Speculative Diction

Yesterday, as I was taking a short break between grading assignments and exams and working on my dissertation, I found myself amazed to be reading an article from the Guardian UK wherein the author argued that in spite of what others might say, academe is not a stressful place — in fact it’s the best […]

Today’s post is about education in the United States — not higher education, but the ongoing (yes, 100+ years!) wrangle over public primary and secondary education reform. This month, a new Gates Foundation-funded research project was highlighted by Diane Ravitch in her blog. The research involves the use of “Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)” bracelets on […]

This week I’m taking a bit of a break from the news and paper-writing to recover from the past six weeks of work. I’ve been pondering the writing “process” and why/how it works (or doesn’t) for me and others. A friend wrote a few days ago and asked if I had any advice about getting […]

This week, I’ll be attending Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, one of the biggest annual conferences in Canada, held this year at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. I try to attend Congress whenever I can, though of course conferences are pricey (as I’ve discussed in the past) and must […]

Canada is generally a much less litigious place than the United States, and that has been reflected in the ways in which the law has come into play in U.S. postsecondary education. Recently, however, we’ve seen some precedents laid down in the Canadian context; in this post I’ll be looking at two of these, and […]

Over the past two years or so, I’ve been stewing quietly about a particular issue in Canadian education. Much of the recent media coverage about PSE in Canada is concerned with tuition costs and accessibility, faculty performance and salaries, government spending on education, and the various failings of the system. But alongside this, a campaign […]

There has been so much going on in Canadian post-secondary education over the past few months, that while my blog posts have focused on other things, it’s time to do a bit of a round-up of the major “happenings” in what is called – in the Twittersphere – #CdnPSE. Top of the news is the […]

What I’m writing about today concerns no specific policy initiative or teaching strategy. It’s about pedagogy, and the ways in which psychology and social norms come to play significant roles in the way we behave and interpret the behaviours of others – in the classroom and in other academic settings. The specific example I’m addressing […]

So much interesting Canadian PSE news has been popping up in my RSS feeds lately that I had a hard time deciding what to write about this week. I think, perhaps because of all the other education-related news, that very little attention has been paid to the Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology […]

By now, many of you may have seen or heard about the (infamous) Washington Post column of March 23 in which author David C. Levy argued that most professors should teach more because currently, they don’t put in enough work hours. Those of you working in universities already know that there’s a significant leap in […]

It’s a Sunday morning, and I’m sipping a fresh cup of coffee while engaging in a conversation about higher education and institutional change (which also happens to be the central concern of my dissertation). On this particular morning I’m chatting with professor Adeline Koh of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and Rosemary G. Feal […]

This weekend I was working on an essay about graduate education and decided to look up a few key statistics to add to my argument, hoping I could strengthen my point using numbers as well as words. Little did I know what I was in for. While I’ve searched for statistics many times (not always […]

This week in my tutorial group, which is for a first-year undergraduate course, something rather interesting happened. While of course, class is interesting in some way every week, this time around some of the students were feeling frustrated because a class had been cancelled the week before, and our discussion segued into a bigger conversation […]

On Friday, Feb. 24, on the heels of much recent debate about post-secondary education policy in Ontario, TVO’s “The Agenda” aired a discussion about the “purpose of the university.” I found myself frustrated at the set-up for the show, and by the discussion that came out of it; and I want to discuss that frustration […]

Last week on February 7, a conference was held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE) on the subject of the new universities (or campuses) that have been proposed by the Ontario provincial government. The conference included speakers who discussed various issues relating to the creation of the […]

Recently I’ve been re-thinking (again!) about what it is that we (citizens, persons, societies) expect from education and how this related to the nature of knowledge and learning. At the moment I’m working with a small group of teacher candidates (TCs) in a concurrent B.Ed program. The course, which is a requirement for the students […]

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland last week that he has a grand plan for Canada, and it sounds like part of this plan will include an overhaul of the Canadian R&D policy and funding structures. Changes are likely to be based on the recent R&D review […]

Unless you’ve been offline and away from your computer for the past week, you have probably seen or read something about the many Internet site “blackouts” in protest of the U.S. bills SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), with high profile demonstrations and shutdowns from Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, BoingBoing and others. […]

The question of whether postsecondary education is a good investment, of whether the “risk” is too much or if it is “worth it,” is one generally framed in terms of economic value now that PSE credentials have become ever more expensive and necessary for larger numbers of people. Of course the correlation is there — […]

As my first post for 2012, I want to provide a bit of a follow-up to my previous piece about PhD students and mental health issues. Though I always had the sense there was a problem with mental health in grad school and especially during the PhD, I was still surprised by the intense reaction […]