All Posts Tagged With: "teaching"

A defense against those who say lectures should be “social”

Photo by poptech on Flickr

There are few long-standing traditions that have as rough a reputation these days as the lecture.

Many commentators on higher education tend to see them as boring, old-fashioned and unsuited to the modern world and the modern student.

Thus American psychology professor Pamela Rutledge  in this recent blog entry takes the lecture as typical of the hidebound university because it is “unidirectional and linear,” not social and students don’t get to decide when it’s over.

But despite her arguments, I feel confident that traditional lectures serve a unique purpose. I believe they will serve us well into the future.

Continue reading Why traditional lectures will thrive

If professors don’t produce research, who will?

Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video on Flickr

University research is under attack these days. This editorial in the Globe and Mail is just the latest call for “reform” of a system where university professors are, they say, too devoted to research, contemptuous of teaching, and wasting the public’s money. If professors spent more time teaching and less time researching, taxpayers and students would get more bang for their buck, they argue. As a student and a young scholar, I always took the value of university research for granted.

Apparently I can’t any longer.

One reason such editorializing is wrong-headed is that the anti-teaching prof is a myth. While those outside the academy like to represent today’s professor as a hyper-nerd who can churn out papers but not explain anything, the stereotype simply doesn’t hold up. In nine years as a student and eleven as a professor, I have met only a few professors who hated teaching, and not a single one who didn’t work hard at it.

Continue reading Stop attacking university research

Teachers will now require a minimum of three years of post-secondary education

Substitute teachers in Prince Edward Island will soon require more university education to enter the classroom.

Beginning in September, teachers will need to have completed at least three years of post-secondary education, up from just one according to previous requirements. The change was motivated by complaints received by the province’s Certification and Standards Board about some substitute teachers who were barely older than their students.

According to Nancy Desrosiers, registrar for certification with the Education Department, some exceptions may be made for schools who formally ask for a specific individual, even if he or she has not completed the new minimum three-year requirement.

Certified teachers in PEI must have substitute teaching experience, as well as an undergraduate degree and a Bachelor of Education.

David Miller chosen for his “low carbon leadership”

David Miller, the former mayor of Toronto, has been hired to teach at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University reports CBC News. He’s been named the Future of Cities Global Fellow, which will require him to lecture on the use of technology in urban settings. ”Under his leadership, Toronto received numerous honors such as the low carbon leadership award from the climate group,” the university wrote in a statement explaining their choice. “It is acknowledged as one of the worlds’ leading business destinations and as a city that respects social justice.” Miller currently works at Toronto law firm Aird and Berlis and is president of Urban Green Jobs.

Research suggests quality could ‘deteriorate’ UPDATED

Large classrooms are increasingly becoming the norm at Ontario universities, according to research from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. In 14 of the province’s 19 universities, no less than 30 per cent of first-year classes had at least 100 students in 2010, compared to just nine a year before, the Toronto Star reports. “The larger the class, the more difficult it is for a teacher to get beyond the traditional lecture method and use techniques that promote deep learning, and if that doesn’t happen, the quality can start to deteriorate,” HEQCO vice-president Ken Norrie said. A recent HEQCO university workshop explored different ways institutions are addressing large classes, from offering internet lectures to redesigning multiple choice tests so that they more accurately measure student learning. One University of Toronto student told the Star how engaging professors are capable of jumping over the “over the hurdle of class size.”

UPDATE: An earlier version of this story inaccurately referred to a HEQCO “survey” or “report” on class sizes. No such report exists as of yet.

The answer may enrage you.

Having posted over a hundred entries to this blog on university affairs, I may seem foolish asking a question like “what is a university?” Shouldn’t I know? Isn’t it obvious? Does it really matter?

As some philosopher said regarding time, I know what a university is — so long as nobody asks me, so I was curious as to what my own definition would look like if I tried to spell it out. The answer is not obvious, though, because a university has not always meant the same thing over the centuries, and it does not necessarily mean the same thing to everyone now. And it matters because very often the arguments we have about universities turn on our assumptions about what universities are and what they ought to be. Recent debates over certain religious universities in Canada, provide one obvious example. What follows then is my initial, and admittedly provisional attempt to define what we ought to consider a university in this country. I hope it provides readers with some food for thought and some opportunity for debate.

1. A university has two principal functions: providing instruction on matters of intellectual importance and conducting research on those same matters.

2. These two functions, to the extent reasonably possible, should support one another. University teaching, therefore, is distinguished from other modes of education not only by seeking the highest levels of sophistication, but also by deriving its vitality from the atmosphere of on-going discovery fostered at the institution. For this reason, most, if not all courses at a university should be taught by faculty who are active researchers in the disciplines in which they teach. Conversely, research ought not to be done in isolation from teaching. Researchers should be open to allowing issues that arise in teaching to suggest new research questions and, where feasible, students, both undergraduate and graduate, should be given opportunities to participate in research.

3. Because strong intellectual work can only be done in an atmosphere where scholars feel free to take risks, challenge conventions, and change their minds, universities must foster an environment that prizes intellectual freedom. Except in cases of illegal conduct, violence, or flagrant abuse of the trust placed in faculty members, universities should never seek to sway, silence, intimidate, threaten, or otherwise influence faculty members to take, renounce, or be silent on any particular position, nor to control or monitor controversial actions. Indeed, universities should take all legal action necessary to defend the academic integrity and freedom of the scholars associated with it. Academic freedom is a right of individual scholars, not of universities themselves or their administrations. Therefore, no university should seek to impinge on the academic freedom of a scholar by claiming it has an institutional freedom to do so.

4. Though university education should provide the kind of intellectual enrichment that would serve any graduate well in the working world, university education should never be construed solely or even primarily as a path to employment. Even in disciplines with obvious professional connections such as education or law, the university should first aim to teach the history, theoretical underpinnings, crucial knowledge, and critical skills necessary to build a profound understanding of the discipline. A university law program, for example, should aim primarily to produce graduates with a profound understanding of law, rather than lawyers, per se.

5. A university has one additional secondary function: to serve as a cultural touchstone in its community to encourage all members of the public to participate in the life of the mind. Universities should, within reasonable limits and without needlessly detracting from its primary missions, sponsor and host artistic performances and displays, public talks, open debates, and other events that excite interest in intellectual pursuits, broadly construed.

This to me seems like a good starting point for a real, meaningful debate on what a university should be. Some readers might object and say that I have simply described Canadian universities as they are. To the extent that that is true, we should consider ourselves lucky, and seek to conserve and develop what we already have. But as the case of Trinity Western and Redeemer have demonstrated, not all institutions that consider themselves universities would sign on to all five of my criteria — particularly the part about academic freedom. Quest University, the new private institution in BC, would certainly not qualify because it does not expect its profs to be researchers, for example. And it’s not just those universities: I think you would be hard-pressed to find many university administrators or any politicians who would endorse number 4.

In any case, what we mean by the term “university” is a debate that we have to continue to have in this country. Have at it.  

Study that shows students learn little misses the point

It seems Canadian universities are paying closer attention to a study that came out of New York University a few weeks ago. The study argues that students aren’t going to university to learn anymore; they’re going there to socialize.

According to the report, students can spend less than half as many hours studying as they do socializing. The study seems to be making a statement that youth of today are unreliable and unruly, that they are less then the university graduates of a generation ago.

Todd Pettigrew has already pointed out that there is little reason to panic that the study’s finding would ring true in Canada. Recent comments from the vice-provost at the University of Western Ontario would back that statement up.

“For most things in life, you get out of something what you put into it,” John Doerksen said in Feb 3 press release. “It’s possible for students to find the easiest route to a diploma at the end of the day, but on the whole universities are serving populations well.”

Whenever you paint an entire population with the same brush, you risk painting some students the wrong colour. It’s a dangerous game to play. While the study found that “45 per cent of students made no significant improvement in critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years, and 36 per cent showed no improvement after four years of schooling” more than half of students did make critical progress.

According to the study, students spent about 85 hours a week socializing or participating in extracurricular activities. Less than 40 hours per week were devoted to academics.

“This surprises me,” Doerksen continues. “From my own experience I would say that students are spending very significant amounts of time on their academic pursuits.”

Doerksen believes Canada’s post-secondary system is well-equipped to prepare students for the rest of their lives. “If a student wants to learn, there is an appropriate environment for that here,” he adds.

Taking away too much from a study that focuses on less than half of the students surveyed is a bad idea. Those students are perhaps not the best hiring choices for new companies, but the remaining 55 per cent of the student body are eager, learning and increasingly critically-minded people who will be the leaders of tomorrow.

By not showcasing the 55 per cent who are making a difference, the paper fails. If 45 per cent of students are not valuing lessons and skills learned in the classroom, they’ll hit their proverbial brick wall at some point. But lets not lose sight of the majority of students who are benefiting from post-secondary education.

How government cuts threaten Oxford and Cambridge’s unique teaching style

In 1945, Evelyn Waugh famously depicted Oxford in his classic novel Brideshead Revisited as a place where young people spend their days “twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sightseeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches.” Six-and-a-half decades later, things in the whimsical college town are far less civilized. Oxford University students spent much of the fall term staging angry protests, gathering in town by the hundreds to demonstrate against the government. Meanwhile, at its historic rival Cambridge, a 21/2-hour train ride away, students are equally fired up. After a number of boisterous marches in November, about 1,000 students staged an 11-day occupation of a university building. At issue is Britain’s massive new austerity package, which includes an 80 per cent cut to higher education teaching grants by 2012, and a potential tripling of tuition fees. The protests were “a wake-up call,” says Tom, a Cambridge Ph.D. student and one of the occupation organizers, who spoke with Maclean’s on the condition of anonymity. “The things the government are calling for seem extreme,” he says. “And extremely dangerous to education.”

Protests have taken place across Britain. But students at Oxford and Cambridge are motivated by a more pressing fear: that the new cuts will end the centuries-old reign of the institutions collectively called Oxbridge. Some are afraid the famed Oxbridge “tutorial system” is in jeopardy. Since their conception, Oxford and Cambridge have dismissed the traditional lecture system. Instead, undergrads are taught largely through one-on-one “tutorials” with professors. In between the weekly or fortnightly meetings, students work through massive reading lists, and write papers to later discuss with their tutors. “It makes the best use of bright students,” says David Palfreyman, an Oxford tutor and editor of The Oxford Tutorial. Students at the two schools work harder—10 to 15 hours a week more than average students, he says—“because [they] can’t escape in the tutorial system.” And it teaches them to think more creatively; many papers aren’t formally assessed, so students “can be a bit adventurous.”

It certainly attracts some keeners. David Barclay, an Oxford undergrad and president of the student union, says the tutorial system was one of the things that drew him to Oxford from Scotland, where he grew up. “It’s the best way of teaching,” he says. “One-on-one interaction with the best minds in the world.” At a coffee shop near the history department, Barclay recounts some particularly memorable classes, including one on 20th-century political history taught by a sitting member of Parliament. “Tutorials can be pretty scary,” he grinned. “But I love them.”

But will tutorials—and with them, Oxbridge’s international standing—ride the wave of public cuts? “The tutorial system is absolutely wonderful,” says Phil Baty, deputy editor of the London Times Higher Education World University Rankings. “But it is extremely expensive. And the universities have really struggled to maintain it.”

Currently, university tuition in Britain is capped at $5,150. Since it costs far more to teach students one-on-one, Oxford and Cambridge have relied on teaching funds from the government. As well, says Baty, the schools subsidize the system, likely to the tune of $8,000 to $9,000 a year per student.

But come 2012, almost all of the public money for university teaching will be gone. To address the shortfall, the government will allow universities to raise fees—up to $14,000 in as-of-yet-unspecific “exceptional” circumstances. This amounts to a near tripling of tuition. But administrators say the tuition hikes may not be enough. According to Andrew Hamilton, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, it costs $25,000 a year to teach an undergrad at Oxford. “If we believe strongly that the tutorial system is the best way to nurture maturing minds,” says Hamilton, “we are going to have to find ways of making it more financially sustainable.”

Also hurting Oxbridge is the scrapping in 2009 of the Historic Buildings Fund, which was set up to dole out money to preserve the nation’s prized architecture, but has gone disproportionately to keeping Oxford and Cambridge’s buildings well kept. “With [the cut],” says Barclay, “died any acknowledgment, subtle or unsubtle, about the special nature of Oxford and Cambridge in public life in Britain.”

The irony of the precarious position that Oxbridge now finds itself in thanks to government cuts is not lost on critics. Many point out that 70 per cent of the British cabinet was educated at Oxbridge. Twenty per cent of the cabinet and 35 members of the House of Commons took Oxford’s famed philosophy, politics and economics degree, dubbed “the surest ticket to the top” by the BBC. (Graduates include British Prime Minister David Cameron, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.)

Of course, the tutorial system isn’t all that keeps Oxbridge afloat. But it helps. Its standing in the Times ranking, Baty says, is boosted by its unmatched student-faculty ratio and intense learning environment. It’s also one of the biggest draws for international students, at a time when Britain’s share is declining. Tim Hands, an Oxford headmaster, recently bemoaned: “There is no doubt that parents are increasingly interested in the prestige of an American university as an alternative to a British one. Now the chief barrier, that of cost, looks as though it may disappear.”

Still, some insist the cuts will actually be a step in the right direction: toward privatization. For years, administrators at the two schools have issued barely masked threats to break free from state control, particularly over the issue of tuition caps. “It is surely a mad world,” Oxford chancellor Lord Chris Patten has remarked, “in which parents and grandparents are prepared to shell out tens of thousands of pounds to put their children through private schools to get them into universities, and then object to paying a tuition fee of more than [$4,500] when they are here.” Even some students are sympathetic. One Oxford graduate student who preferred not to be named was adamant: “If students don’t believe their education is worth more than a few thousand pounds, they should think about what they’re doing at university.”

The crux of the problem, says Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, is that Britain has struck an unhappy marriage between state control and market control of higher education. Until 1998, education in Britain was free. Since then, the state has held tuition artificially low. And yet, Britain’s public spending on higher education ranks near the bottom of OECD countries: 0.7 per cent of GDP in 2007, compared to 3.1 per cent in the U.S. and 2.6 per cent in Canada. The result is that top schools must rely heavily on philanthropic donations to maintain their education standards: a system that may not be sustainable.

The government also limits the number of students that universities can accept—largely because every undergraduate, regardless of family income, is entitled to state-subsidized loans. Those loans, says Claire Callender, professor of higher education at University College London, cost the government around £30 for every £100 borrowed. So, in effect, the government must be prepared for all students—even, Callender says, “the kids of millionaires”—to draw on government aid.

The new system may help correct these long-standing ills. Top schools like Oxbridge, which will likely command the maximum $14,000, might see some financial gain. And though tuition will increase for most, children from the lowest-earning families may actually see theirs go down, as subsidies for the poorest students are expanded.

But for Cambridge’s Tom, this higher education experiment is not worth the risk. “I’m afraid,” he says, “that my discipline, in 10 years’ time, will be little more than a finishing school for the rich.” But how best to decide what’s fair? That debate, wrote the Telegraph’s Neil O’Brien last month, sounds like the kind worthy of a “chin-stroking philosophy tutorial at Oxbridge.”

When all teachers are paid the same, hard work isn’t worth it

There is virtually no other profession in Canada whereby termination due to incompetence is so rarely handed down.

In recent years, the annual average of termination due to poor performance for teachers was just 0.002 per cent Ontario, and zero in many major city boards across the country. Unsurprisingly, teachers’ unions are some of the strongest unions in Canada and besides job security, most express unequivocal support for the pay-for-seniority type wage model. So when British Columbia Liberal leadership candidate Kevin Falcon proposed the idea of merit pay for educators, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation—predictably—was not in favour.

But there is support for the proposition, and it’s easy to see why. The remarkable security enjoyed by teachers across the board and rewards based on amount of time served (not quality of time served) in no way motivates improved performance. Of course, there are teachers who take it upon themselves to seek new challenges and improve their methods of teaching, but those who don’t are rewarded just the same. The logic is backwards for a society that is supposedly meritocratic. When those who strive for excellence and those who just coast along are rewarded just the same, it sends the message that hard work really isn’t worth the effort. That is, unless we find some new form of trade involving intrinsic worth.

The obvious problem with merit pay lies in its application. Is there really a valid way to measure merit? It’s easier in some professions—real estate, for example. But it’s more difficult to measure the efficacy of teaching without employing some sort of standardized testing. These tests are limited still in that students’ scores are often based on a variety of factors (parental involvement, community values, socio-economic status, etc.) and do not necessarily reflect the instructor’s ability to teach the material. The idea is further complicated when you consider that teachers—some of them, at least—are exceptional not for their ability to break down the complexities of learning logarithms, but for their roles as classroom mentors. One of my best teachers once told me that the lessons I’ll learn from taking a look around once in a while will surely outweigh anything I’ll pick up from a book. Of course, that sort of attitude won’t ensure the best standardized test results, but its impact is still valuable. Those sort of intangibles are practically immeasurable.

If Falcon was serious about his proposal (which, based on the amount of political pandering that’s gone on during this campaign, I’d say is doubtful), it would be worth running a pilot campaign in a few schools before overhauling the B.C. education system altogether. Testing should measure improvement in a single class over a single school year—say September to June to see how students have progressed—rather than comparing scores from across the province. And teachers should be assessed for their non-academic contributions to the classroom as well. Just like in other professions, exceptional teachers should be entitled to higher pay, but only if we can properly identify who the exceptional ones are.

Hollywood may be reading the Canadian icon but university students are not

Even nine years after his death, Mordecai Richler can’t seem to get a break.

Just one day after the local government in Richler’s old neighbourhood announced that they would not be naming anything after him, the Globe and Mail is reporting that his works aren’t being taught at Canadian universities.

Well, it’s not quite as black and white as the Globe makes it out to be, but it’s still concerning.

At Montreal’s Concordia University, a school which claims to take particular pride in the city that surrounds it, only one course has any Richler as required reading and that’s a religion course on Jewish literature, not an English class.

According to the Globe, students at Montreal’s other English-language university, McGill, are only reading one Richler book, The Street, in a course on urban writing.

Ironically, despite the almost complete lack of Richler works being taught at McGill, the university’s writer-in-residence program is named for Richler.

Several other universities and colleges are teaching his work, but they’re few and far between and when his work is taught it’s generally in classes where his exclusion would be almost impossible, like “The Worlding of Canadian Fiction Since 1967,” a class at the University of New Brunswick.

It’s hard to say what’s causing this lack of Richler in the classroom, although it does seem like his works were taught more often in the past, it may just be that he’s back in the public eye with a film based on his novel Barney’s Version arriving in theaters soon and the TV documentary on his life that premiered last week.

But while Richler is being taught in some Canadian and Jewish literature classes, Canadian universities don’t seem to be teaching his works anywhere else.

It’s not just Richler though. It’s been a while since I took a literature class (and I’ve never taken a Canadian literature class) but since high school — and quite probably earlier than that — the only Canadian writer I’ve read in an academic setting has been Margaret Atwood. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since the Globe reports that studies of Atwood’s work have received more research grants than those of any other Canadian author. There’s nothing wrong with this, Atwood is a great writer, but there should be room on the shelf for a little bit of Richler beside her.

Canada has had a vibrant literary community for decades, too bad you couldn’t tell from looking at academia.