Background: Universities continue to experience pressure to prepare work-ready graduates. In Ontario, this has recently taken the form of new provincial funding metrics which include experiential ...education. This places more formal pressure on all provincial universities to foster experiential education. Purpose: This study focuses on the organizational dynamics within a selected university as it developed an Experiential Education Certificate (EEC). Methodology/Approach: Using a qualitative approach, this case study relies on multiple methods. Content analysis was used to analyze textual data that framed the EEC. Semi-structured interviews (n = 12) with institutional actors were used to analyze how experiential education is framed administratively and practiced at the technical level of the university. Findings/Conclusions: Although the EEC reflected a management logic, it was not fully aligned with the academic logic of ground-level technical actors (e.g., professors). Institutionalizing experiential education has implications for multiple logics at play within universities and thus requires more “logic work” of those working within. Implications: This exploratory study lays the groundwork for further theorizing experiential education from an organizational perspective, namely, studying experiential education across disciplines, theorizing at the field level, and including administrators.
Experiential education, the process of providing students with applied learning opportunities within and outside the classroom, is rife with organizational complexity. This article examines Ontario’s ...Strategic Mandate Agreements using qualitative content analysis to see how conceptions and communications of experiential learning have changed over time, and how universities have responded to government pressure to foster experiential learning. Drawing on frame analysis, findings reveal that universities have developed a considerable amount of institutional infrastructure and initiatives to support the expansion of experiential learning, and these efforts have been framed in relation to current discourse about graduate skill readiness. However, these outward signalling responses are not necessarily aligned with internal organizational processes (i.e., expansion of co-curricular learning). These mandate agreements represent official accounts of institutional priorities, which leave the door open for future research to examine micro-foundations of experiential learning through the perspectives of the faculty and staff inhabiting these institutions.
This commentary provides selected observations from 25 years of research in Canadian HIV awareness campaign representation. Earlier research by Hunter (2004) found that HIV awareness posters ...targeting women focused on messages of fear, rather than presenting women as proactive about safer sex. Although there has been some improvement in recent years, we remain quite troubled by many of the Canadian HIV awareness posters targeting women. We demonstrate that there has been little progress in portraying women's agency in communicating safer sex options with their partners. Further, posters tend to reinforce the stigma associated with HIV, rather than depicting support, to minimize stigma. Canadian HIV awareness posters targeting women are in great contrast to the community-based HIV awareness posters targeting men who have sex with men, where taking control of sexual health and the importance of communication are reinforced. This commentary offers a critical appraisal on the minimal progress of Canadian HIV awareness posters targeting women throughout the years, and makes the case for developing HIV awareness poster campaigns which focus on prevention through communication, and support around stigma.
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