Learning is a Wonderful Gift
Marie Therese Rush has long considered teaching and learning not just an occupation but a preoccupation as well. That’s even more so since the longtime laboratory instructor and U of G graduate collected a master of education degree to hang alongside her 1980 B.Sc. in zoology.
She had already taken plenty of workshops on various aspects of teaching and learning, including courses offered by U of G’s Teaching Support Services, but says: “It made me hungry for more. Learning is a wonderful gift for me.”
Rush says the knowledge she gained has also made her a better teacher. She’s used it to design marking rubrics for her Guelph courses, help students resolve conflicts during group work, and experimented with multimedia modules that help students learn.
Education pays off for women
Michael Hoy It pays to earn a university degree, but it pays more for women to gain the education than it does for men. That’s the finding of research by economics professors Michael Hoy and Louis Christofides and doctoral student Ling Yang. They used Statistics Canada data to figure out that a woman with a university degree in 1977 earned $1.88 for each dollar earned by a woman with a high school diploma; the ratio for men was $1.63 to one dollar. By 2003, the better-educated women earned $2.73 for every dollar earned by female high school graduates; for men, it was $2.13 to one dollar.
Hoy says this higher premium for women helps explain why women outnumber men at university. “If it pays more to go to university, then we’d expect people to be more inclined to go,” he says. “Women are responding to the incentive.”
New protections for athletes in place
Dr. Margo Mountjoy of the University’s Health and Performance Centre is one of the authors of a new “consensus statement” on sexual harassment and abuse recently adopted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The statement defines the problems, identifies risk factors and provides guidelines for resolution and prevention.
No longer bored with the Bard
When English professor Daniel Fischlin started to teach Shakespeare 10 years ago, he found himself trying to figure out how to get hundreds of students interested in reading what many considered to be boring stuff.
Daniel Fischlin Fischlin decided that looking at adaptations of the Bard’s work would show how contemporary writers were dealing with Shakespeare and provide a nice platform for transitioning back to the original texts.
When he couldn’t find a resource on world adaptations of Shakespeare, Fischlin was left to compile his own database. He discovered lots of Canadian plays, comic books, cartoons, movies, songs and jazz improvisations all dedicated to giving a Canadian perspective on Shakespeare’s work. And so the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) was born. It’s the largest website in the world dedicated to showing Shakespeare’s influence on a nation, and it’s still growing.
CASP has attracted the attention of other educators and the Stratford Festival of Canada, which asked to have its vast archival holdings included in a new hybrid website. CASP researchers also compiled teaching guides and instructional aids to help high school teachers use the database, and they’ve launched a fast-paced online arcade game based on Romeo and Juliet. Aimed at youth aged 10 to 15, ’Speare fuses gaming goals with the curricular goals of literacy promotion. Only by learning about the Shakespearean classic can a player successfully complete the game.
CASP has become an educational tool for audiences from grade school and high school students to post-secondary and long-time learners to theatre aficionados at an international level. (www.canadianshakespeares.ca)
Treating epilepsy
Prof. Roberto Poma, a veterinary neurologist at the Ontario Veterinary College, says a better understanding of canine epilepsy may help with treating the condition in humans.
Roberto Poma “In a clinical setting, we often jump from clinical symptoms to treatment of epilepsy,” he says. “What we’re looking at is the information missing in the middle, which will help us characterize epileptic syndromes in dogs and hopefully provide valuable support to investigate human epilepsy.”
Poma begins by gathering information on a dog’s history and performing a neurological examination. He also uses magnetic resonance imaging and conducts an electroencephalography to investigate brain electrical activity in epileptic dogs. With improved understanding of the disease, he hopes to locate abnormal genes and map the causes of epilepsy.
One of the most important purposes of any university is to promote critical thinking in our classrooms, laboratories and communities.
More students shunning sports for academics
Prof. John Dwyer of the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition says less than half of Ontario’s high school students take physical education classes after Grade 9, the only grade where it’s required, and only a fraction are involved in school sports and recreation programs. In fact, student participation in PE classes and intramural and inter-school sports has declined steadily over the past six years.
 John Dwyer “Students seem to be opting for what they or their parents consider to be more academic courses,” says Dwyer, who was chosen by Health Canada to serve on its external Food Guide Advisory Committee, part of the team that revised Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating. “But they must start to recognize the importance of physical activity.”
Health foods go mainstream
 Catherine Carstairs Health food stores, once thought of mostly as “hippie bastions,” have gone mainstream, with health and organic food items now occupying entire aisles in grocery stores. Guelph history professor Catherine Carstairs says it’s due to society’s growing concerns about health, its desire to remain youthful and its distrust of technology and mainstream medicine.
“All of these factors have contributed to the growing health food craze,” says Carstairs, who conducted interviews with 30 leaders in the health food industry across Canada to trace the industry’s history and trends.
She says the health food industry first took off during the 1960s and experienced another wave of interest in the 1990s. By 1999, the federal government created the Natural Health Products Directorate to regulate over-the-counter health products such as vitamins, minerals and herbal remedies.
“The 9irectorate has added a lot of legitimacy to the industry because it allowed people to make health claims for products,” says Carstairs.
Animal Health Lab is on the job
Staff at U of G’s Animal Health Laboratory (AHL) are ever vigilant in their efforts to diagnose and monitor foreign animal diseases and zoonotic diseases in Ontario. As a partner with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs in the Ontario Animal Health Surveillance Network, the AHL contributes to maintaining healthy animals and safe food by serving as the central source of provincial disease-trend information.
In defence of processed foods
 Milena Corredig Many Canadian processed foods aim to improve health and should not be considered synonymous with junk food, says food scientist Milena Corredig, a new Canada Research Chair who aims to incorporate more functional, healthier ingredients in food products.
“Omega-3 milk and heat-treated tomato juice are good examples of processed foods that are actually better for you than the non-processed version,” she says. “They’re also well-conserved, so you can have the sense of freshness for a longer time.”
Canadian food processors are world leaders in working to make products healthier, says Corredig.
She and her colleagues remain one of the only research groups in the world studying butter’s byproduct, called buttermilk — not fermented buttermilk, but the watery substance that’s separated from the butter during the butter-making process. Once buttermilk is processed, the nutritional properties are diminished, so the team is trying to find a way to process cream and butter that would preserve the quality of the phospholipids in buttermilk.
Shrinking bee population threatens economy
 Peter Kevan Environmental biologist Peter Kevan says shrinking bee populations in North America pose a serious threat to our plants, food chain and economy. He co-authored a U.S. National Research Council report with 14 other researchers that shows U.S. honeybees have declined some 30 per cent in the past 20 years. Other pollinators, including bats and wild bees, are also in jeopardy.
“This is a huge problem because one in every three bites of human food depends on pollinators and, in nature, 75 per cent of all flowering plants depend on pollinators for fertilization,” says Kevan, who has been studying pollinators for more than 30 years. If the pollinators aren’t there, crop yields suffer and prices for affected commodities go up.
The problem in Canada is not as drastic as in the United States, says Kevan. “The Canadian bee community is very proactive in bee breeding and in controlling parasitic mites, which have caused declines in the States.”
In Canadian forests, restrictions in pesticide use have also improved conditions for pollinators and, in turn, protected the fruit and seeds eaten by wildlife, he says.
Shedding light on math disabilities
 Marcia Barnes New research by psychology professor Marcia Barnes will make it easier to assess and help children who have problems with math.
She has found that, contrary to what was previously believed, visual-spatial skills and math calculation skills are unrelated. She also found that children’s math difficulties stem from only a couple of key problems.
It’s often been thought that math calculation and skills such as putting block puzzles together are somehow related. Barnes and her colleagues tested this theory by looking at children with spina bifida, North America’s most common disabling birth defect. About 40 per cent of children with spina bifida have math disabilities, and a large proportion of them also have difficulties with visual-spatial skills.
“We found no relation between math calculations and visual-spatial skills,” says Barnes.
They did find that, regardless of a child’s type of disability — straight math, reading and math, association with a brain disorder — the problems with math looked very similar.
“This means you can start to be much more strategic in planning assessment and intervention for children with math difficulties,” she says. “The programs that work for kids without brain disorders may be the same programs that will help children with brain injuries improve their math skills.”
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