Amphitheatre and Tower

The original Master Plan of 1964 called for the campus to stretch out 1 1/4 miles across the escarpment with arts buildings west of the tower and science buildings to the east. This plan laid out the development of Brock for the next 10 or 11 years by which time enrollment was expected to be near 8000 students. Pictured here is the tower and behind it, in the lower left portion of the picture, the planned outdoor amphitheatre. This view is from the edge of the escarpment facing southward or southeast.

Academic advising, eh : a profile of undergraduate academic advising at Ontario universities

Despite its importance to postsecondary students' success, there is little known about academic advisement in Canada. Academic advising can be a very intensive and demanding job, yet it is not well understood what duties or student populations of advising make it so. On a practical level, this study sought to learn more about academic advisement in Ontario universities and provide a general overview of who advisors are and what they do. This study also investigated academic advising duties and time allocation for these responsibilities in an attempt to relate theory to practice incorporating Vilfredo Pareto's theoretical underpinnings to confirm or negate the applicability of the Pareto Principle in relationship to time utilization by advisors. Essentially this study sought to discover which students require the greatest advisement time and effort, and how advisors could apply these findings to their work. Academic advising professionals in Ontario universities were asked to complete a researcher-designed electronic survey. Quantitative data from the responses were analyzed to describe generalized features of academic advising at Ontario universities. Discussion and implications for practice will prompt advisors and institutions using the results of this study to measure themselves against a provincial assessment. Advisors' awareness of time allocation to different student groups can help focus attention where new strategies are needed to maximize time and efforts. This study found that caseload and time spent with student populations were proportional. Regular undergraduate students accounted for the greatest amount of caseload and time followed by working with students struggling academically. This study highlights the need for further evaluation, education, and research in academic advising in Canadian higher education.

Aboriginal women in education : Honouring our experiences a vision of access to and success within the university

This thesis explores Aboriginal women's access to and success within universities through an examination of Aboriginal women's educational narratives, along with input from key service providers from both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal community. Implemented through the Wildfire Research Method, participants engaged in a consensusbased vision of accessible education that honours the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical elements necessary for the success of Aboriginal women in university. This study positions Aboriginal women as agents of social change by allowing them to define their own needs and offer viable solutions to those needs. Further, it connects service providers from the many disconnected sectors that implicate Aboriginal women's education access. The realities of Aboriginal women are contextualized through historical, sociocultural, and political analyses, revealing the need for a decolonizing educational approach. This fosters a shift away from a deficit model toward a cultural and linguistic assets based approach that emphasizes the need for strong cultural identity formation. Participants revealed academic, cultural, and linguistic barriers and offered clear educational specifications for responsive and culturally relevant programming that will assist Aboriginal women in developing and maintaining strong cultural identities. Findings reveal the need for curriculum that focuses on decolonizing and reclaiming Aboriginal women's identities, and program outcomes that encourage balance between two worldviews-traditional and academic-through the application of cultural traditions to modern contexts, along with programming that responds to the immediate needs of Aboriginal women such as childcare, housing, and funding, and provide an opportunity for universities and educators to engage in responsive and culturally grounded educational approaches.

University Faculty Members’ Understanding of Their Role: Identity, Power, and Silence

This qualitative study was conducted to explore tenured faculty members’ understandings of their roles as professors. Tenure is an institutional means to enact academic freedom, which allows tenured faculty members to investigate topics of their choosing free from external influence. Academic freedom also enables faculty members to be public intellectuals who shape and critique social policies and make knowledge assertions. In effect, the faculty members are institutionally protected to speak truth to power. Purposeful sampling of 9 participants from 2 universities yielded 3 major themes: professorial identity (shaped by such factors as career stage, university culture, and faculty affiliation), professorial power (powers that participants experienced as well as the ways in which they exercised power), and professorial silencing (as a response to fiscal realities coupled with numerous governance issues). While participants were cognizant of the powers that affected their freedoms, they were less aware of the ways in which their position afforded them powers. Subtle but more potent forms of power were at play for tenured professors, but the participants saw themselves as having to work within institutional and financial constraints that limited their freedom to speak out on controversial issues. Faculty members were, thus, silenced and at times chose to self-silence. The context of the present-day university, governance models, and the financial issues affecting universities and departments worked in concert to silence this critical voice in society.