Increasing Faculty Engagement: The Key to Meaningful and Sustainable Higher Education Internationalization

According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (2014), over 80% of Canadian post-secondary institutions have identified internationalization as one of their top five priorities. However, the focus has been on inbound student mobility (King, 2018). Institutions have aggressively and successfully pursued student recruitment with international student populations increasing by approximately 78% from 2014/15 to 2019/20 (Statistics Canada, 2021). While rationalizing internationalization as a vehicle to improve academic and sociocultural outcomes, the literature suggests that universities are subjugating these objectives to economic and political motivations (de Wit, 2020; Garson, 2016). Strongly under the influence of neoliberal ideologies, post-secondary institutions focus their efforts on branding and other market-based initiatives to entice international students, while ignoring the investment required to engage faculty and develop quality internationalized curricula (Heringer, 2020; Nyangau, 2018). My organizational improvement plan (OIP) argues that faculty engagement is critical for meaningful and sustainable internationalization and recommends a comprehensive approach adapted from Childress’ (2008) Five I’s model of faculty engagement. The OIP is set in the context of a mid-size, primarily undergraduate university in British Columbia and is based on the principles of critical pedagogy as a foundation for quality learning (Freire, 2005; Giroux, 2013) and Bandura’s (1982) social cognitive theory as a mechanism to increase faculty engagement. The Competing Values Framework (Cameron & Quinn, 2011) is used to diagnose the gap between the current and desired state of internationalization. The OIP further outlines how a hybrid model of transactional/distributed leadership can be used to build faculty internationalization skills, improve self-efficacy, and increase engagement

The value of voice through employee ownership :fabric or fabrication?

PhD ThesisThe aim of this thesis is to explore whether employee voice in an employee-owned enterprise is different to that in conventional businesses. Employee voice encompasses the different ways employees can express their ideas or concerns at work. Contemporary knowledge tends to draw empirical evidence from conventional businesses where ‘efficiency’ is a key objective of voice mechanisms. However, there is growing evidence suggesting that voice which does not correspond to this objective can go ‘unheard’. There is a gap in the literature; less is known about alternative mechanisms through which voice may be heard, such as employeeownership. Employee-ownership differs to conventional business. Differentiating factors include employees having a ‘right’ to a voice through its ‘embeddedness’ in the governance structure expressed through ‘sophisticated’ processes. This suggests employee voice is part of an organisation’s ‘fabric’. However, employee ‘compliance’, ‘organisational hierarchy’ and ‘management resistance’ are factors which can hamper voice in such enterprises suggesting it is a ‘fabrication’. All of these factors are explored in the thesis which adopts a subjectivist and interpretivist philosophical approach and uses a qualitative single case study of an employeeowned organisation providing social care services. The research methods were semistructured interviews, observations and documentary evidence. The empirical evidence suggested mixed findings. Employee-ownership did provide opportunities for voice to be heard as part of its fabric. However, the pressures on, and dominance of, senior executives counteracted and weakened voice suggesting it was a fabrication. Employee-ownership was regarded as a management tool that would achieve the objective of company efficiency. A key finding is that, even when voice did reflect this objective, it often went unheard. The conclusion is that the way employee voice is heard is not because of a mechanism, but in the way it is valued. The contribution to knowledge of this thesis is; the difference in employee voice is created because of the way in which it is value

The versatility of a truss mounted mobile transporter for in-space construction

The Mobile Transporter (MT) evolution from early erectable structures assembly activities is detailed. The MT operational features which are required to support astronauts performing on-orbit structure construction or spacecraft assembly functions are presented and discussed. Use of the MT to perform a variety of assembly functions is presented. Estimated EVA assembly times for a precision segmented reflector approximately 20 m in diameter are presented. The EVA/MT technique under study for construction of the reflector (and the entire spacecraft) is illustrated. Finally, the current status of development activities and test results involving the MT and Space Station structural assembly are presented

Summary of LaRC 2-inch Erectable Joint Hardware Heritage Test Data

As the National Space Transportation System (STS, also known as the Space Shuttle) went into service during the early 1980's, NASA envisioned many missions of exploration and discovery that could take advantage of the STS capabilities. These missions included: large orbiting space stations, large space science telescopes and large spacecraft for manned missions to the Moon and Mars. The missions required structures that were significantly larger than the payload volume available on the STS. NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) conducted studies to design and develop the technology needed to assemble the large space structures in orbit. LaRC focused on technology for erectable truss structures, in particular, the joint that connects the truss struts at the truss nodes. When the NASA research in large erectable space structures ended in the early 1990's, a significant amount of structural testing had been performed on the LaRC 2-inch erectable joint that was never published. An extensive set of historical information and data has been reviewed and the joint structural testing results from this historical data are compiled and summarized in this report

Women World Leaders: Comparative Analysis and Gender Experiences

Research suggests that executive political office poses additional and different political challenges for women than legislative office. Yet, a few dozen women have attained their nations’ highest executive office. Surprisingly little research has been devoted to the experiences of these women world leaders. This study builds profiles of the women world leaders in the modern era and analyzes their backgrounds and political experiences in an effort to both identify commonalities among the women leaders and assess the challenges they faced on account of their sex

Homeless Over 50: The Graying of Chicago's Homeless Population - Final Technical Report

CURL, in collaboration with the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness and the financial support of the Retirement Research Foundation, embarked on a project to better understand the stories and the needs of this aging population. The Chicago Alliance to End Hopelessness plans to use the findings to help shape the implementations of the Chicago Plan to End Homelessness.  Currently, a group of 10 providers are meeting every other month and planning how to implement the recommendations of the report. The project itself aimed to increase public awareness and influence public policy on homelessness in Chicago

Technology Challenges and Opportunities for Very Large In-Space Structural Systems

Space solar power satellites and other large space systems will require creative and innovative concepts in order to achieve economically viable designs. The mass and volume constraints of current and planned launch vehicles necessitate highly efficient structural systems be developed. In addition, modularity and in-space deployment/construction will be enabling design attributes. While current space systems allocate nearly 20 percent of the mass to the primary structure, the very large space systems of the future must overcome subsystem mass allocations by achieving a level of functional integration not yet realized. A proposed building block approach with two phases is presented to achieve near-term solar power satellite risk reduction with accompanying long-term technology advances. This paper reviews the current challenges of launching and building very large space systems from a structures and materials perspective utilizing recent experience. Promising technology advances anticipated in the coming decades in modularity, material systems, structural concepts, and in-space operations are presented. It is shown that, together, the current challenges and future advances in very large in-space structural systems may provide the technology pull/push necessary to make solar power satellite systems more technically and economically feasible

Results of the ACCESS experiment

All basic EVA space construction tasks included in the experiment were accomplished on-orbit successfully, and the construction task time shows good correlation with neutral buoyancy data. However, the flight assembly times were slightly longer than the best times obtained in the water tank. This result was attributed by the EVA astronauts to the new, tighter tolerance truss hardware used on-orbit as opposed to the well-worn training hardware used in the neutral buoyancy and was, thus, not a space related phenomenon. The baseline experiment demonstrated that erectable structure can be assembled effectively by astronauts in EVA. The success of ACCESS confirmed the feasibility of EVA space assembly of erectable trusses and played a role in the decision to baseline the Space Station as a 5 meter erectable structure

A 60-meter erectable assembly concept for a control of flexible structures flight experiment

A flight experiment which proposes to use a 60-m deployable/retractable truss beam attached to the Space Shuttle to study dynamic characterization and control of flexible structures is being studied by NASA. The concept requires a relatively complex mechanism for deploying and retracting the truss on-orbit. Development of such a mechanism having a high degree of reliability will be expensive. An alternative method for constructing the truss is discussed requiring no new technology development or complex mechanisms and has already been demonstrated on-orbit. The alternative method proposes an erectable truss beam which can be assembled by two astronauts in EVA. The EVA crew would have to manually assemble the beam from 468 struts and 165 nodes, and install 7 instrumentation platforms with signal and power cabling. The predicted assembly time is 3 hr and 23 min. The structure would also have to be disassembled and restowed following testing, thus 2 EVA days would be required. To allow 25 hr for data collection (probably a bare minimum to accomplish meaningful tests), current Shuttle operations policy dictates a 9-day mission. The design, assembly procedure and issues associated with the alternative concept are discussed