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Modeling Courtesy: Thoughts about Campus Controversy and Maya Angelou
[social_share/] [social-bio] I’m reflecting on recent controversies over change of several kinds in my own campus community and finding myself slowly recovering perspective as time passes. (Although, I must say dear Educatus readers, that I remain astounded and saddened at the sudden loss of senior leaders at the University of Saskatchewan.) Time marches on and this week, I happened upon an excerpt from an interview Evan Solomon of CBC conducted with the late Maya Angelou in 2008. Her call for courtesy during that interview has me lamenting last week’s occasions of name calling, trashing of character, and even graffiti to a historical building. On the upside, Maya Angelou’s words have…
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What? A Menu of Assessment Options?
[social_share/] [social-bio] I have recently come upon a few interesting ideas about the conditions we create for assessment in higher education, especially with respect to deterring academic dishonesty. Standing out to me right now is a 2013 book I’ve been reading by James Lang titled “Cheating Lessons.” This book provides inspiration, encouragement, and practical advice to teachers in higher education. Lang’s premise is that cheating is an inappropriate response by students to environments that convey an emphasis on performance within the context of extremely high stakes and where extrinsic motivators overpower the “intrinsic joy or utility of the task itself” (p. 30). Lang points his readers to an innovative assessment…
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Got the Group Project Blues?
[social_share/] [social-bio] Last week I gave my students back their group project assignments. They actually did quite a superb job, across the board. I asked them to provide me with comments on their own contribution, using a rubric I developed that was my adaptation and a shorter version of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) “teamwork” rubric that can be found at http://www.aacu.org/VALUE/rubrics/. And, then I also left it open if they wanted to share any comments with me about the teamwork demonstrated in their group. I knew because of some individual requests for guidance that most of the groups had encountered some conflict or difficulty and a…
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Experiencing and Embracing Controversy in the Classroom
[social_share/] [social-bio] Students in the leadership classes I have taught report general personal discomfort with conflict. They also report enjoying (and learning from) engaging classroom discussions. Providing students with a debating experience in class responds to both quite nicely. My post today is about a teaching strategy I have successfully used twice now, called “structured controversy.” Structured controversy is ultimately an active learning activity where small teams of students (3 or 4) prepare for and then argue different sides of the same issue with different opponents in a rotating cycle. Groups each take a turn arguing the affirmative and the negative, but arguing against a different group each time. Needless…
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Turkey Dinner Causes University Student Career Planning! What’s the relationship?
[social_share/] [social-bio] A career counsellor once told me that appointment requests by first year university students increase dramatically after the Thanksgiving weekend. She knew from talking with many of these students, that it had been conversations with parents that weekend that had led to their making of appointments. Students (and parents of students) care deeply about their future and finding fulfilling and interesting career paths. While different degree programs make differing claims about achieving job preparation goals, students in all programs are right and wise to be anticipating their futures. Rarely, however, will the first six weeks of the first year answer many questions for new students—a fact that may…
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How’s the View? Four Lenses for Looking at Your Curriculum
[social_share/] [social-bio] While paging through a recent addition to our in-house library at the GMCTE by Blackmore and Kandiko, I encountered a reference that I find quite helpful for understanding why it is important to view curricula from different perspectives. The work referenced is by Basil Bernstein who was a sociology of education scholar in the UK, until his passing in 2000. Bernstein suggested that the curriculum can be viewed through four lenses. I frame these first in the form of questions curriculum review committees can ask themselves and then add Bernstein’s terminology below. With respect to our curriculum…. ….what do we say we will do? This is the “planned…
- Academic Integrity, Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, General, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, Program Evaluation
The Academic Honesty Bonus: Another Advantage of an Aligned Curriculum
[social-bio] In my role as a Curriculum Development Specialist, I get to talk with faculty about their programs and the many reasons to examine and renew curricula in higher education. In recent months, another advantage to an aligned curriculum has come to mind for me: academic honesty. I posit that the three following relationships hold generally true, and promote academic honesty among students. When faculty alert students to the progressive nature of the curriculum and convey to students how what they are learning now prepares them for, not only life after graduation but for future courses, students can better recognize the benefit of deep learning. For example, students can come…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Moral Agent
[social-bio] This is the final post in a series of four about metaphors revealed in students’ discussions of academic honesty and dishonesty. The four metaphors presented in this series do not represent mutually exclusive understandings and can overlap in their meanings. Not all students in my study expressed the same meanings or, if they did, did not express them in the same way. As McMillan and Cheney (1996) acknowledged, it can seem drastic to ascribe such power to metaphors but we rely so heavily on them that we often overlook their “powerful and practical role in our discourse” and that there is a “tendency to become what we say we…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Trainee
[social-bio] This is the third in a series of four posts about the ways students positioned themselves when discussing matters of academic honesty and dishonesty in my doctoral study. The metaphor of trainee described below, could also be conceived as the student as investor in or consumer of higher education. The overarching idea I gleaned is the student viewpoint that the desired outcome of a university education is gainful employment, where coursework is merely a means to that end, education an investment in the future, and enrolment in university a contractual relationship with an educational service provider. The Student as Trainee “This class that I’m taking is not relevant to…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Competitor
[social-bio] This is the second in a series of four posts where I present the metaphors I recognized as being in use in students’ discussions in my doctoral study of students’ understandings of academic honesty and dishonesty. These metaphors can be treated as lenses students appeared to use to see themselves in the university, to navigate their relation to others, and to interpret events. The Student as Competitor “It’s [good grades] like a carrot dangling in front of you. And everybody’s at a race and whether or not your carrot is big enough will tell you how far you’ll go.” “But you try to find every possible way,…