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The increasing speed of societal, environmental, technological, and workplace changes brings into sharper focus the question of how people shape and learn from transitions, such as so-called 'skilled migration'. Taking a doing transitions and doing migration perspective, I assert that transitions and migration do not simply exist but are constituted relationally through social practices and accompanied by learning processes. This paper reports findings from qualitative research into the question of how people learn and transform their understandings of (life)time when moving to a new country and seeking entry into the labour market. The study used the documentary method to analyse data from 20 biographical-narrative interviews with people who moved to Canada as adults. Findings indicate different modes of dealing with shifts in temporal contexts during migration as decompressing lifetime, losing time, and going with the flow. These modes are associated with positive transformative learning, negative transformative learning, and learning through participation in practices. This study has implications for theorising learning during life course transitions as a socially embedded process. It also points to the need for differentiated support as individuals seek to enter new labour markets or make career changes in the context of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current heightened sensitivity around history, colonisation and the aftermath of the socio-political and cultural ethos of the world can create in many people the fear of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. This fear can affect the ability to imagine and play in certain learning settings, especially in devising performances, socially engaged theatre, and other arts-based explorations. However, what happens when participants choose not to engage due to the abovementioned fears? This paper considers the differing ways in which fear of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation deterred students from learning while teaching in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A social accountability mandate for Canadian medical schools formally emerged in Canada with changes to accreditation standards in 2015. However, how social accountability is defined and operationalized within medical schools has transpired independently. Key enablers of social accountability in Canadian medical schools have been largely unexplored. This paper is the first of a two part series that seeks to explore drivers of social accountability in a sample of Canadian medical schools. Nine key drivers of social accountability emerged from the data including a unified vision, committed leadership, accreditation standards, champions of social accountability, authentic community engagement, community-based learning opportunities, a supportive organizational and governance structure, diversity within medical schools, and measurement of progress and outcomes. This is the first study of its kind to examine what is driving social accountability across Canadian medical schools. An appreciative inquiry approach highlights areas of progress for future work to focus and build upon. This paper presents the findings from part one of the study – exploring the themes emerging from key informant interviews with senior leaders. A second paper will dive into the broader perspectives of faculty, staff and students, to explore more fully the varying perspectives of social accountability within colleges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two adult educator professors share reflections on their dialogues, spanning 15 years, focusing on their journey of work and learning at a research-intensive university. Authors refer to intrinsic principles, values, and a shared commitment to contributing to a community shaped and influenced by an intentional focus on 'relationality' in support of individual and collective well-being. By reflecting on dialogues, past and ongoing, an enduring commitment to co-creating learning spaces sustained by care, compassion, and positive regard for colleagues and students is realized. Authors advance a commitment to community as essential to support work and learning spaces that thrive. This discourse is located in the current neoliberal milieu where a focus on performance germane to teaching, securing research funding, scholarship productivity, and compliance pervades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is general consensus that teaching and learning centres have a positive impact on promoting and supporting a culture that values teaching and learning, yet there is limited evidence on how centres evaluate their work. For this purpose, a survey was developed and administered to the directors of 88 Canadian centres; 46 of which completed the survey. In this paper, we share centres’ approaches to evaluation that emerged from the survey findings and the artifact analysis. By raising awareness of evaluation approaches, we are better positioned to identify further opportunities to develop a more systematic and coherent approach to evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing student learning in ways that offer students, institutions and systems with sound information is a considerable challenge for higher education. Despite demonstrable progress, a disconnect remains between methods used for assessing learning, improvement and accountability. This muddled situation is illustrated through a review of contemporary practice in the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and New Zealand. To advance research and practice, this paper contributes a structured set of criteria that practitioners can use to evaluate whether an assessment functions effectively across different levels of practice. These technical and practical criteria touch on issues such as sampling, the viability of aggregation, reporting and cost-benefit considerations. The paper tests these criteria by considering their capacity to drive multi-level improvement in education quality. It is contended that the criteria provide perspective and structure for reconciling the quantitative assessment of higher education quality at different levels of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If I lose my key in Canada, for instance, and I search for it in the United Kingdom, how long will I take to find it? This paper argues that problems in education are caused by non-professional teachers who are employed when trained teachers move in search of promotion friendly activities or financially rewarding duties. This shift of focus means that policy makers in education act without adequate professional guidance. The problems in education, therefore, result from demands made on mainstream education based on misconceptions about what education can offer. It is argued that the implementation of e-learning in education faces the risk of developing on the basis of unproven theories. This scenario increasingly sees the replacement of formal education activities in institutions of learning with non-formal and informal education practices. Given that the contents and influences of non-formal and informal education are not under the control of the teacher, the experiences that learners bring to education settings are increasingly difficult to manage. The paper proposes that by integrating e-learning in teacher education and rewarding ‘good teaching’, there is a potential for a successful e-learning revolution in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a critical feminist theoretical framework is used to explore the challenges of creating democratic learning spaces that will foster active and inclusive citizenship for women. Three democratic considerations are addressed to assess how adult educators can create more inclusive opportunities for lifelong education for women. The first consideration is the need for a careful examination of structural inequalities that create disadvantages for women in pursuing lifelong education. The second consideration is the need to create a broader and more gender inclusive understanding of the scope of lifelong learning possibilities, so that women's learning experiences are not devalued. The third consideration explores how to take up gender as a complex variable within the broader discourse of inclusion. This paper is informed by preliminary results from a current SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) study on lifelong learning trajectories for women in Canada and a CCL (Canadian Council on Learning) study on active citizenship for women in Nova Scotia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second paper of this two part series on Key Elements of Interprofessional Education (IPE), we highlight factors for success in IPE based on a systematic literature review conducted for Health Canada in its “Interprofessional Education for Patient Centred Practice” (IECPCP) initiative in Canada (Oandasan et al., 2004). The paper initially discusses micro (individual level) meso (institutional/organizational level) and macro (socio-cultural and political level) factors that can influence the success of an IPE initiative. The discussion provides the infrastructure for the introduction of a proposed framework for educators to utilize in the planning and implementation of an IPE program to enhance a learner's opportunity to become a collaborative practitioner. The paper also discusses key issues related to the evaluation of IPE and its varied outcomes. Lastly, it gives the reader suggestions of outcome measurements that can be used within the proposed IPE framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an experiment designed to evaluate an attempt to improve the effectiveness of an existing L2 idiom-learning tool. In this tool, learners are helped to associate the abstract, idiomatic meaning of expressions such asjump the gun(act too soon) with their original, concrete meaning (e.g. associatingjump the gunwith the scene of a track athlete who starts running before the starting pistol is fired). This association lends concreteness to target lexis, which is known to facilitate learning (Paivio, A., & Desrochers, A. (1979). Effects of an imagery mnemonic on second language recall and comprehension.Canadian Journal of Psychology, 33, 17–28). It is a mental operation that orients the learner first and foremost to the semantic dimension of the expression, however. It does not as such engage the learner with formal properties of the expression, such as its orthography. In an effort to stimulate the latter engagement, a copy exercise was incorporated in the learning procedure. The merit of this additional exercise was evaluated by having one group of students (N= 21) study 25 idioms according to the new procedure, while a comparison group (N= 21) was given an additional meaning-oriented task instead. Recall by the two groups was compared immediately and two weeks after the treatment by means of a gap-fill test. The copy exercise was not found to promote better recall, a result we discuss with reference to levels of processing theory (Lockhart, R.S., & Craik, F.I.G. (1990). Levels of processing: A retrospective commentary on a framework for memory research.Canadian Journal of Psychology, 44, 87–112). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: Changing the current geographical maldistribution of the medical workforce is important for global health. Research regarding programs that train doctors for work with disadvantaged, rural populations is needed. This paper explores one approach of remote supervision of registrars in isolated rural practice. Researching how learning occurs without on-site supervision may also reveal other key elements of postgraduate education. Methods: Thematic analysis of in-depth interviews exploring 11 respondents’ experiences of learning via remote supervision. Results: Remote supervision created distinctive learning environments. Respondents’ attributes interacted with external supports to influence whether and how their learning was promoted or impeded. Registrars with clinical and/or life experience, who were insightful and motivated to direct their learning, turned the challenges of isolated practice into opportunities that accelerated their professional development. Discussion: Remote supervision was not necessarily problematic but instead provided rich learning for doctors training in and for the context where they were needed. Registrars learnt through clinical responsibility for defined populations and longitudinal, supportive supervisory relationships. Responsibility and continuity may be as important as supervisory proximity for experienced registrars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reflection is generally acknowledged as an important part of teacher education and a central activity in teacher development. The close connection between reflection and identity development has been noted in literature on teacher education. This paper will focus on the interplay among the concepts of reflection, identity and the ideal, and will report the results of a pilot study which attempted to elicit from student teachers their reflections on an ideal identity for their future lives as teachers. The implications of such reflection for teacher education programmes will be indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is substantial evidence that formal educational attainments increasingly exceed the educational job requirements of the employed labour force in many advanced market economies - a phenomenon variously termed 'underemployment', 'underutilisation', or 'overqualification'. Conversely, both experiential learning and workplace case studies suggest that workers continually negotiate such 'gaps'. This paper summarises results of recent national labour force surveys and workplace case studies in Canada to further assess the relations between workers and their jobs. Underemployment is found to be increasing among all types of employees. Underemployment is found to decline with work experience but persists in virtually all categories of employees - most notably service and industrial working classes and among non-white immigrant workers. Case studies of teachers, computer programmers, clerical workers, autoworkers and disabled workers demonstrate how underemployed workers as well as others engage in continual learning and try to reshape their jobs. Implications of these findings are identified in terms of the incompatibility of narrow economic market objectives with wider social objectives of democratic education, and of the systemic limits of appeals for still greater formal educational efforts by already highly educated and continually learning labour forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The (un)reality of open/porous borders is starkly represented/manifested in the experiences of immigrant women in lifelong learning contexts. While globalization effectively destroys some borders, it simultaneously creates new ones. State institutions respond to global reconfigurations of borders at local levels by establishing policies that exclude women from working in their fields unless they participate in re-education programs. At the same time the global competition among states within the discourses of the knowledge economy for attracting 'the best and the brightest' entice women to leave (or the effects of Western imperialism force them to flee) their homes with the promise of economic wellbeing or physical safety. Within this environment, lifelong learning can (dangerously) serve to privilege some forms of learning, knowledge and citizenship while devaluing others. This paper draws on research conducted between 2004 and 2006 in two immigrant service organizations. We explore possibilities for developing policies and practices that redress symbolic and cultural injustices with respect to immigrant women in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experiences of new graduate supervisors, individuals who have just moved as it were from one side of 'the table' to the other. We describe how their learning to 'do supervision' relates to their understanding of academic work and how they make sense of the transition from doctoral student, someone supervised, to someone supervising, how they connect the past to the present (and future). The particular contribution is the examination of new academics' experience of supervision within the broader context of undertaking to establish oneself as an academic. This study is part of a broad research programme in Canada that investigates the experiences of doctoral students and the academic staff who support them and then works collaboratively with those in the units in which we are collecting data to ensure the findings can inform and support doctoral policies and pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking broadly sociocultural or sociolinguistic perspectives, the five contributions to this special issue investigate various aspects of the co-construction of knowledge, as this is manifested in K-16 classrooms in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While the authors of these papers address different educational settings, student populations, and curricular content, what unites them is their concern to better understand the cumulative, multidimensional nature of learning and teaching and the ways in which this is enacted in action and discourse across different spaces and over different scales of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews literacy learning conducted in two laboratory preschools in Hong Kong and Canada, and examines the link between cultural values and educational practices. Both preschools maintain that a constructivist view of child learning underpins their practice. However, the author's experience in these two settings illustrates how similarities and differences are identified in the scope, focus, implementation strategies and learning outcomes of the activities observed. Reasons for these findings are explored from the perspectives of cultural values and societal beliefs in education of the East and the West, and how the constructivist ideology is espoused in these settings. Implications of this cross-cultural comparison on the issue of 'best practice' in early childhood education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuing professional development has been identified as an important tool for advancing the competence of social workers, yet outcomes of professional development are conventionally evaluated using methods that cannot provide trustworthy information about program effectiveness. This paper suggests that innovations in social research can be applied to strengthen the evaluation of educational outcomes from continuing professional development. The benefits of designing a mixed-method evaluation of educational interventions are explored by reviewing the experience of implementing a cultural competence continuing professional development workshop series in Toronto, Canada. Review of the process demonstrates that the combination of methods results in a richer data set that can answer questions about both the process of the learning experience, and the effect that training has on professional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the essential practices and conditions for fostering transformative learning using the Canadian Human Rights Foundation's International Human Rights Training Program as a case study. It suggests that the program's participants challenge their own values and assumptions about human rights, their work and their society through critical reflection. Consequently, it argues that if human rights educators are to contribute to the transformative education of others, it is necessary for them to understand the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the learning process associated with human rights education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responds to comments made to the author's paper the local uses of international tests in Canada. Version of modern mathematics; Transparency in educational data that describes teaching and learning; Curriculum change.

Although the health care community expects its members to make effective presentations, presentation strategies are seldom explicitly taught.Those who do attempt to systematically teach or learn these skills soon realize that 'how to' guides for making effective presentations contain useful, but not sufficient, information. To become an effective presenter, it is necessary to understand not only the generic strategies that characterize effective presentations, but also the context-specific presentation strategies of a particular practice community.The framework for making effective presentations proposed in this paper is grounded in the knowledge of how experts acquire and use strategy knowledge, and takes into account not only the 'how to' of making presentations, but the circumstances and belief systems that determine effective presentation strategies in varying contexts.The framework is designed to make presentation strategy knowledge more transparent, and to permit presenters to learn from every presentation they give and attend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]