NSSE questions in Canada and the U.S.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro PDF comparison

In my research today I compared the Canadian and American versions of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) instrument for 2010.

This is the survey that over 1 million university students across North America are invited to take in their 1st and 4th year.

The NSSE survey page calls the Canadian version the “Canadian English” version.  But the version is not just different in terms of its “Canadian English” vocabulary (such as “school/college” in the US versus “university” in Canada). 

The Canadian version is different in terms of its cultural content and rhetorical approaches.

This post provides comparative screenshots of survey content to help us ponder why these differences exist.

Arts Peer Mentoring program @ U of C

Higher education innovation

Peer Mentoring featured on the front page of OnCampus, 2007

As I complete a book on peer mentoring in undergraduate courses, this theme is quite fresh in my mind and well worth a blog post.

At the University of Calgary in 2005 I founded our Faculty of Arts Peer Mentoring program.  I still coordinate it, although others now teach our peer mentors.  I have just completed my 2nd year as the Director of our university’s SU-funded Curricular Peer Mentoring Network located at our Teaching and Learning Center.

What are peer mentors?

In a nutshell, undergraduate students become peer mentors who collaborate with instructors and teaching assistants to enrich peer-based learning within their courses.  They may also design and lead learning activities outside of class time and online.  Normally they return to a course they have already taken and work with a professor they are familiar with. They apply for this honor, and are supported and educated by taking a 4th year course in peer mentoring and collaborative learning.

Website analysis in Calgary Herald

My participation in an interview with Tony Seskus, a journalist at the Calgary Herald newspaper, spurred me to write this blog post on mayoral candidates’ websites a couple of days ago:

Website rhetoric of mayoral candidates

Now some of the content has appeared in this article –

Can mayoral hopefuls emulate Obamamania?

By Tony Seskus, Calgary Herald June 27, 2010…

for a bit of fun this last week, I asked Tania Smith at the University of Calgary for her thoughts on a selection of mayoral candidate websites.

Smith teaches a course in advanced professional and technical communication, where students work on real-world web design projects and study online communication.

She reviewed the websites of nine mayoral candidates and scored them on first impression, message and readability, and interactivity, giving up to five points for each.

…

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/technology/mayoral+hopefuls+emulate+Obamamania/3207872/story.html#ixzz0s7wuJB4W

Website rhetoric of mayoral candidates

View from Calgary Tower. Photo by palestrina55 on Flickr

Many decades ago society started talking about how televised debates were beginning to influence election campaigns.  Now we have new questions about how new media influences them, such as — What makes effective website rhetoric for a mayoral candidate nowadays?

The city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada is going to have a municipal election in October 2010.  Although it is only June, nine candidates have put their hat in the ring, and they all have websites already. Tony Seskus, a Calgary Herald journalist, contacted me yesterday (June 24, 2010) for my input on the candidates’ sites.  I provided to him some of my general findings and advice, and critiques and ratings of all nine candidates’ websites, and a memorable image clip from the site.

As I posted this on my blog, I added two final sections that help readers think about the theory and criticism of website rhetoric — what methods are needed, and how my theoretical framework for analysis relates to what ancient and contemporary rhetoricians have said.

If there is interest in this topic, I may give an update in October/November on how the candidates’ sites looked on voting day, and see if my ratings have any correlation to the results of the election.

Canadian and U.S. Rhetorical Cultures

Teaching and studying “Rhetoric” in Canada is different from doing so in the U.S. because of Canadian “rhetorical culture” within which we live and work.

Rhetorical study has flourished more in the U.S. because there is less social stigma against using and studying rhetoric in the U.S.

Consider one small segment of our rhetorical culture — among academics.  The rhetoric we are accustomed to use in our colleges and universities as students, teachers, academic colleagues, and academic presenters.  Our cultural context beyond the university/college makes a difference in how we organize and deliver our presentations.  It probably impacts the way we do “small talk” and network and give feedback among colleagues at academic  conferences.

In his blog post on the CSSR (Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric) conference in 2010, David Beard (alias syntaxfactory) describes how his experience at our Canadian association conference differed from his experience of the RSA (Rhetoric Society of America).  He writes,

The feedback was neither agonistic (as so many conference Q&A become competitions between audience and speaker) nor was it skew (as so many conference panel Q&A become about “the paper I wish you’d written instead”).

Why was the feedback not agonistic or skew at the CSSR?  Because that’s a norm of our rhetorical culture.

Thinking beyond our academic worlds to the societies that support them, I often meditate on the differences in the “rhetorical culture” of Americans and Canadians.  There are negatives and positives on both sides, but the Americans have an advantage over us because they actually study their own rhetorical culture in a focused and open manner.

Canadians need to catch up with the U.S. in their study and refinement of rhetoric.  And when we do that, we may actually excel in the quality and broad impact of our rhetorical accomplishments for the betterment of society.