Statistics Canada is moving to reinstate its Full Time-University and College Academic Staff System survey, and to include information on part-timers.
The data it will reveal is bound to shed much-needed light on a growing challenge that is already well-recognized but far too infrequently discussed in academia: the recent surge in numbers of underemployed PhD graduates at Canada’s universities.
Institutions have made their best efforts to encourage graduates to think beyond university jobs, and have directed more toward careers in government and the private sector. Yet serious challenges within the system remain — for recent PhDs themselves, for the renewal of the academy, and for Canada’s future research potential.
For academics, November through March are perhaps the most emotionally taxing months of the year. Not only are we dealing with holiday stress while preparing for the end of one semester and the start of another, we also have an omnipresent and oppressive awareness of the faculty job market.
Somehow higher education has chosen the winter months — when seasonal affective disorders are most pronounced — as the perfect moment to decide the professional fate of thousands of Ph.D.s.
So many of our conversations about social media revolve around statistics: two billion Facebook users, 1.5 billion YouTube users, 800 million Instagram users. On a single day we produce 525 million tweets, upload 54 million photos, and watch five billion videos. It is the size of those audiences and the scale of the activity that prove so enticing to academics keen to descend from the ivory tower.
Any seasoned academic who has been involved with job searches knows there are two sets of criteria for some positions: the ones in the published ad and the "hidden" ones.
"The dean says we must hire a woman this time," reports the chair. Or the dean says: "The department’s lack of racial diversity is becoming a problem, you’ve got to fix that with this year’s search." Or the department’s star faculty member tells the chair, "If you don’t hire my spouse into a permanent line finally, we will take jobs elsewhere next year." All of those fall into the hidden-criteria column.
I have a question about cover letters. In your blog posts and book, you stress the importance of putting research first in a cover letter for positions at research-oriented institutions, and teaching first for openings at teaching-oriented colleges. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell which camp an institution falls under. Any advice?
Indeed, in presenting yourself as a desirable job candidate for a particular institution, it is imperative that your application materials align you with the main focus — the main mission, if you will — of the place to which you are applying. The cover letter is the first indicator that you understand what will make you both effective and tenurable at a given institution, and search committees looking to fill a tenure-track position want to be sure they "spend" that tenure line on someone who will be successful.
It is heartening to see an increase in the amount of research in pursuit of understanding how best to foster
young children's social, emotional and cognitive development through play-based learning. That said, the field
is replete with varying definitions or purposes regarding play-based learning as there is with the myriad of
differing notions of other related and touted benefits of "early learning". Moving coherently, reliably and validly
from evidence to improving pedagogy, early learning environmental design and policy remains difficult because
of the lack of evidentiary consensus.
Using publicly available information, the study has compiled employment data on 88 percent of the university’s PhD graduates from 2000 to 2015.
In a bid to understand where PhD graduates end up after they finish their doctorates, the school of graduate studies at the University of Toronto launched a project to collect publicly available data on the roughly 10,000 U of T students who received their PhDs between 2000 and 2015. Called the 10,000 PhDs Project, it provides a snapshot of where these former students are currently in their careers.
As academics, we grapple with failure all the time and in a myriad of ways.
One of the best parts of academia is that we are always learning. In our quest to develop a deeper understanding of the world around us, we occupy various positions as expert and novice learners. But, this is also one of the hardest parts of our jobs: in order to learn, we must open ourselves up to the risk of failure, mistakes and missteps.
As academics, we grapple with failure all the time and in a myriad of ways. We are rejected on the job market, we are dejected after an unsuccessful grant application, and we are crestfallen when Reviewer 2 destroys our central argument. Our ideas are challenged during a conference session or during a departmental meeting; we are criticized in the Twittersphere or in book reviews. A class can spectacularly self-implode despite careful preparation or a student might fail to thrive despite our best efforts.
To form a truly educated opinion on a scientific subject, you need to become familiar with current research in that field. And to be able to distinguish between good and bad interpretations of research, you have to be willing and able to read the primary research
literature for yourself. Reading and understanding research papers is a skill that every single doctor and scientist has had to learn during graduate school. You can learn it too, but like any skill it takes patience and practice.
What's the worst college major for your career, according to Forbes? Anthropology and archaeology. Kiplinger's says to stay away from religious studies, music, anthropology and art history.
Such warnings are common these days. And liberal arts professors and admissions deans at liberal arts colleges will tell you that plenty of students (and an even larger share of parents) believe them. Many colleges with liberal arts roots are rushing to add preprofessional programs.
The Early Childhood Education Report 2017 is the third assessment of provincial and territorial frameworks for early childhood education in Canada. Nineteen benchmarks, organized into five equally weighted categories, evaluate governance structures, funding levels, access, quality in early learning environments and the rigour of accountability mechanisms.
Results are populated from detailed provincial and territorial profiles developed by the researchers and reviewed by provincial and territorial officials. Researchers and officials co-determine the benchmarks assigned. We are pleased to welcome Nunavut and Yukon as new participants in this edition. ECEReport.ca includes the profiles for each jurisdiction, including the federal government, plus the methodology that shapes the report, references, charts and figures and materials from past reports.
The majority of university staff feel that they are overworked and underpaid, and that their careers have a detrimental impact on their relationships with their friends, families and partners.
These are some of the conclusions that can be drawn from Times Higher Education’s first major global survey of university staff’s views on their work-life balance.
We are often warned against being judgemental. “Judge not, lest ye be judged”, for example, reminds us how vulnerable we are to others’ estimations of us, and how likely those estimations are to be biased.
Nevertheless, we continue to make judgements, both positive and negative, because we have evolved to do so. Human brains have been “domesticated” by our need to live in groups to survive. We assess others carefully, and monitor their views of us; if those views are negative, we may be cast out of the group.
While nearly every day brings news of someone banished from the entertainment industry — Harvey Weinstein, Garrison Keillor, Louis C.K. — the situation in the academy is very different. Only a small number of tenured faculty members have lost their jobs in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Of course, this isn’t a result of any lack of allegations. A crowdsourced survey on instances of sexual harassment organized by Karen L. Kelsky is at 1,900 responses and counting.
In his classic 1963 study Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter convincingly argues that Americans’ suspicion of purely intellectual pursuits extends even to our thinking about how to structure and value higher education. He might not have been surprised at the currently popular movement on college campuses that goes under the banners of “experiential learning,” “service learning” and “engaged learning.”
Using the chronicles of three friends, this chapter presents a counterstory that sets the stage for the examination of racism in teacher education, within the United States of America, using critical race theory (CRT) as an analytical tool. The setting of these chronicles is during a time when postracial rhetoric in the United States was at its highest—just after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. The three friends take the readers on a journey through their graduate experience in teacher education and into their first faculty position in teacher education. Their experiences, as students and junior faculty, are akin to what many faculty and students of color and their White allies experience daily in teacher education programs across the United States. The analysis of their chronicle, using CRT, reveals that postracial discourse has disguised racism and racial microaggression in teacher education. Racial microaggression is as pernicious as other forms of racism and, through its passiveaggressive orientation, validates institutional and individual lack of attention to issues of race.
Quiet at School, a new book by Robert J. Coplan and Kathleen Moritz Rudasill, illuminates the complexity of a teacher's work and provides practical strategies for teachers to positively impact the educational experience of shy children. The book begins by helping the reader understand what constitutes shyness and why it is critical that teachers are thinking about how they respond. By clearly describing what shyness is and what it isn’t, the authors dispel common misconceptions and, importantly, resist positioning shyness as a weakness. Instead, they illustrate potential positive and negative outcomes associated with this trait.
Most, if not all, faculty and graduate students will agree with Dr. Joli Jensen’s statement that “academic writing is a perplexing burden, a source of constant anxiety, self-doubt, and confusion” (p. 4). When we and our colleagues discuss our own writing struggles or those of our graduate students, we recognize that there are many potential issues underlying writing problems: research design issues, lack of knowledge of other scholarly literature, underdeveloped academic writing skills, an
emerging identity as an academic writer, and ineffective writing processes and practices. Jensen, the author of Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics, claims that her book focuses solely on “offering academic colleagues process-oriented strategies for overcoming writing obstacles” (p. 88). In fact, we find that Jensen offers more than just process strategies in that she also details the affective and psychological barriers to writing; the things that happen in writers’ heads when they have carved out time for writing but still struggle.
Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race brings together work from across several subfields of linguistics and offers a complex, global examination of the connections between race and language. As a whole, this anthology seeks to make sense of our historical moment, a unique time in which “we are constantly orienting to race while at the same time denying the evidence that shows the myriad ways that American society is fundamentally structured by it” (p. 3). This historical moment was concretized in the national consciousness with the election and presidency of Barack Obama. For Smitheran and Alim, Obama’s linguistic choices as he developed a social and racial public identity served as a starting point for their theorizing of race and language, which they began in their first book, Articulate While Being Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the US (2012). In Raciolinguistics, an expanded line of inquiry goes beyond the case of Obama to ask, “what does it mean to speak as a racialized subject?” This question became a topic for several conferences and scholarly movements at UCLA and Stanford, incorporating theoretical threads from race and ethnic studies as well as anthropology. In this text, however, the authors embrace a unique analytical approach, studying race as a sociolinguistic construction on an international scale.
In Seven Essentials for Family-Professional Partnerships in Early Intervention, Bonnie Keilty explores the intricacy of the relationship-building process between early intervention (EI) professionals and the families they work with. EIs are called upon as a part of a team of specialists to work with families of young children with a range of medical and/or developmental concerns so as to foster progress toward developmental goals. Keilty positions family members as experts within this team, drawing on research from the family systems intervention approach that suggests families more fully engage in the goal-achievement process when collaborative relationships and participatory practices serve as the foundation of the family-professional partnership (FPP). Recognizing that the work of developing meaningful relationships between EIs and families is both essential and complex, this book looks at how to create and sustain relationships that enhance the FPP. In line with Auerbach’s (1995) suggestion that the movement towards familial partnerships that invoke an additive approach and that draw on families’ funds of
knowledge must be intentional, Keilty’s book provides a framework for EI practitioners to shift away from approaching families through a deficit lens and move towards relationships that resituate families as authentic partners in early interventions.