This research study was initiated and funded by OPSEU Local 110 at Fanshawe College. The report was presented as part of a panel discussion of the Rae Review featuring Bob Rae, Darryl Bedford, Glen A. Jones and Mary Catharine Lennon in London, Ontario on March 31st, 2015. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and may not reflect the views of OPSEU Local 110 or its members.
On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology to the for-mer students of Canada’s Indian residential school system, calling it a “sad chapter in our history.” That chapter is part of a broader story: one in which the Canadian government gained control over Aboriginal land and peoples, disrupted Aboriginal governments and economies, and sought to repress Aboriginal cultures and spiritual practices. The government, often in partnership with the country’s major reli-gious bodies, sought to ‘civilize’ and Christianize, and, ultimately, assimilate Aboriginal people into Canadian society. The deputy minister of Indian Affairs predicted in 1920 that in a century, thanks to the work of these schools, Aboriginal people would cease to exist as an identifiable cultural group in Canada.
Canada’s universities put ideas to work for Canadians.
Canada needs ingenuity, creativity, entrepreneurship, new ideas and competitive drive. We need to compete on our wits to succeed in the global economy. Canada’s universities are centres of knowledge, learning and innovation. Through teaching, research and community engagement, Canada’s universities help deliver the solutions needed to achieve ongoing prosperity for Canada. University faculty, researchers, graduates and students put their knowledge and skills to work for the benefit of Canada and Canadians now, and in the future.
This article reports on findings from a scan of 465 policies relevant to the handling of cyberbullying in 74 Canadian universities. It first assesses the commonalities and differences in the policies. Second, it considers how their various lenses—a human rights perspective versus a student conduct perspective, for instance—can affect the directions and outcomes of university
responses. The majority of the policies reviewed were codes of student conduct and discipline, policies on electronic communication, and policies on harassment and discrimination. Most of the policies outlined complaint procedures and possible sanctions, but relatively few addressed prevention of unacceptable behaviours. Only about a third made reference to “cyber” behaviours, suggesting that the university policy environment is not current with the information and
communication technologies that permeate the daily lives of university students and faculty.
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.
Chpt. 12 from Prentice Hall
Education has lost its soul. The idealism of the 70s was crushed upon the rocks of the back-to-the-basics movement of the 80s. In today’s hyper-testing environment, there is little room for real learning, creativity, innovation, passion, and curiosity. Today, education today is more about what we do to students than what students do. Adopting a humanistic approach to education is one way to find our way back.
A recent Globe and Mail article pointed out that Canadian universities appear to be slipping in world rankings. This is not a good thing. Higher education institutions — because of the students they teach, the research and discoveries they make, and the communities they support — are some of the most critical public institutions in Canada positioning us for a robust economy with plentiful good jobs and the quality of life and civil society Canadians want and merit.
The challenge Canada faces in higher education is best summarized in this question: How can we deliver a better education to more students with no more money?
The field of student attrition has grown tremen dously over the past two decades. The demographic characteristics of the population have induced us to consider how our institutions can more effectively serve their students and hopefully retain more of them until degree completion. As a result, studies of dropout and policy-oriented workshops concerned with prevention of attrition have become commonplace.
Legal uncertainty is a topic often raised in discussing unresolved Aboriginal land claims, such as those in British Columbia. Mining and Aboriginal Rights in Yukon examines legal uncertainty on Aboriginal rights in a different way, and in an under-examined Northern context. We examine what we identify as growing legal uncer-tainty in Yukon. This topic is not one that would have been expected a few years ago. In Yukon, modern land claims agreements with 11 out of the territory’s 14 First Nations once seemed to have established a high degree of certainty on Aboriginal claims. This certainty was even seen as a significant advantage for Yukon in the global competition for mining investment.
Self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 1991), when applied to the realm of education, is concerned primarily with promoting in students an interest in learning, a valuing of education, and a confidence in their own capacities and attributes. These outcomes are manifestations of being intrinsically motivated and internalizing values and regulatory processes. Research
suggests that these processes result in high-quality learning and conceptual understanding, as well as enhanced personal growth and adjustment. In this article we also describe social-contextual factors that nurture intrinsic motivation and pralmote internalization, leading to the desired educational outcomes.
Mismatches between workers’ competences and what is required by their job are widespread in OECD countries. Studies that use qualifications as proxies for competences suggest that as many as one in four workers could be over-qualified and as many as one in three could be under-qualified for their job. However, there is significant variation across countries and socio-demographic groups. Our meta-analysis of country studies suggests that over 35% of workers are over-qualified in Sweden compared with just 10% in Finland, with most other OECD countries located between these two extremes. There is also extensive evidence that youth are more likely to be over-qualified than their older counterparts and the same is found to be true for immigrant workers compared with a country’s nationals. On the other hand, no definitive evidence has been found of the persistence of qualification mismatch, with some papers showing that over-qualification is just a temporary phenomenon that most workers overcome through career mobility and others finding infrequent trantisions between over-qualification and good job matches. Across the board, over-qualified workers are found to earn less than their equally-qualified and well-matched counterparts but more than appropriately-qualified workers doing the same job. Under-qualified workers are found to earn
more than their equally-qualified and well-matched counterparts but less than appropriately-qualified workers doing the same job. Over-qualified workers are also found to be less satisfied about their job and more likely to leave their work than well-matched workers with the same qualifications.
The purpose of the paper is to describe our peer mentorship experiences and explain how these experiences fostered transformational learning during our PhD graduate program in educational administration. As a literature backdrop, we discuss characteristics of traditional forms of mentorship and depict how our experiences of peer mentorship was unique. Through narrative inquiry, we present personal data and apply concepts of transformational learning theory to analyze our experiences. Our key finding was that it was the ambiguous boundaries combined with the formal structure of our gradu- ate program that created an environment where peer mentorship thrived. We conclude that peer mentorship has great capacity to foster human and social capital within graduate programs for both local and international students.
OCUFA traditionally has been a strong advocate for academic quality in the Ontario university system. OCUFA’s position is that academic quality is usually reflected by the presence of a number of fundamental factors: a high proportion of qualified tenure- stream and tenured faculty conducting teaching, research, and community service as tenure indicates a mutual
commitment by the administration and faculty to both the institution and its academic health; sound physical facilities and a sufficiency of other physical components necessary to program delivery (e.g. laboratory facilities); sufficient academic and administrative support staff so that programs can be delivered effectively; and ready access to adequate research and library resources staffed by appropriately qualified academic librarians.
We have seen considerable discussion in recent Inside Higher Ed articles about “Teaching Excellence”, whether at the individual or institutional levels. We know this concept can be problematic: a focus on Excellent Teaching can have negative side effects in promoting an individualistic and competitive environment.
I think we need to consider a shift in focus, from Excellent Teaching to Exemplary Teaching ‒ again, at both the individual and institutional levels. A focus on Exemplary Teaching could promote a collective outcome of surpassing past accomplishments in teaching and learning, by fostering professional teaching at the individual level and coopetition at the institutional level (i.e., “cooperation in creating value, competition in dividing it up”).
This three-year study explored the perceptions of pre-service candidates in a five-year concurrent teacher education program who participated in a peer mentorship practicum model. In this practicum model teacher candidates were placed as a dyad, with each novice first-year candidate paired with a second- or third-year candidate who acted as a peer mentor. Ideally, the pair was then placed in the same classroom under the supervision of the same hosting associate teacher. However, each year
constraints presented by candidates requesting different geographic areas for their placements and/or a lack of associate teachers in some locations who were willing to host two candidates (i.e., a novice and a mentor) necessitated placing between 5 and 8% of candidates in another classroom in the same school as their mentorship partner or in another school in close geographic proximity. The objective of the peer mentorship model was to foster collaborative practice between novice and mentor candidates, which was perceived to hold the potential to provide additional support for both candidates.
Attraction and retention of apprentices and completion of apprenticeships are issues of concern to all stakeholders involved in training, economic development and workforce planning. The Canadian Apprenticeship Forum (CAF) has forecast that by 2017 there will be a need to train 316,000 workers to replace the retiring workforce in the construction industry alone (CAF, 2011a). In the automotive sector, shortages are expected to reach between 43,700 and 77,150 by 2021. However, shortages are already widespread across the sector, and CAF survey data show that almost half (48.1%) of employers reported that there was a limited number of qualified staff in 2011 (CAF, 2011a). Given this, retention of qualified individuals in apprenticeship training and supporting them through to completion is a serious issue. There is some indication that registration in apprenticeship programs has been increasing steadily over the past few years, but the number of apprentices completing their program has not kept pace (Kallio, 2013; Laporte & Mueller, 2011). Increasing the number of completions would result in a net benefit to both apprentices and
employers, minimizing joblessness and skills shortages.
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 confluence of social, technical, economic, and other factors have created the demand for improvement and change in U.S. postsecondary education. Many of the drivers for change are quite prominent, and include access to postsecondary education, cost, and students’ success. At the same time, many innovations are taking place, including numerous new modes of delivery, access, and instruction.
However, education outcomes are influenced at the micro level, where incredible variation among advisors, teachers, students, and methods leads to a process which is systemically difficult to map in detail, and hence to understand and support. In this environment, it is crucial to understand faculty members, both as stakeholders, and as potential creators and drivers of innovation, and as the direct, front-line drivers of student success.
The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. This paper fills an important gap in availability of internationally-comparable data. Using the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), it draws a comprehensive picture of work and study in 23 countries/regions. Crucially, it decomposes the total share of working students by the context in which they work (VET, apprenticeships or private arrangements) and assesses the link between field of study and students’ work. The paper also assesses how the skills of students are used in the workplace compared to other workers and identifies the socio-demographic factors and the labour market institutions that increase the likelihood of work and study. Finally, while it is not
possible to examine the relationship between work and study and future labour market outcomes at the individual level, some aggregate correlations are unveiled.