Canada Ties International Education to Economic and Trade Policy

October 13, 2011, 3:30 pm

The Canadian government has tapped a group of prominent educators and business leaders to sit on a new panel to develop a strategy on how international education can be integrated into economic and trade policy. Thursday’s announcement, made at the China Education Expo in Beijing, signals that Canada’s recent push to attract foreign students and scholars will continue with the backing of the federal government. The panel, which is chaired by Amit Chakma, president of the University of Western Ontario, will provide a report early next year. Universities and colleges have welcomed the move, as has Canada’s major international-education organization, which notes that the people on the panel are widely experienced in the field.

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mkt42

Decent advice, but I think of varying value depending on the institution and the discipline. I’ve only participated in the faculty search process once as an applicant and once as a department member, but the audiences at the talks were almost solely faculty from the department (and sometimes students); avoiding jargon would probably have been a negative with those audiences, who might’ve looked upon a jargon-avoiding candidate as an inadequately educated lightweight. And although I believe that co-authored papers are becoming more common in most disciplines, they are still a relative rarity in some, so suggestions by a candidate for collaboration would be viewed as a bit odd; not negatively per se but not particularly positively.

These of course are highly limited examples, there are a lot of varying institutions and disciplines out there. But the ideas here may not get at the most crucial aspects of a job talk, depending on where the candidate is applying.
minnesotan

The line between participating in the conventions of one’s own discourse community and ladling on steaming piles of jargon is not so fine. If you can’t identify that line, you will need to ask an educated layperson, or someone from another sub-field within your discipline, to tell you where you’re being unclear. (And, judging by your response, you’re probably being unclear.)