briefing book:
copyright clearance by educational institutions. In this case, bad law is destroying an entire industry.
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”.
Recruiting and hiring are duties that face almost all academic leaders, and they take a large bite out of their time and resources. It makes sense, then, to make every attempt to retain these new professionals. At the 2016 Leadership in Higher Education Conference, Kenneth Alford led a preconference workshop about the development and use of a mentoring program
to help develop and retain new faculty.
Abstract
While Indigenous entrepreneurship is associated with significant economic promise, Indigenous innovation continues to be invisible in Canadian policy contexts. This article examines how Indigenous entrepreneurial activities are framed in government policy, potentially leading to another wave of active exploitation of Indigenous lands, peoples, and knowledges. The
article first discusses the concepts of Indigenous entrepreneurship and innovation through a decolonizing lens, drawing links to education. Then, it provides a set of rationales for why governments need to re-think and prioritize Indigenous entrepreneurship. Next, it maps the current federal government initiatives in this policy sector. Drawing from the Indigenous entrepreneurship ecosystem approach (Dell & Houkamau, 2016; Dell et al., 2017), the article argues that a more comprehensive policy perspective guiding Indigenous entrepreneurship programs should inform Canadian innovation policy. Individual voices from 13 Indigenous entrepreneurs in Manitoba point to three core issues: (a) relationships with the land and the community; (b) the relevance of (higher) education and training; and (c) the importance of cultural survival and self-determination. The article makes an argument for a systemic decolonizing change in how Indigenous innovation is approached in government policy and programs, supported by the work of higher education institutions1.
Keywords: Indigenous entrepreneurship, decolonization, ecosystem, innovation, policy
Résumé
Alors que l’entrepreneuriat autochtone est associé à une promesse économique importante, l’innovation autochtone est toujours invisible dans le contexte des politiques publiques canadiennes. Cet article examine la manière dont les activités entrepreneuriales autochtones sont encadrées dans les politiques publiques, laquelle risque de provoquer une autre vague d’exploitation des terres, des peuples et des connaissances autochtones. Dans un premier temps, l’article discute des concepts d’entrepreneuriat et d’innovation autochtones sous l’angle de la décolonisation et établit des liens avec l’éducation. Ensuite, il fournit un ensemble de justifications expliquant pourquoi les gouvernements doivent repenser et prioriser l’entrepreneuriat autochtone. Enfin, il recense les initiatives actuelles du gouvernement fédéral dans ce secteur. S’inspirant de l’approche écosystémique de l’entrepreneuriat autochtone (Dell et Houkamau, 2016; Dell et al., 2017), cet article soutient qu’une politique publique plus complète pour orienter les programmes d’entrepreneuriat autochtone devrait éclairer la politique d’innovation canadienne. Les voix individuelles de 13 entrepreneurs autochtones du Manitoba permettent de souligner trois enjeux fondamentaux : 1) les relations avec la terre et la communauté; 2) la pertinence de l’enseignement (supérieur) et de la formation; 3) l’importance de la survie culturelle et de l’autodétermination. Cet article plaide en faveur d’un changement décolonisant systémique dans la façon dont l’innovation autochtone devrait être abordée dans les programmes gouvernementaux
et les politiques publiques, avec l’appui des établissements d’enseignement supérieur.
Mots-clés : entrepreneuriat autochtone, décolonisation, écosystème, innovation, politique publique
In an increasingly complex, networked, and rapidly changing world, creativity has taken a central role (Dortier 2015; Runco 2004). There is enormous interest in creativity in education, business, technology research, and emerging fields such as social innovation and design. Coupled with a proliferation of popular as well as academic discourses of creativity, this situation presents researchers with complex, multidimensional challenges that cannot be addressed exclusively from the perspective of one discipline. This new global context requires a transdisciplinary exploration of creativity, particularly since the articulation, expression, and practice of creativity appear to be in flux in society as well as in academia. The networked society, generational differences, and the focus on business innovation have turned attention to collaborative, distributed forms of creativity that have only recently begun to be studied systematically.
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.
Teacher education evaluation is a major policy initiative intended to improve the quality of classroom instruction. This study docyments a fundamental challenge to using teacher evaluation to improve teaching and learning.
Engineering leadership education has become increasingly popular over the past decade in response to national calls for educational change. Despite the growing popularity of the movement, however, reform efforts continue to be piecemeal in their delivery, driven largely by the priorities of program leaders who established them (Graham, 2012). If we as engineering educators wish to more systematically develop leadership skills in our students, we should begin by empirically examining and defining our phenomenon of interest: engineering leadership. Our article takes up this challenge by investigating how 82 engineers in five organizationally distinct roles define leadership and how their respective insights are shaped by their diverse organizational loca-tions. After weaving together the perspectives of engineers in industry, hu-man resource professionals, entrepreneurs, politicians and interns, we pro-pose a poly-vocal definition of engineering leadership and identify practical implications for engineering leadership educators.
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.
Have you ever wondered if your students are as concerned about their learning as you are? If you prioritize student learning, you may be the only person in your classroom with that goal. Learning-centered teachers seek to coauthor classroom experiences with their students, whereas students may seek only to be taught passively. How might you inspire your students to share accountability for their learning? These five considerations can help you teach your students to be learning-centered, too.