This publication was originally designed in 2003 when the Gender in Education Network in Asia-Pacific (GENIA) was established. Few gender in education resources were available at that time, and until the 2006 version, documents were mainly intended to be used by GENIA members, who are representatives (gender focal points) from ministries of education in the Asia-Pacific region.
GENIA members have been using the Toolkit to sensitize and train their national counterparts ever since.
Vision
Seneca is building a different kind of school with a different kind of graduate. We are driven by our values of excellence, innovation, community, and diversity. Seneca will be the preferred partner for colleges and universities, offering students the most innovative pathways in Ontario in a number of distinct academic clusters. With an enviable reputation for academic excellence, Seneca will continue to offer career- relevant programming at the certificate, diploma, baccalaureate, and graduate certificate levels. The College will consistently renew and refresh its programs, driven by a focus on student mobility and market demand.
Every program at Seneca will embed cross-disciplinary and experiential learning, and provide flexible learning options that enable students to learn during the day, in the evening, on weekends, in person, and online. More students and faculty will be supported in international study, work, and volunteer opportunities designed to enrich their own Seneca experiences. Students
will benefit from a comprehensive set of integrated advising services, from pre-application through to graduation, that will help them match their educational and career pathways with their interests and skills.
A different kind of school will produce a Seneca graduate with distinctive qualities: highly attractive to employers; ethical, engaged and confident; and adaptable and capable of addressing the challenges of the future in a global context. Our focus on the Seneca Core Literacies will ensure that graduates from every program have the broad range of skills that are key to success:
communication, problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration – the skills required to navigate change at work and in society.
Think back to your first few years of teaching. If you’re like most educators, you probably ade your share of mistakes. To be sure, we all do things differently now than we did when we were first starting out. Thank goodness for that! When Faculty Focus put out a call for articles for this special report on teaching mistakes, we really didn’t know what to expect. Would faculty be willing to share their earlier missteps for all to see? Would the articles all talk about the same common mistakes, or would the range of
mistakes discussed truly reflect the complexities of teaching today?
We were delighted at the response, not only in terms of the number of instructors willing to share their stories with our readers, but by the variety of mistakes in the reflective essays. For example, in “You Like Me, You Really Like Me. When Kindness Becomes a Weakness,” Jolene Cunningham writes of her discovery that doing everything you can for your students is not
always the best policy.
In “If I Tell Them, They Will Learn,” Nancy Doiron-Maillet writes about her realization that it’s not enough to provide information to students if they don’t have opportunities to then apply what you are trying to teach them.
Other articles in Teaching Mistakes from the College Classroom include:
• When Expectations Collide
• Things My First Unhappy Student Taught Me
• Understanding My Role as Facilitator
• Don’t Assume a Student’s Previous Knowledge
• What Works in One Culture May Not Work in Another
We thank all the authors who shared their stories and know that the lessons learned will help
prevent others from making these same mistakes.
Mary Bart
Editor
Faculty Focus
The Ontario university sector is already somewhat differentiated. A policy decision to increase the differentiation of the postsecondary system brings the following benefits:
• Higher quality teaching and research programs
• More student choice with easier inter‐institution transfer and mobility
• Greater institutional accountability
• A more globally competitive system
• A more financially sustainable system
Ask anyone what it means to be a leader, and you'll likely hear something unique every time. That's because everyone has his or her own idea of what leadership is, but not every boss leads a team the same way. Some people think leadership means guiding others to complete a particular task, while others believe it means motivating the members of your team to be their best selves. But while the definitions may vary, the general sentiments remain the same: Leaders are people who know how to achieve goals and inspire people along the way.
This paper examines the relationship between individuals’ personal exposure to economic conditions and their investment choices in the context of human capital. Focusing on bachelor’s degree recipients, we find that birth cohorts exposed to higher unemployment rates during typical schooling years select majors that earn higher wages, that have better employment prospects, and that more often lead to work in a related field. Much of this switching behavior can be considered a rational response to differences in particular majors’ labor market prospects during a recession. However, higher unemployment leads to other meaningful changes in the distribution of majors. Conditional on changes in lifetime expected earnings, recessions encourage women to enter male-dominated fields, and students of both genders pursue more difficult majors, such as STEM fields. These findings imply that the economic environment changes how students select majors, possibly by encouraging them
to consider a broader range of possible degree fields. Finally, in the absence of this compensating behavior, we estimate that the average estimated costs of graduating in a recession would be roughly ten percent larger.
What is Next for Mobile Learning?
In December 2015, there were 4.3 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world. In North America, 77% of families have at least one smartphone and 46% have access to a tablet at home. Worldwide, even though only 75% of the world has ready access to electricity, 75% of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone[1]. Some of the most remarkable learning development projects in the world, such as the Commonwealth of Learning’s Learning for Farmers initiative, use mobile phones and simple messaging systems to transform the livelihoods of thousands of families. Learning through mobile devices is possible anywhere and at anytime and is happening now.
As the world continues to watch the evolving implications of the Trump administration’s executive orders to restrict certain nationalities from entering the United States, academic institutions have been acting swiftly in response, from university presidents issuing statements against the ban, to widespread student protests. Many campus communities agree international students and scholars not only bring diversity to a university campus, but also contribute to vital research and diverse perspectives to global affairs.
A look at the sexual harassment policies at Canadian universities.
The recent decision of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal in the case of Fariba Mahmoodi, a student who accused her professor of sexual harassment, has once again focussed attention on a controversial issue. Ms. Mahmoodi complained to the tribunal that Donald Dutton, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and UBC as his employer, had sexually harassed her. The tribunal agreed, awarding her a total of $13,000 including $4,000 for injury to her dignity, feelings and self-respect, and $5,200 for counseling expenses.
This report examines data on operating expenditure per full-time equivalent student at community colleges in the United States and Ontario. Depending on the method used to equate U.S. and Canadian currency, expenditure per FTE student in Ontario sits somewhere between 74% and 92% of a comparable U.S. value. Notwithstanding this relative disadvantage, students in Ontario support, through tuition and other fees, a higher proportion of college operating expenditure than do students in the United States (30.8% vs. 23.5%).
What research direction is needed in the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education? Over a decade ago, Windschitl (1998) advocated for more research on in- creasing student inquiry through the World Wide Web and illuminating web-based stu- dent communication. The release and then extensive development of a model of online communities of inquiry (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) responded to Windschitl’s call. In addition to continued work in these two areas, a stronger research focus on learn- ing theory and everyday use of Web 2.0 technologies is required (Greenhow, Robelia, & Hughes, 2009; Zawacki-Richter, Anderson, & Tunca, 2010).
This essay is primarily analytic and historical with respect to the conceptualizations that should guide the contextualization of assessment in education.
At the University of British Columbia, Aboriginal students congregate in a First Nations Longhouse. At the University of Manitoba, senior managers now travel to Aboriginal communities to recruit students. The University of Saskatchewan’s College of Engineering runs outreach programs to engage Aboriginal youth well before they are of university age. At Lakehead University, the Native access program assists students in making a successful transition to university.
Six years ago, Sallie Mae started a conversation with American families, asking them important questions about how they meet the cost of higher education and how they view the value of that investment.
The How America Pays for College study, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, shows that American families are settling into a post-recession reality with regards to how they pay for college. Since 2010, families have reduced how much they spend on college, with parents’ contributions in particular seeing a significant decline.
The use of grants and scholarships, now the largest contributor, and student borrowing have increased to make up for some of this deficit. In 2013, the use of college savings plans has also increased to its highest level ever.
On may 16th. 2011, IBM, Baycrest and the Public Policy Forum convened Innovation and the Human Brain. This conference was convened, in part, at the request of the Minister of Research and Innovation in an effort to bring together business, academia and government to tackle one of the main issues which will define Ontario's innovation agenda over the coming decade - brain research.
One of the primary functions of many Ontario universities and colleges is to provide students with a high quality teaching and learning experience. However, as resources are stretched and postsecondary institutions focus more on research, funding into teaching development and support has been put at risk. A number of additional challenges – including rising
student/faculty ratios and class sizes, an aging faculty population, outdated methods of instruction and curriculum design, and uneven access to teaching development for new instructors – are making it even more difficult to develop and maintain quality teaching. Many student associations, faculty and administrators, the general public, as well as provincial government officials have agreed that the quality of the teaching and learning experience available to students at Ontario’s colleges and universities is increasingly at risk.
Few academics endorse bullying of or by their colleagues. But is bullying something about which disciplinary associations can take a stand? Can bullying even be defined in ways that don't limit strongly worded criticism that is part of academic freedom?
Student participation in applied research as a form of experiential learning in community colleges is relatively new. Ontario Colleges today participate at different levels with different numbers of projects and faculty involved. A few colleges in Ontario are more established in doing applied research including having basic infrastructure for research and having defined in which disciplines they will conduct research. This study took place in a college with a more established applied research program with the study goal of hearing and listening from the students and their teacher/research leaders as to their perceived benefit from the research program. The findings showed that the students found the program very beneficial and that student learning in areas considered important for the workplace was occurring that would not have been possible in the regular classroom.
The University community has an interest in improving the happiness and well-being of graduate students for a straightforward reason: to enable graduate students to do their best work. Balanced, happy people are more productive, more creative, more collaborative, better at pursuing long-term goals, more likely to find employment, and more physically and psychologically resilient, among other things. Positive emotion is associated with curiosity, interest and synthetic thinking. In contrast, depression is associated with loss of interest, helplessness, difficulty concentrating and remembering details, and worse. For more on this, see Part VI, “The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being,” from the World Happiness Report.
A theory is a way of organizing ideas that makes sense of the world. A theory of action is a way of understanding the world in a way that identifies insights and ideas for effectively improving it.
This chapter is about a theory of action for whole system improvement in education. There are three conditions that such a theory must meet for the task at hand. First, it must meet the systemness criterion. Do the ideas stand a chance of addressing the whole system, not just a few hundred schools here and there? Second, our theory must make a compelling case that using the ideas will result in positive movement. We are talking about improvement after all — going from one state to another state. Third, such a theory must demonstrably tap into and stimulate people’s motivation. I ask the reader to keep these three criteria in mind in assessing the theory I am about to offer, and in comparing it with other competing theories of action. Thus, to what extent do other theories or mine measure up to the systemness, movement, and motivation criteria.