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Category: Indigenous PSE

Te Wānanga o Aotearoa

A couple of weeks ago, I promised I would tell you the story of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, the entirely Maori-run polytechnic with over 35,000 students.  So here it is. The 1970s saw significant Aboriginal cultural revivals in many parts of the world.  Aboriginal higher education – or at least the access of aboriginal peoples to mainstream higher education – was a significant part of that.  In Canada, the struggle was mostly about gaining a foothold in mainstream institutions; in

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September 26, 2014 No Comments

Teach for Canada: Attack of the Kielberger Colonialists

I see the Globe has given some laudatory coverage to something called “Teach for Canada”.  The brain-child of a couple of Bay Street types (who have never themselves taught a class), the idea here is to shamelessly rip-off Teach for America (TFA) and apply its methods to the problem of low achievement among the country’s Aboriginal youth. This is a terrible idea.  And here’s why: TFA recruits top university graduates right out of their undergraduate program, to do two years of teaching

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November 6, 2013 5 Comments

PIAAC: The Results for Aboriginal and Immigrant Canadians

One of the unbelievably cool things about this week’s PIAAC release is the degree to which StatsCan and CMEC have gone the extra mile to not only oversample for every province, but also for every territory (a first, to my knowledge), and for Aboriginal populations, as well – although they were not able to include on-reserve populations in their sample.  This allows us to take some truly interesting looks at several vulnerable sub-segments of the population. Let’s start with the Aboriginal population. 

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October 11, 2013 3 Comments

Re-thinking “First-Generation” Students

Back when the McGuinty government was still working out what it wanted to do in higher education, it made a commitment about making progress in access for four key groups: aboriginal students, students with disabilities, francophone students and “first-generation” students. Two of these were unquestionably sensible. Anything that helps Aboriginal students is a Good Thing. Of course, there are some enormous differences in the barriers faced by, say, Aboriginal students from Toronto and people from fly-in First Nations communities that

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November 2, 2012 2 Comments

Comparisons in International Indigenous Education

Yesterday we looked at different models of indigenous PSE around the world. Today, we’re going to look at some differences in levels of indigenous PSE access. When we want to compare countries’ rates of access, we usually look at participation rates; that is, the percentage of people in a particular age group (usually 18-21) who attend PSE. But that doesn’t work well with indigenous students, who tend not to delay attendance until long after this “traditional” age. There is a

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March 16, 2012 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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