Contributions to Discrete Mathematics, Vol. 14 No. 1 (2019)

Contributions to Discrete Mathematics, Vol. 14 No. 1 (2019)

Graduate supervisors need ongoing educational development to enhance and develop their supervisory skills. From new supervisors to the experienced ones, faculty members all benefit from gathering to discuss and exchange their experiences and supervision practices. Increasingly, research is focusing on the study of best practices for graduate supervision given the need to enhance the student/supervisor relationship and students’ satisfaction with the quality of supervision. Offering educational development opportunities for graduate supervisors is complicated and needs...

This paper reviews the idea of threshold concepts in the context of conceptual change processes students experience at the cognitive and social dimensions of learning. Literature suggests the role of students’ ontological views in the development of their prior conceptions, which could be alternative to scientifically accepted ideas. It is proposed that students may be able to negotiate such troublesome concepts in a productive way as they engage in the meaning-making process with peers. Moreover,...

Alberta Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 68 No. 4 (2022): Winter

With prevailing global neoliberal ideology, teachers and teacher unions must respond to market-driven governmental policies intended to undermine public education. In Saskatchewan, Canada, teacher activists feel compelled to both counter neoliberal discourses and proactively advocate for equitable, high-quality public education. To explore acts of resistance, semi-structured interviews with four teacher activists were employed to understand how teachers enact advocacy within their union and through grassroots activism. Harding et al.’s (2018) framework of alliances, assemblages, and...

This paper reports on how we developed a Writing Commons to support graduate student needs within our faculty. Graduate writers often require more concentrated and specific support than traditional support sources (e.g., writing centres, supervisors) can provide. We argue that local writing support spaces, like a Writing Commons, can meet these needs for graduate writers by opening a flexible, student-centric space for both writing support and time to write. We detail how faculties can go...

Students’ ability to evaluate arguments is significant in democratic societies. Therefore, researchers argue that it is important to understand and facilitate students’ argument evaluation skills. Most research on students’ argument evaluation focuses on final products and outcomes instead of students’ decision-making processes. Thus, how students evaluate arguments constructed by others has not been fully clear to researchers and educators. This qualitative case study aimed to understand the process of students’ argument evaluation by exploring the...

Publication, if successful, is exhilarating! Aspiring academic scholars recognize the contribution that peer-reviewed publications make to their careers. It identifies their engagement with their discipline. For students, the benefits of publishing a paper include bolstering their levels of confidence and knowledge and demonstrating to them how they can contribute to their chosen profession. However, inexperience can cause trepidations of the unknown or negative emotions when the writing and publication process goes amiss (Devitt, Coad, &...

In 2016, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars came together to imagine a better world through a bold approach to education at the Werklund School of Education. This imagining took the form of a newly designed graduate pathway program which focused on meaningfully and actively responding to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) (2015) 94 Calls to Action. Central to the design of our program is the inclusion of a capstone service-learning project that...

Mentorship has been proposed as a key process for preparing doctoral students as effective educators. However, few models have been described in-depth. To address this challenge, four social work doctoral graduates and one senior faculty member shared their insights drawing on their study on collaborative teaching mentorship, reflecting on their mentorship experiences and inviting feedback from the conference audience in the Conversation Café forum. The resultant discussion supported findings from our research and reinforced that...

Communities of practice (CoP) are rich learning spaces that support knowledge creation, social engagement and practice improvement. In some university settings, there is a buoyant interest in creating and supporting interdisciplinary knowledge and practice. The purpose of the study was to apply an action research approach to explore the emergence of interdisciplinary communities of practice in a university context and to reflect on the practice of convening a CoP. How do communities of practice emerge...

Mental health and wellness is a concern, not only for students, but for instructors in higher education as well. Course design can have a positive or negative impact on both student and instructor wellness, especially around stress and anxiety with assessments, workload, and due dates. Factors of course design such as policies and values, academic expectations, learning environment and learning experiences, student assessment, and reflection and resilience can play an important role in supporting wellness....

Reviewed by Nancy Chick, University Chair in Teaching and Learning, Academic Director of the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, and Teaching Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Calgary AB, CANADA.

The visualization of chemical compounds in three-dimensions is a foundational skill in the study and practice of chemistry and related fields, and one which has the potential to be supported by interaction with virtual models. Here, we present a collaborative learning activity piloted in first-year chemistry which investigates if inquiry-driven interactive technology can contribute meaningfully to student conversations around this topic, and how students’ conversations and practices may shift when driven by feedback from an...