The exploratory study focused on First Nation students and First Nation education counsellors within Ontario. Using an interpretative approach, the research sought to determine the relevance of the counsellors as a potentially influencing factor in the students’ post-secondary program choices. The ability of First Nation education counsellors to be influential is a consequence of their role since they administer Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSSP) funding. A report evaluating the program completed by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in 2005 found that many First Nation students would not have been able to achieve post-secondary educational levels without PSSSP support. Eight self-selected First Nation Education counsellors and twenty-nine First Nation post-secondary students participated in paper surveys, and five students and one counsellor agreed to complete a follow-up interview. The quantitative and qualitative results revealed differences in the perceptions of the two survey groups as to whether First Nation education counsellors influenced students’ post-secondary program choices. Students perceived themselves to be their greatest influence, while the counsellors felt their influence was greater once students made their program decisions, through encouragement and follow up support. The study raised questions regarding challenges faced by First Nation education counsellors to provide consistent academic, personal and cultural/social supports to their sponsored students. While the study suggested the role of First Nation education counsellors had evolved little from its original financial-administrative role and toward a more rounded offering including interpersonal, academic and cultural supports, in keeping with an educational decolonization process, counsellors face chronic program under funding and are under-staffed. To enhance First Nation students’ academic success, federal and provincial governments and First Nations are encouraged to further support First Nation education counsellors with greater training opportunities (expansion of the Ontario Native Education Counselling Association’s Native Counsellor Training Program), a higher ratio of counsellors to students, and support and promotion of their ability to provide interpersonal and academic counselling. The study challenged First Nation education counsellors to seek more opportunities to maintain consistent engagement with their students, especially with more autonomous or older students. First Nation students were also challenged to seek more from their counsellors than sponsorship.

Governments across the world rationalize interdisciplinarity as an effective strategy for answering complex problems of social importance, drawing on large investments of resources to technical and biomedical sectors. I have identified this rationale as part of specific discursive relations and subsequently troubled its dominance through an exploration of how it has been authorized, and how faculty and administrators negotiate subjectification in engineering and medicine where this discourse dominates. Neo-liberal approaches to knowledge-production are deconstructed and analyzed. An archive was assembled of key texts pertaining to interdisciplinarity including documents produced by the OECD, the Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments, the University of Toronto (UofT), academics and the popular press. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of these texts provided a specific historical context for interviews conducted with 20 faculty and administrators identified as interdisciplinary knowledge-makers. Subsequently, a situated analysis of how discourse is embodied and experienced was developed and applied to the whole archive. Four inter-related concepts were identified as making-up the popular discourse of interdisciplinarity: diversify-collaborate-innovate-integrate. According to this narrative, knowledge-makers are expected to diversify through collaboration in order to innovate and produce knowledge that is useful and marketable. From the discovery of insulin to the establishment of the MaRS discovery district, knowledge-making examples from UofT are analyzed to identify the social relations that make the idea possible that researchers should address problems of ‘relevance’. I argue that interdisciplined subjects are ‘facilitated’ to fulfill this popular narrative by management approaches that capitalize on intrinsic notions of ‘making-a-difference’. Concurrently, different narratives of interdisciplinarity are embodied and promoted as individuals negotiate ontological and epistemological issues in their daily practice. This research contributes to the refinement of Foucauldian discourse analysis, and informs scholarship on the effects of neoliberal approaches to knowledge-making and the professionalization projects of engineering and medicine.

Chinese higher education has achieved a remarkable expansion in recent years but few studies have examined the civic perceptions and civic participation of contemporary university students. This study aims to fill the gap in the existing literature by accomplishing four main goals: first, to investigate how students view citizenship, civic issues, and civil society; second, to examine how they participate in civic activities, both on and off campus; third, to understand how their civic attitudes and behaviours are being influenced by society, university and family, also by such factors as formal citizenship education curricula, informal educational experiences and the mass media; and fourth, to analyze the impact of higher education expansion on civil society in China. This study adopted a mixed methods approach, and combined findings from a large-scale national student survey across 12 universities and 34 face to face interviews conducted in 3 selected institutions among the 12 that were surveyed. The conceptual framework drew upon social capital theory and both ecological and cognitive psychological theories to generate two analytic frameworks for analyzing the quantitative and qualitative data. The major findings were: (1) university students demonstrated strong patriotism, and a serious commitment to social justice and civic participation, which was partly the result of the distinctive form of citizenship education they received in the Chinese context; (2) half of the survey participants were found to be inactive participants in civic activities, which showed a disconnect between their civic attitudes and civic behaviours; (3) higher socio-economic status (SES) was associated with more active civic participation; (4) the mass media, especially the Internet was found to have a profound impact on students’ civic perceptions; (5) interview participants in the three qualitative case institutions revealed distinctive patterns of civic engagement, which confirmed the importance of university environment, policy, history and culture on student civic participation and citizenship development. This study has made a significant contribution to the existing literature on citizenship issues in contemporary Chinese universities. It has also added to current knowledge on trends of civil society development and the democratization process in China, from the perspective of university students.

The potential of a broad enactive approach in education has yet to be realized. This thesis contributes to the development of a well-rounded enactive educational theory and practice. This thesis argues that a broad enactive perspective has the potential to challenge, reframe and reconfigure problems, issues and practices in education in ways that improve teaching, learning and research communities. It establishes that a broad enactive approach as a theory of embodied mind, a dynamic co-emergence theory, and a method of examining human experience helps to realize the meaning, scope, and potential of enactive education. It takes as its point of departure Dewey’s broad enactive philosophy of mind, cognition, embodiment, experience, and dynamic co-emergence. It shows, through an examination of an actual public classroom encounter, that a broad enactive approach has the potential to reconfigure responsibility, ethics and justice in education. It demonstrates using a case study of the enactment of impostor feelings in higher education how a broad enactive approach to education as the potential to reconfigure teaching, learning and research practices.

The purpose of this study was to explore how students with learning disabilities understood and experienced their transition from high school to postsecondary education. In-depth interviews with 7 graduates of Achievement School (pseudonym), a private high school for students with learning disabilities in the southwestern region of the United States, were conducted to elicit personal narratives of students’ transition experiences from high school to college. By doing so, findings contribute to a deeper understanding of students’ experiences and what allows students with learning disabilities to succeed in their transition to university or college. In addition, 4 parents and 4 high school staff members were interviewed for this study to provide a triangulated perspective on the experience studied. Few studies have collected and analyzed the perceptions and voices of students with learning disabilities as they transition to postsecondary education. This study provides insight towards bridging the gap in providing further insight into the students with learning disabilities’ experiences on their transition to college and the factors students’ feel have impeded or supported their success in this new environment. This study utilized a descriptive and phenomenological qualitative research methodology consisting of individual in-depth interviews with the students and member checks with informants, their parents, and staff members of the participants’ former high school. Suggestions will be made for future research as well as for practical application for future students as well as high school and postsecondary service providers.

Tradition and modernity are often viewed as strong yet opposing influences on the lives of Indian women living in Canada. In particular, the customs and religion of the homeland are assumed to conflict with the modern aspirations of these women. This study utilizes standpoint theory as a framework to question and push against this popular portrayal, and examines how Indian (Hindu) values influence, challenge and contribute to the educational and professional advancement of diasporic women. By analyzing qualitative interviews conducted with recently immigrated and second-generation Indian (Hindu) women, this study reveals that these women take on the role of an ideal amalgamation of Eastern and Western practices and navigate through their educational and professional choices in a manner that accommodates both. Traditional values and modernity are not always mutually exclusive, as evidenced by my participants who mobilize both in order to achieve particular sites of classed and ethnic empowerment.

Tradition and modernity are often viewed as strong yet opposing influences on the lives of Indian women living in Canada. In particular, the customs and religion of the homeland are assumed to conflict with the modern aspirations of these women. This study utilizes standpoint theory as a framework to question and push against this popular portrayal, and examines how Indian (Hindu) values influence, challenge and contribute to the educational and professional advancement of diasporic women. By analyzing qualitative interviews conducted with recently immigrated and second-generation Indian (Hindu) women, this study reveals that these women take on the role of an ideal amalgamation of Eastern and Western practices and navigate through their educational and professional choices in a manner that accommodates both. Traditional values and modernity are not always mutually exclusive, as evidenced by my participants who mobilize both in order to achieve particular sites of classed and ethnic empowerment.

This thesis examines the historical evolution of the credit transfer policy and its implications on the roles and interplay between colleges and universities. This in-depth analysis of credit transfer evaluates the establishment of College of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs) in the 1960s, to present day initiatives in place to create a system wide credit transfer system between colleges and universities. The theoretical framework is comprised of two major components: firstly, through an examination of policy tools used over the years, this thesis provides a basis to understand measures that have been employed to address the issue of credit transfer. Secondly, through the organization adaptation approach and resource dependency theory, the credit transfer discussion contextualizes the overall impact on the relationship between colleges and universities. The findings conclude that although higher educational institutions are proactively responding to credit transfer demands, the hierarchical structure between universities and colleges is still prevalent.

Ce mémoire vise à comprendre les enjeux sociaux qui ont animé le champ social de l’enseignement supérieur à l’étape de la formulation du projet de loi no 38 sur la gouvernance des universités et à mettre en évidence le rôle et l'influence des diverses catégories d'acteurs sociaux impliqués dans ces débats, chacun tentant d’imposer sa définition des enjeux en fonction de ses intérêts, de même que les facteurs explicatifs de cette influence (stratégies, ressources, etc.). Les débats qui ont eu lieu autour du projet de loi à l’étude ont été traité comme étant le produit d’un système d'action, lequel permet de classer ces débats selon une typologie des enjeux, correspondant chacun à trois niveaux de l’action sociale : enjeux fondamentaux, enjeux organisationnels et enjeux politiques. L’analyse des débats font état d’un rapport conflictuel entre les acteurs « externes » à l’université et les acteurs associés à la communauté universitaire dont l’objet est l’organisation et l’exercice du pouvoir entre les acteurs et les instances au sein des établissements universitaires. / This thesis aims to understand the social issues that have animated the social field of higher education at the formulation stage of Bill no. 38 on university governance. Also it aims to highlight the role and influence of various categories of social actors involved in these debates, each trying to impose its definition of issues according to their interests. The debates that took place around the bill are to be treated as the product of an action system, which presents these debates as a typology of issues, each corresponding to three levels of social action: fondamentals issues, organizational issues and political issues. The analysis of the debates indicate a conflictual relationship between the actors 'external' to the university and the actors involved in the academic community whose object is the organization and exercise of power between actors and bodies within academic institutions.

Canada, like other countries around the world, has health inequities. The literature on social accountability and responsibility urges medical schools to be grounded in the needs of communities to address health inequities. The Canadian professional and regulatory bodies promote the CanMEDS Competencies of which one, the Health Advocate Competency, speaks of addressing community issues. Yet medical schools face challenges actualizing social responsibility and teaching the Health Advocate Competency. Therefore it is important to understand how the teaching of health advocacy and social responsibility is incorporated into the undergraduate curricula of self-defined socially responsible medical schools in Canada. In this study, mixed methods were used beginning with a semi-structured questionnaire administered to undergraduate Course Directors at two medical schools in Canada with a response rate of 74% (n=60). This was followed by a series of open-ended interviews with eleven equity leaders to bring their perspective into the data collection and establish knowledge about frontline intersectional equity work. The major theoretical lens encircling this work was intersectionality which examines historical oppression and how the intersection of gender, race, and class compound health inequities. Questionnaire results made it clear that biomedical ideology and the CanMEDS Medical Expert Competency were privileged in the undergraduate curriculum at the expense of other knowledge such as health advocacy and social responsibility. The objective biomedical discourse ignores or marginalizes important social influences on health which are highlighted by using an intersectional lens. The semi-structured interviews provided rich data about working in an intersectional equity framework highlighting the impact of the intersections of race, gender, class and other identities on health inequities. These interviews also demonstrate the importance of health advocacy in improving health care outcomes and addressing social responsibility. Incorporating intersectionality into previously accepted assessment tools for physicians adds an important dimension to the health care encounter. Explicitly embedding social responsibility and health advocacy in the medical school mission and curriculum is essential to their acceptance. A series of supporting recommendations are offered.