Disability and difference in higher education : case of accommodation at the University of Lethbridge

Building on scholarship in Disability Studies and Deaf Studies, this research explores the discourse of disability and deafness-related accommodations at the University of Lethbridge, by examining the university’s policies, website content, and archival material. In order to examine how disability and deafness are spoken of and constructed at this institution, this study employs Foucauldian theorizing on discourse. This research shows that accommodation-related policy embraces the view that disability is an individual problem, placed in the domain of the student’s personal responsibility. Furthermore, the analysis of the university’s documents indicates that, both historically and at present, a medical understanding of disability is the dominant but not the only understanding employed in the institutional design of accommodation-related practices. Finally, the policy and accompanying documents are formulated in ways that place the ‘normal,’ able-bodied student at the centre, thus representing disabled students and D/deaf students as an exception within the university’s population

Zombie journals: designing a technological infrastructure for a precarious graduate student journal

Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License (CC-BY-NC) applies.Background: The Meeting of the Minds graduate student journal is edited primarily by students from our Masters programme. This means that our editorial board is subject to high annual turnover and that our technological infrastructure and workflow needed to be easy to train for, accommodate differing levels of technological skill and editorial interest, and provide archiving that did not require a continuing interest in the journal by future generations of students. Analysis: This article provides a detailed and comparative account of the "off-the-shelf" systems and software used in developing the journal with an explanation of the rationale behind our choices. Conclusion and implications: The choices we made can be adopted by other journals interested in a low-cost, "future-proof" approach to developing a publishing infrastructure.Ye

"Let's start a journal!": the multidisciplinary graduate student journal as educational opportunity

Sherpa Romeo green journal. Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) applies.The University of Lethbridge is a medium-sized, primarily undergraduate, comprehensive research university on the Canadian Prairies in Alberta. It has a small but growing graduate school, within which most students are studying at the masters level. For many years, the graduate student elected representative body, the Graduate Students Association (GSA), has sponsored an annual refereed conference, Meeting of the Minds. In 2015 the GSA decided to supplement this conference with an accompanying journal, also called Meeting of the Minds. This article discusses the lessons learned in establishing this journal and overseeing its first two years of operations (and first year of publication). The article concentrates on two sets of problems: 1) philosophical, economic, and sociological issues that arose at the conceptual level while establishing a multidisciplinary, institution-focused graduate journal; and 2) technical, bibliographic, organizational, and economic issues encountered in attempting to address these conceptual concerns and ensure the long-term viability of the research accepted and published. Although the journal was not able to solve all the problems that arose during the first two years of operation, several solutions on the organizational, technological, economic, and bibliographic levels were developed that might be used by others establishing similar scholar- or student-led journals.Ye

Predictors of Healthy Youth Relationships Program Implementation in a Sample of Canadian Middle School Teachers

Implementation of evidence-based, Tier 1 social-emotional learning (SEL) programming that supports healthy relationships skills is recognized as a key mental health promotion and violence prevention strategy for youth. However, work specifically exploring how to support the high-quality implementation of such programming with Canadian teachers and schools is just beginning to emerge. Drawing on implementation frameworks that emphasize the importance of setting, provider, and implementation process characteristics for understanding program implementation outcomes, this prospective, longitudinal study explores implementation of the Fourth R, a SEL-based healthy relationships program, in a Western Canadian province using a sample of middle school teachers. The aim of this mixed-methods study was to illuminate relationships among teachers’ attitudes toward evidence-based programming, perceptions of organizational climate, and training experience with program implementation outcomes (dosage, quality, fidelity). Findings of this exploratory study identified that these characteristics influenced implementation dosage, quality, and fidelity in differential ways. Qualitative data drawn from teacher interviews supported quantitative findings and highlighted the importance of organizational support for high-quality implementation. We discuss areas for further study, given that there are significant gaps in knowledge about teachers’ attitudes toward evidence-based programming, school climate, and other systemic factors in the Canadian context, as well as relevance of study findings to the field of school psychology