More Canadian colleges are turning into universities

Many local Canadians teenagers have been missing out on taking their education further because universities are located far away from their hometowns. In response to this, a recent trend among Canadian colleges is that they are slowly transitioning into universities.

On February 22, Minister of Advanced Education Marlin Schmidt announced that Grande Prairie Regional College (GPRC) had been approved for degree-granting status, with a view to becoming a university. On March 1, Premier Rachel Notley appeared at an event to announce that Red Deer College (RDC) also had been approved to grant its own degrees. That same day, the education minister again went before the cameras to confirm that the Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) had achieved university status.

The college-to-university transition is a recurring phenomenon in Canada. Two other Alberta colleges made a similar transition less than a decade ago, while British Columbia saw five post-secondary institutions (three university-colleges and two colleges) become universities back in 2008.

Like Red Deer, the City of Grande Prairie and its surrounding region, some 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, has experienced an exodus of residents seeking university-level education.

In Calgary, ACAD has been granting degrees for more than 20 years and recently graduated its first cohort of master’s students. The institution has essentially operated as a university in all but name for decades.

The Yukon government approved Yukon College’s request to grant degrees and change its name after more than 40 years of lobbying all levels of government. The plan is to fully transition to Yukon University by 2020. The team at Yukon College wants a new kind of system, one that suits a “hybrid university” with a range of trades, vocational, degree, postgraduate and applied research programs

Visit this website page to learn more:

www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/across-canada-more-colleges-are-transitioning-to-universities/

Comic books are great literacy tools for young people

Comic books have been a popular form of literary entertainment for decades. For many it has been seen as just that – entertainment. Superheroes battling the bad guys, promoting good versus evil, and giving children and adults alike an escape from reality.

But comic books, or graphic novels as they are now referred to, go much deeper than colourful graphics and witty dialogue. They promote literacy.

In fact, comics have been a literary tool in some schools dating back to the 1830’s. “There is a history of comics and literacy that dates back at least 180 years,” said Ryerson University English Department Chair Andrew O’Malley, who uses comics as part of the curriculum in his English classes.

“There is a Swiss educator by the name of Rodolphe Topffer who in the 1830’s produced a series of books in the form of comic strips with the now familiar sequential panels with text underneath them. They were kind of satirical and comical but he did use them in school where he was headmaster to help with literacy,” he said.

“It was really in the 90’s with the boom of the graphic novel that there was a kind of widespread popular recognition that there was a literary and artistic quality to these materials … Really the watershed moment was Art Spiegelman’s Maus that went on to win the Pulitzer, and since then, they have gained greater and greater legitimacy … They are increasingly being used in schools now.”

Comic books are said to be a very sophisticated form of literature. As O’Malley explains, the pictures and the text do not match perfectly. In other words, the text does not explain the image and the images do not supplement the text.

Reading comics actually requires your brain to multi-task – interpreting both the image and the text. “There is actually a very sophisticated kind of interaction going on. So comic reading requires pretty advanced decoding,” O’Malley says.

Visit this website page to learn more:

https://globalnews.ca/news/4189937/comic-books-education/

Report: UK schoolchildren held back by limited vocabulary

An increasing number of teachers in the UK are seeing large numbers of children who have a limited vocabulary range and they fear this will hold them back educationally and socially. A survey of 1,300 primary and secondary school teachers across the UK found that more than 60% saw increasing occurrence of underdeveloped vocabulary among pupils of all ages.

This may lead to lower self-esteem, negative behaviour and in some cases greater difficulties in making friends.

The report, commissioned by the Oxford University Press, found the word gap for many pupils remained “stubbornly high” at secondary schools, where teachers say they have less time and fewer resources to tackle the problem.

Secondary school teachers said that vocabulary deficiency held back pupils’ progress not just in English but also across a range of subjects, including history and geography.

Those with a low vocabulary were also less likely to do well in national tests such as GCSEs, struggling to understand instructions and questions included in papers.

A third of secondary school teachers reported a widening vocabulary gap between the first and last years of secondary school. The majority of teachers surveyed blamed declining numbers of children reading for pleasure for shrinking vocabularies, especially among older pupils.

Visit these website pages to learn more: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/19/teachers-in-uk-report-growing-vocabulary-deficiency