At one point during my year spent adjuncting, a former graduate school classmate who was now a tenured professor told me that I was lucky. I didn’t, he helpfully explained, have to attend department meetings, and I was only teaching one course.
Anyone familiar with adjunct life -- the anxiety about money, the constant search for the next job, the terrible work conditions -- knows that this classmate-turned-professor’s comment was ignorant at best. Now, having finally landed a tenure-track professorship, I understand better the extent of his ignorance. It went beyond his obliviousness to what a $3,000-a-semester job
means.
Social and emotional skills, such as perseverance, sociability and self-esteem, help individuals face the challenges of the 21st century and benefit from the opportunities it brings. Policy makers, teachers and parents can help foster these skills by improving the learning environments in which they develop. This paper reviews international evidence, including those from Japan, to better understand the learning contexts that can be conducive to children’s social and emotional development. It sheds light on features that underlie successful learning programmes including intervention studies. Reviewed evidence suggests that there are important roles for families, schools and communities to play in enhancing children’s social and emotional skills, and that coherence across multiple learning contexts needs be ensured. While most of the evidence comes from the United States and the United Kingdom, the paper suggests that further efforts could be made in Japan in collecting and better exploiting micro-data on a range of social and emotional skills, as well as in evaluating effectiveness of nterventions designed to raise social and emotional skills.
The number of international students attending Ontario colleges and universities has increased every year since 2009, testament to the quality of Ontario’s institutions and the province’s well-earned reputation as a study destination of choice.
Today, international students account for over 15 per cent of all students enrolled in public postsecondary institutions in the province. 1 With this vibrant international student body comes the need for a renewed international postsecondary education strategy for Ontario: one mindful of the vital linkages between education, innovation and the economy, and puts students at the centre.
Abstract This study investigates the degree to which biodiversity concepts are included within university curricula in Ontario and provides a baseline for tracking this. A keyword search of undergraduate and graduate academic calendars from six Ontario universities was conducted. A list of 28 relevant keywords was developed, and university program descriptors were searched for these keywords, while considering core and elective courses within each program. Almost half (49.5%) of the 386 undergraduate programs, and 29.4% of the 327 graduate programs featured biodiversity keywords. Science programs showed the highest degree of integration (74.5% for undergraduate and 37.4% for graduate programs), followed by business programs (57.6% and 38.4%, respectively). The arts and social sciences showed the least biodiversity integration (25.8% of undergraduate and 21.0% of graduate programs). This research method provides a depth of understanding of biodiversity integration within university curricula, although the analysis is limited to the content provided in academic calendars.
Résumé Cette étude évalue le degré d’intégration des concepts de la biodiversité dans les programmes universitaires en Ontario, et établit des repères pour suivre cette intégration. Une recherche par mots-clés a été réalisée dans les calendriers des cours de premier cycle et de cycles supérieurs de six universités ontariennes. Nous avons dressé une liste de 28 mots-clés pertinents, puis avons effectué une recherche de ces mots-clés parmi les descripteurs de programmes universitaires, en englobant les cours obligatoires et facultatifs de chaque programme. Près de la moitié (49,5 %) des 386 programmes de premier cycle et 29,4 % des 327 programmes de cycles supérieurs étaient assortis de mots-clés liés à la biodiversité. Parmi tous les programmes, les programmes scientifiques ont démontré le degré d’intégration le plus élevé (74,5 % pour le premier cycle et 37,4 % pour les cycles supérieurs), suivis des programmes en commerce (57,6 % pour le premier cycle et 38,4 %, pour les cycles supérieurs). Par ailleurs, les arts et les sciences sociales ont démontré la plus faible intégration de la biodiversité (25,8 % pour le premier cycle et 21,0 % pour les cycles supérieurs). Cette méthode de recherche permet de mieux comprendre l’intégration de la biodiversité dans les programmes universitaires, même si l’analyse se limite au contenu indiqué dans les calendriers des cours.
Anyone who suffers with anxiety knows that social anxiety is a terrible thing to suffer from. But according to a recent study, people with social anxiety might be more empathetic and have a higher IQ!
Social anxiety is a horrific mind inclination to suffer from. It gets in the way of overall happiness, contentedness, and even affects relationships in a majority of ways. Social anxiety is defined by the fear of social situations that involve interaction with other people. It is a pervasive disorder that causes anxiety and fear in almost every aspect of your life. Fear of work, relationships, public, school, you name it. Social anxiety is actually on a rise, statistics showing that approximately 7% of the population already suffers from it. Although social anxiety is such an awful thing to suffer from, sometimes good things come alongside bad things. For example, science has shown that people who suffer from social anxiety have a higher IQ and better empathetic skills than those who don’t.
Many years ago, educational anthropologists George and Louise Spindler (1982) urged us to "make the familiar strange and the strange familiar" (p. 15) to understand the commonplace in our culture. The lives of 21st century students are strange in many ways; they face much of the traditional angst associated with social acceptance, prospects for academic achievement, and economic success. However, the lives of today’s youth are also defined by a burgeoning number of technological innovations that shape every aspect of behavior, relationships, and communication. As such, attempts to make this world more familiar are important to adults seeking to understand and perhaps create spaces where there are opportunities to bridge the gap between a rapidly changing and complex contemporary world and a future where the only certainty is that our notions of community, work, and family are likely to be even more sharply defined by technological innovations.
Even as the economy has at last begun to expand at a more rapid pace, growth in wages and benefits for most American workers has continued its decades-long stagnation. Real hourly wages of the median American worker were just 5 percent higher in 2013 than they were
in 1979, while the wages of the bottom decile of earners were 5 percent lower in 2013 than
in 1979.1 Trends since the early 2000s are even more pronounced. Inflation-adjusted wage growth from 2003 to 2013 was either flat or negative for the entire bottom 70 percent of the wage distribution.2 Compounding the problem of stagnating wages is the decline in employer-provided health insurance, with the share of non-elderly Americans receiving insurance from an employer falling from 67 percent in 2003 to 58.4 percent in 2013.
In October of 1979, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman delivered al ecture at West Point in which she decried the “persistence of unwisdom” among politicians across the ages. Reflecting on how American presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had embroiled the United States more deeply in the Vietnam War, Tuchman bemoaned a perennial “wooden-headedness” -- a tendency for politicians to act wishfully, while not allowing themselves to be “confused by facts.”
While much literature has considered feedback and professional growth in formative peer reviews of teaching, there has been little empirical research conducted on these issues in the context of summative peer reviews. This ar- ticle explores faculty members’ perceptions of feedback practices in the summative peer review of teaching and reports on their understandings of why constructive feedback is typically non-existent or unspecific in summative reviews. Drawing from interview data
with 30 tenure-track professors in a research-intensive Canadian university, the findings indicated that reviewers rarely gave feedback to the candidates, and when they did, comments were typically vague and/or focused on the positive. Feedback, therefore, did not contribute to professional growth in teaching. Faculty members suggested that feedback was limited because of the following: the high-stakes nature of tenure, the demands for research productivity, lack of pedagogical expertise among academics, non-existent criteria for evaluating teaching, and the artificiality of peer reviews. In this article I argue that when it comes to summative reviews, elements of academic culture, especially the value placed on collegiality, shape feedback practices in important ways.
Canada’s businesses agree completely with the Prime Minister regarding the potential of our Aboriginal peoples to contribute to our collective economic prosperity. In fact, members of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce identified the participation of
the Aboriginal peoples in our workforce as one of four priority areas in addressing the barrier to their competitiveness posed by their difficulties in finding workers with the skills they need.
The Canadian Chamber has focused on the significant difficulties Aboriginal peoples face in completing elementary, secondary and post-secondary education and in obtaining and retaining employment. In this paper, we take a different approach to this issue by highlighting productive initiatives to improve the workforce participation of Aboriginal peoples and the competitiveness of employers. We will also offer recommendations to the federal government and Canada’s businesses
on measures both can take to provide Aboriginal peoples and communities—as well as businesses—with the tools to make these
success stories the norm.
Vocational education and training are highly valued by many. The European Ministers for Vocational Education and Training, the European Social Partners and the European Commission have issued in 2010 the Bruges Communiqué, which describes the global vision for VET in Europe 2020. In this vision, vocational skills and competencies are considered as important as academic skills and competencies. VET is expected to play an important role in achieving two Europe 2020 headline targets set in the education field: a) reduce the rate of early school leavers from education to less than 10 percent; b) increase the share of 30 to 40 years old having completed tertiary or equivalent education to at least 40 percent. However, there is limited hard evidence that VET can improve education and labour market outcomes. The few existing studies yield mixed results partly due to differences in the structure and quality of VET across countries.
Background/Context:
Scarce research has been conducted examining why students choose to attend higher priced for-profit institutions over community colleges. The authors suggest that increased national concern over proprietary higher education warrants an in-depth comparative case study of the choice factors utilized by for-profit and community college students.
An early consensus in the ongoing discourse about graduate student preparation for diverse careers was that graduates lacked competencies relevant to non-academic professional settings. Lists of missing “skills” were developed that universities and agencies sought to address, most commonly by the offering of generic (transferable) skills workshops or courses. In this paper, we critique this framing of the issue and discuss the limitations of the common approaches taken to address it. We propose a more integrated approach, where students’ thesis research itself is oriented to their possible futures (a practice already occurring in many areas), and where assessment of the competencies so developed is integral to the awarding of the degree. We illustrate the concepts through the stories of two students, and discuss policy ramifications and
the substantial challenges to its realization presented by a highly competitive research
environment and established ways of assessing success in faculty and students.
Thirty four Canadian postsecondary institutions self-selected to participate in the Spring 2013 ACHA National College Health Assessment.
Accelerated courses continue to be part of the changing academic landscape at Canadian universities.
However, there is limited evidence to support their efficacy in relation to knowledge retention. A greater understanding of knowledge retention associated with accelerated courses (i.e., intensive full-day course for a one- or two-week duration) as compared to traditional courses (i.e., one three-hour lecture once a week for 12 weeks) will provide university stakeholders and
administrators with evidence to determine whether quicker courses should be pursued in the postsecondary education environment.
There is a growing body of research demonstrating that there have been major changes in the work and working conditions of university teachers in many countries over the last few decades. In some cases this has led to the increasing employment of non-full-time university instructors, and questions have been raised, especially in the United States, concerning the working conditions of part-time faculty and the implications of these changes on educational quality. The number of full-time faculty at Ontario universities has not increased at the same pace as the massive growth in student enrolment, raising questions about whether universities have employed non-full-time faculty in larger numbers and whether the balance between full-time and non-full-time instructors is changing. However, very little empirical research has been conducted on non-full-time instructors in Ontario. This study offers a preliminary exploration of the issue by addressing four key questions:
a) What categories of non-full-time instructors are employed by Ontario universities?
b) What are the conditions of employment for non-full-time instructors?
c) Has the number of non-full-time instructors employed by Ontario universities changed over time?
d) Has the ratio of full-time to non-full-time instructors employed by Ontario universities changed over time?
The research method focused on the collection and analysis of publicly available information through a detailed review of collective agreements and related documentation, and the analysis of institutional data on employment. Most institutions do not report data on non-full-time instructor appointments.
Are there too many Canadian young people at university? I think the question is a fair one, but you would not think so from the reaction to the issue being raised. A report I prepared for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Career Ready, attracted way more attention for the suggestion that we could do with 30% fewer university students than at present.
Digital resources are changing the ways students engage in learning and provide increased opportunities for student success. New technologies also provide improved assessment tools for measuring learning outcomes and student engagement. These benefits come without an additional cost burden to students.
The Ministry of Training, Colleges, and University’s (MTCU) recently released Tuition Fee Framework and Ancillary Fee Guidelines for Publicly-Assisted Universities (December, 2013) indicates support for the use of digital learning materials, including materials used in assessment. The new framework reflects a change in the Ministry policy concerning ancillary fees and enables the use of digital learning resources. This position paper explains Ontario universities’ support of MTCU’s new guidelines.
All willing and qualified students in Ontario must be able to access and excel within Ontario’s post-secondary education system. This is a foundational principle of OUSA’s policy and advocacy work. We believe universities are currently underserving students with disabilities and that this needs to change.
In support of this change, we conducted an exploratory primary research study during September and November 2015. We intended to learn about the lived experiences of attending university in Ontario for students who identify as having one or more disabilities. Specifically, we wanted to investigate the challenges associated with persistance and graduation. This report will start by presenting the external research on which this project is based, move on to describe the methodology, and end by presenting and discussing the findings.
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.