It would be a shame if the lesson learned is simply to remove the controversial bits from your course.
The issues of freedom of speech and transgender rights, highlighted by recent events involving a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, remind me of my first year as a university instructor in the late 1990s, when I taught a communications course on advertising at York University. (Yes, I understand that the status of a TA is different than that of an instructor, but I think for the purposes of this anecdote, the principles are similar.)
While teaching the course, I saw an ad for Sauza tequila in the campus newspaper. It featured a photo of an attractive, swimsuit-wearing woman, with the phrase, “She’s a He,” written across her chest. The ad’s tag line read: “Life is Harsh, Your Tequila Shouldn’t Be.” (The ad didn’t identify the model, who in fact was Caroline Cossey, a transgender model.)
The past millennium has witnessed a myriad of technological changes, and there has been exponential growth in the same over the past century. Yet the design of the classroom has changed relatively little over the same time period. The classroom of Aristotle was organized more or less in the same fashion as that of Thomas Aquinas or Einstein. This design emphasizes the so-called “sage on the stage” model where a lecturer addresses an auditorium of students who are expected to listen, absorb, and retain this knowledge. The model continues to be the staple of pedagogical practice in the 21st century. Although the sage-on-the-stage model still dominates, there is a great deal of research suggesting more efficient and effective ways of imparting knowledge.
Why We Need to Act
One in five women is sexually assaulted in college. Most often, it’s by someone she knows – and also most often, she does not report what happened. Many survivors are left feeling isolated, ashamed or to blame. Although it happens less often, men, too, are victims of these crimes.
The President created the Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault to turn this tide. As the name of our new website – Not Alone.gov – indicates, we are here to tell sexual assault survivors that they are not alone. And we’re also here to help schools live up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.
Student mobility refers not to just the physical ability of a student to move from one institution to another, but the more comprehensive understanding of a student as an independent agent who - as their own needs and desires change - requires the ability to move from one institution to another to achieve their educational goal, be it a college certificate, diploma, or undergraduate degree. The policy has been broken into three key pillars, which cover the mobility needs of Ontario’s postsecondary students: Transparency, Consistency, and Student Support.
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.
During the economic doldrums that have followed The Great Recession, employees in the education sector (administrators, staff, and teachers or faculty at both the K-12 level and the post-secondary level) are confident about both their retirement savings behavior and their likely retirement outcomes. African American and white American employees in the education sector are more optimistic about their retirement planning and prospects than are U.S. workers overall. Education sector employees—both African Americans (87%) and white Americans (88%)—are more likely than U.S. workers overall (59%) to currently save for retirement. This fact helps justify their greater confidence that they will have enough money to live comfortably throughout retirement. Seven of every ten black American employees and seven of every ten white American employees are confident (‘very’ or ‘somewhat’) of this, while nearly half of all U.S. workers express this level of confidence.
In their aptly named book on organizational management, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton write about Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. A hard fact is something for which there is solid evidence. A dangerous half-truth is when this fact is superficially applied. And total nonsense is often the outcome of not knowing the difference.
We can gain insight about the current state of school leadership by applying this organizational thinking to two of education’s hard facts: The principal is crucial to school success, and professional learning communities are more effective than individual professionals working in isolation. In doing so, we should remember that the danger in the half-truth is not just that it is incomplete or misleading, but that its proponents are unaware that it is not true.
Colleges and Institutes Canada’s (CICan’s) 2015 Survey of Institutional Capacity, Facilities and Equipment Needs confirms that colleges and institutes continue to be in great need of infrastructure support.
Researchers say that discrimination at colleges and universities may have negative impact on black students' mental health.
The purpose of this research study was to map Ontario universities’ strategies, programs and services for international students (IS). In mapping these programs, we aimed to understand the opportunities, challenges and gaps that exist in supporting IS. We focused on services at various levels, including from the first year of study all the way through to graduation, the job search process, entry into the labour market, and students’ transition to permanent resident status.
On March 12, 2015, the government announced that Ontario would be moving forward with the transformation of its postsecondary education sector by launching consultations on modernizing the university funding model. The purpose of this consultation paper is to outline an engagement process and position the review within the context of the government’s
overall plan for postsecondary education. Funding universities in a more quality-driven, sustainable and transparent way is part of the government’s economic plan for Ontario.
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.
This study was a phenomenological study examining the experiences of faculty in an online learning environment in order to identify the factors that could produce job burnout and stress in master’s programs in education. The challenges and related stress-producing factors were also explored to identify best practices for online faculty and attributes most suited for the demands and expectations required in the online teaching environment. The study’s insights and findings are based on perspectives from online faculty who have been teaching in the modality for three or more years. These findings may be useful to stakeholders such as administrators, faculty mentors, faculty trainers, and faculty interested in employment in the modality so that identifiable and realistic criteria may be available upon which to base future hiring standards, employment practices, training, and decisions about teaching online. Insights about procedures and practices have been identified that may be effective in helping to develop initial training programs, faculty mentor supports, administrative decisions, and on-going faculty training. Based upon the findings, institutional leaders have information that could help identify best practices for online faculty and attributes most suited for the demands and expectations required in an online teaching environment. Institutions and administration can seek out and recruit the best possible online faculty who have the necessary skills, abilities, and characteristics required in this modality rather than hiring based merely upon academic credentials that would fail to identify specific attributes necessary for online teaching. Finally, those specific characteristics can then be applied to alleviate job burnout challenges online faculty would experience. The study will help institutional leaders (a) identify faculty earlier who will be better suited to the modality; (b) identify how to offer relevant, on-going faculty supports and training practices; and
(c) prevent online faculty job burnout.
Over the past two decades, many analysts have explored the various influences on high-school graduates’ college enrollment behaviors.
Theoretical and methodological approaches to studying the topic have become almost standardized. Most new studies of the topic are either replications of earlier analyses or minor variations on earlier themes. Levine and Nidiffer’s Beating the Odds brings us something a little different, however. Instead of another multivariate, quantitative exploration of educational attainment patterns in nationally representative survey data for thousands of students, Levine and Nidiffer present us with an interpretive analysis based on interviews with a very small group of respondents. Instead of beginning with a framework based in the familiar status attainment, cultural capital, or human capital theories, these authors construct their interpretations inductively, as they learn from the voices of their respondents. Instead of investigating what separates college attenders from those who choose other options, Levine and Nidiffer focus only on those who actually enter postsecondary institutions. Finally, instead of examining an economically diverse pool of respondents, these authors consider only those they term "the poor": students from backgrounds so impoverished that opportunities for college attendance are severely limited. These are bold choices. Individually and as a whole, they carry significant analytic risks. For those accustomed to other approaches to the topic, however, the book provides some special pleasures.
Administrators at many colleges and universities have had online courses at their institutions for many years, now. One of the hidden challenges about online courses is that they tend to be observed and evaluated far less frequently than their face-to-face course counterparts. This is party due to the fact that many of us administrators today never taught online courses ourselves when we were teaching. This article provides six "secrets" to performing meaningful observations and evaluations of online teaching, including how to use data analytics, avoid biases, and produce useful results even if observers have never taught online themselves.
Operating at the interface between ideas and action, graduate education in geography and planning has a responsibility to provide students with theoretical and practical training. This paper describes service-learning as a form of engaged pedagogy, exploring its ability to interrogate notions related to the “professional turn” and its contributions to transformative learning. Using a case study of a graduate-level service-learning course at the University of Toronto, we address the challenges associated with service-learning and high- light opportunities for students, faculty, universities, and community organizations. Our case study is based on assessment and analysis of the course and contributions to student learning, professional development, and community engagement. We contend that, at the graduate level, service-learning is an underutilized
pedagogical tool. Service-learning can impart high-demand skills to graduate students by transforming how students learn and move from knowledge into ideas and ultimately action, and by offering opportunities for developing higher-order reasoning and critical thinking.
The number of students with disability in higher education is increasing. National data reveal differences in the retention and success of these students across Australian higher education institutions but the reasons for this are not clear. The overarching aim of this study was to explore the relationship between supports and university adjustment for students with disability, and their retention and success.
Each year the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance releases its Habitats project: a series of case studies on municipal-level issues affecingundergraduate students. These case studies are written by OUSA campus researcher from our member institutions.
What is on the five-year horizon for higher eudacation instiregarding technology adoption? Which trends technology developments ill drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and educational change steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 58 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition, in partnership with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This NMC Horizon Report series charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technologies in colleges and universities across the globe. With more than 14 years of research and publications, it can be regarded as the world’s longest-running exploration of emerging technology trends and uptake in education.
International education is becoming an increasingly competitive sector within the field of postsecondary education. Tomorrow’s leaders will be expected to speak multiple languages, work in foreign countries, and bridge cultural differences to achieve social, economic and political objectives. Governments around the world are responding to this trend by intensifying the internationalization of their higher education systems — both attracting a greater number of international students and ensuring their citizens are able to pursue studies beyond national boundaries. In our globalized world, the demand for international education and experience continues to grow rapidly.