Mind the Gap: Mentoring, Goal-setting and Self-Evaluation for International Graduate Students

The objective of this paper is to understand how peer mentoring and exercises to encourage goal-setting and self-evaluation can support first year international graduate students to engage in Canadian universities’ online learning environment during COVID-19. Surveys, students’ work, and instructors’ reflections were used to inform the current study. Preliinary findings show that during COVID-19, online peer mentoring and exercises to encourage goal-setting and self-evaluation have been able to support international students’ behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement in Canadian academic learning to a certain degree. The findings also show that there is a need to use real-time communication tools to enhance the e-peer mentoring process for international students in an online course environment. Although the personal goal-setting exercises were new experiences for many of the international students, they proved to be valuable steps in their adaptation to Canadian graduate studies

The Processes of Designing and Implementing Globally Networked Learning Environments and their Implications on College Instructors’ Professional Learning: The Case of Québec CÉGEPs

Abstract This study describes the design and implementation processes of globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) in a college environment and discusses how these processes may contribute to instructors\u27 professional learning. A thematic analysis was conducted on five interviews with instructors working in Quebec general and vocational colleges (CEGEPs). The design and implementation processes were mapped out using Fretchling\u27s (2007) logic modeling basic components. Findings suggest that GNLEs in a college context take the form of joint lectures or joint activities. Instructors reported that designing and teaching within a GNLE had led to pedagogical, intercultural and technology-related learning; and that learning was fostered by unforeseen challenges as well as long-standing partnerships. Résumé L’objectif de cette étude est de décrire les processus de conception et de mise en œuvre de milieux d’apprentissage réseautés internationalement (MARI) dans un environnement collégial ainsi que d’analyser leur influence sur le perfectionnement professionnel. Une analyse thématique réalisée à partir de cinq entrevues avec des enseignants de cégeps a permis d’élaborer un modèle logique (Fretchling 2007). Les résultats suggèrent que les MARI implantés dans un collège prennent surtout la forme de cours magistraux ou d’activités pédagogiques conjointes. Pour les enseignants impliqués, le perfectionnement (pédagogique, interculturel ou technologique) résulte des imprévus et des partenariats durables inhérents aux MARI

Meeting the JCHE Team: A Reconstructed Interview

This “reconstructed interview-conversation” involves the entire editorial team of the Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education (JCHE). Together, the team dialogues around the shared visions, aspirations, motivations, and aims we have in creating this new journal platform. With this sharing, the team sends out a welcoming invitation to colleagues from around the world to get to know our new journal and to join our work to support and promote contemplative and holistic education. We at JCHE are committed to the ideal of education as transformative integration of mind-body-heart-spirit, which we ultimately understand as a decolonizing project. Through this interview, various research and life themes have emerged: the centrality of education for wisdom, the life-sustaining importance of contemplative practice, the role of contemplative and holistic education as decolonial project; how JCHE exemplifies and aims at cultivating the wide diversity that exists in intellectual work; the place of contemplative and holistic education within peace education and environmental education; the important contributions that Indigenous knowledge practices make to education, science, medicine, and health care, and to the broader task of cultivating ecological and human flourishing; as well as concerns about contemplative/holistic practices being co-opted by neoliberal and instrumental forces in education

Towards a Youth Development Paradigm in Sri Lanka: Lessons from the Youth in Transition Program

Final thesis in the International Development Studies co-operative specialist program at University of Toronto at Scarborough.This thesis is about a group of young people in southern Sri Lanka, a relatively successful youth program – the Youth in Transition Program (YITP) in this part of the island, and the concept of “youth development”. It is about a university student’s attempt to use YITP as a case study to illustrate just how interactions between a program and its participants could create a set of “youth development” meanings important to a country like Sri Lanka and the well-being of Sri Lankan youth. It seeks to capture young people’s own conception of “youth development” in Sri Lanka as it happens locally during and after their participation at YITP. Such conception hints towards the need for an integrated youth development paradigm in the country, both now and in the future

Knowing Our True Self and Transforming Suffering toward Peace and Love: Embodying the Wisdom of the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra

The biggest crisis that we are in nowadays is existential, which is the state of not knowing our true natures or our true selves; hence, we suffer from deep anxiety and we fail to find safety and a way to ground ourselves. In this article, we share our practical experiences of encountering and practicing the teachings of two important Buddhist scriptures: the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. We show how both sutras, and especially their teachings on emptiness, allow us to remove our attachment to a sense of a separate self, which deepens our understanding about life, and transforms suffering toward peace and love. We further demonstrate the importance of meditation, contemplative chanting and reading, and experimentation with Buddhist teachings as pathways towards understanding our true natures. In sum, both sutras help us to go beyond the materialistic, capitalistic, narrow vision of who we are and to access the higher dimension of our existence, which allows us to discover our cosmic selves in the ultimate reality. It is through experiencing one’s true self that one gains a greater capacity to seek social transformation in times of crisis.https://doi.org/10.3390/rel1305040

Knowing Our True Self and Transforming Suffering toward Peace and Love: Embodying the Wisdom of the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra

The biggest crisis that we are in nowadays is existential, which is the state of not knowing our true natures or our true selves; hence, we suffer from deep anxiety and we fail to find safety and a way to ground ourselves. In this article, we share our practical experiences of encountering and practicing the teachings of two important Buddhist scriptures: the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. We show how both sutras, and especially their teachings on emptiness, allow us to remove our attachment to a sense of a separate self, which deepens our understanding about life, and transforms suffering toward peace and love. We further demonstrate the importance of meditation, contemplative chanting and reading, and experimentation with Buddhist teachings as pathways towards understanding our true natures. In sum, both sutras help us to go beyond the materialistic, capitalistic, narrow vision of who we are and to access the higher dimension of our existence, which allows us to discover our cosmic selves in the ultimate reality. It is through experiencing one’s true self that one gains a greater capacity to seek social transformation in times of crisis

Knowing Our True Self and Transforming Suffering toward Peace and Love: Embodying the Wisdom of the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra

The biggest crisis that we are in nowadays is existential, which is the state of not knowing our true natures or our true selves; hence, we suffer from deep anxiety and we fail to find safety and a way to ground ourselves. In this article, we share our practical experiences of encountering and practicing the teachings of two important Buddhist scriptures: the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. We show how both sutras, and especially their teachings on emptiness, allow us to remove our attachment to a sense of a separate self, which deepens our understanding about life, and transforms suffering toward peace and love. We further demonstrate the importance of meditation, contemplative chanting and reading, and experimentation with Buddhist teachings as pathways towards understanding our true natures. In sum, both sutras help us to go beyond the materialistic, capitalistic, narrow vision of who we are and to access the higher dimension of our existence, which allows us to discover our cosmic selves in the ultimate reality. It is through experiencing one’s true self that one gains a greater capacity to seek social transformation in times of crisis