Attainment of a post-secondary education has become a prerequisite to participate in the Canadian workforce. This shift was precipitated by a recession that resulted in the near-collapse of Canada’s manufacturing sector, but it reflects a broader shift that has been happening for the past two decades in Canada and around the world.
The Government is fulling its promise to balance the budget in 2015. pursuant to its long-standing commitment to responsible fiscal management. Economic Action Plan 2015 will see the budget balanced and Canadians can rest assured that Canada's fiscal house is in order.
Community colleges are a distinctively American contribution to higher education. While invented a century ago, these “junior colleges” were defined in modern terms after World War II in response to the Truman Doctrine’s call for developing post-secondary institutions that encourage adults to return to college. More than 70 percent of American community colleges were established between 1945 and 1970 and are still evolving today.
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.
Once a fourth-grade teacher, I recently began my work as an elementary assistant principal in another district. Based on my research and what I have experienced so far, I'd like to offer five ways for a rookie administrator to successfully navigate his or her new position.
Aboriginal learners who have followed their passion and found their voice at Ontario universities are spreading the word to their peers in a series of testimonials about the transformative power of a university education in hopes of inspiring other Aboriginal youth to see the benefit of higher education.
Like many developed countries around the world, Canada and Australia will face growing labour market pressures as a result of unprecedented demographic trends and increasing competition for skilled workers. As part of their response to current and emerging skill shortages, both countries are committed to improving qualification recognition processes to better facilitate internal mobility and skilled migration. With Canada and Australia functioning as federal systems, qualification recognition tends to involve a number of jurisdictions and a range of practices, creating an often confusing and lengthy process for many foreign trained professionals. While Canada is driving improvements in foreign qualification recognition through
intergovernmental and stakeholder collaboration, Australia is restructuring internal systems to centralize and standardize qualification assessment and professional registration. Since both countries face a number of common issues and share similar policy objectives, there is an opportunity to not only share key lessons and emerging best practices, but also work together to advance further collaboration across a range of professions.
Preventing youth suicide is an issue that naturally garners support from everyone including parents, policy makers and youth directly and indirectly affected. Schools can play a positive role in suicide prevention because they offer consistent, direct contact time with large populations of young people. There are other important reasons why schools should be involved in suicide prevention:
This commentary discusses the problem of bullying as it relates to Muslim students. The authors posit that teacher education programs can impact how Muslim students are treated in schools. In doing so, they provide practical avenues teacher educators can use to prepare pre-service teachers to address the problem.
Prior work has established robust diversity in the extent to which different moral values are endorsed. Some people focus on values related to caring and fairness, whereas others assign additional moral weight to ingroup loyalty, respect for authority and established hierarchies, and purity concerns. Five studies explore associations between endorsement of distinct moral values and a suite of interpersonal orientations: Machiavellianism, prosocial resource distribution, Social Dominance Orientation, and
reported likelihood of helping and not helping kin and close friends versus acquaintances and neighbors. We found that Machiavellianism (Studies 1, 3, 4, 5) (e.g., amorality, controlling and status-seeking behaviors) and Social Dominance Orientation (Study 4) were negatively associated with caring values, and positively associated with valuation of authority. Those higher in caring values were more likely to choose prosocial resource distributions (Studies 2, 3, 4) and to report reduced likelihood of failing to help kin/close friends or acquaintances (Study 4). Finally, greater likelihood of helping acquaintances was positively associated with all moral values tested except authority values (Study 4). The current work offers a novel approach to characterizing moral values and reveals a striking divergence between two kinds of moral values in particular: caring values and authority values. Caring values were positively linked with prosociality and negatively associated with Machiavellianism, whereas authority values were positively associated with Machiavellianism and Social Dominance Orientation.
“This report reinforces the effectiveness of financial aid in closing Canada’s education gap for Aboriginal students. Along with culturally relevant curriculum, programs, and outreach, financial support is key to improving both access and success for Indigenous students in post-secondary education. AUCC is pleased to partner with Indspire and others who share a commitment to getting results.”
This paper provides an overview of research on higher education leadership and management from the 20th and into the 21st century. It highlights the development of specific research in higher education contexts as well as the relationship between research in the management sciences in general on which higher education researchers, practitioners and policy makers have drawn, not always with beneficial consequences. The paper draws particularly on the work of Bensimon et al (1989) and Kezar et al (2006) in the US as well as research in the UK over the last quarter century, including recent research commissioned by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education in the UK.
Developing leaders is an especially daunting task for higher education institutions. Like individuals working in professional service firms, academicsx are often ambivalent about assuming leadership roles. Their professional idenity and sense of satisfaction from work are derived pricipally from their professional expertise and accomplishments. They are not recruited for their leadership potential, but rather are selected andrewarded for their research, course development, and/or teaching.
While the phenomenon of leadership is widely considered to be universal across cultures, the way in which it is operationalized is usually viewed as culturally specific. Conflicting viewpoints exist in the leadership literature concerning the transferability of specific leader behaviors and processes across cultures. This study explored these conflicting views for managers and professional workers by empirically testing specific hypotheses which addressed the generalizability of leadership behaviors and processes across five nations in North America and Asia. Confirmatory factor analyses provided evidence for conceptual and measurement equivalence for all six leader behaviors employed in the study.
For most educators, writing a philosophy of teaching statement is a daunting task. Sure they can motivate the most lackadaisical of students, juggle a seemingly endless list of responsibilities, make theory and applications of gas chromatography come alive for
students, all the while finding time to offer a few words of encouragement to a homesick freshman. But articulating their teaching philosophy? It’s enough to give even English professors a case of writer’s block.
Between June 2013 and June 2014, 11 graduates from the School of Education at Laurentian
University,most teaching in smaller communities scattered across northern Ontario, were interviewed about their recent experiences. The purpose of these interviews was to determine how well the concurrent education program had prepared these graduates for the realities of teaching in First Nation, Métis and Inuit (FNMI) remote and rural communities in the province. Five of the graduates’ administrators or school principals were also interviewed to determine how thoroughly teacher
training had prepared the graduates to work in the north and how the program could be improved.
Over the last twenty years, the public—through the federal government—has spent an increasing amount of money on student financial aid and education-related financial incentives. Driven by rising tuition and ancillary fees (coupled with stagnant middle-income earnings), the cost of pursuing post-secondary education has led an increasing number of low- and middle-income Canadians to rely on these programs. Each developed separately and at different times, the Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP), Canada Student Grants Program (CSGP), Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP), and education-related tax credits (Education and Tuition Fee Tax Credits [TFTC] and Student Loan Interest Credits [SLIC]) now cost the public over $4.2 billion each year, with an additional $2.5 billion given out in loans.
Trust is important for social and economic well-being, for enhancing social cohesion and strengthening resilience, and for maintaining security and order in our societies. Trust is the foundation upon which social capital is built and it also is intimately related to human capital. This work examines the association between education and levels of interpersonal trust, using data from the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). Our analysis demonstrated that education strengthens the cognitive and analytical capacities needed to develop, maintain, and (perhaps) restore trust in both close relationships as well as in anonymous others. It does so both directly, through building and reinforcing literacy and numeracy in individuals, and indirectly, through facilitating habits and reinforcing behaviours such as reading and writing at home and at work. Education and trust are thus fundamentally intertwined and dependent on each other. While all countries across the OECD have been striving to improve their education systems in terms of student achievement levels, this analysis suggests that there are also concrete elements that could be usefully addressed in order to reinforce and strengthen trust.
This study assesses the economic and financial benefits for individuals and the province of Ontario of implementing a coordinated, province-wide credential and credit recognition and transfer system for Ontario college graduates enrolling in a university undergraduate degree program in the province. The study demonstrates that there are solid economic and financial reasons to develop such a system. It also recognizes that the current patchwork transfer framework results in significant instances of inequity for students and that an enhanced system will encourage more students to pursue the higher education that matches their interests and skills. It will also reduce the number of students who feel compelled to leave Ontario to continue their education. The study recommends a Made-in-Ontario solution to address the fundamental equity and fairness concerns of students, to simplify administration for post-secondary institutions, and to strengthen our economy by providing educational opportunities for the workforce this province will need to compete and prosper in the global economy.
International students are increasingly regarded as ‘ideal‘, ‘model‘ or ’designer‘ immigrants for the labour markets of their host countries. Young, educated, and equipped with host country credentials and experiences, international students are
presumed to mitigate future talent shortages, especially in technical occupations in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). In an effort to retain more inter- national students for their domestic workforce, many host countries have passed legislation to improve post- study work and residency options for the ‘educational nomads’. However, despite these reforms and a high willingness to stay, many international students fail to find adequate employment. For example in Germany, 30 percent of former international students are still searching for a job more than one year aftergraduation.