Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we, as faculty, are prepared to teach – particularly in liberal arts contexts. We are trained in disciplinary research paradigms but when we get into the classroom are suddenly tasked with teaching (and assessing) things like critical and creative thinking, communication, quantitative and information literacy, teamwork, problem solving, intercultural competencies, life-long learning and more. These are laudable endeavors but how likely are we to accomplish them if we aren’t also learning how to build learning experiences that promote those outcomes?
In the Spring Edition of Liberal Education, Jonathan P. Rossing and Melissa R. Lavitt explored this idea in their piece titled “The Neglected Learner: A Call to Support Integrative Learning for Faculty”. They pose a compelling, brilliantly simple idea: integrate faculty work with the goals of the institution …
Making connections between one’s individual career aspirations and broader institutional goals fills a gap that hampers both faculty and administrators. We need to do a better job of aligning what the campus hopes to achieve with the rewards, incentives, communications, and related support designed for faculty. We believe that many faculty are interested in connecting their careers with their campuses and communities, but they feel ill-equipped to take on this challenge. These strategies move faculty learning from remediation or individual enhancement to faculty learning as institutional investment. We could develop incentives and rewards in the form of grants for mentoring or forming learning communities—providing a stipend for enrollment as fellows, for example, with the requirement to pay back and teach others—and, ultimately, have these efforts count in promotion and tenure reviews.
This idea resonates with me from work I have done in the past analyzing tenure and promotion policies to see how value for liberal education and community-engaged work was communicated to faculty. Typically, it’s not at all – and if it is, the message is do it if you can fit it in on top of your “scholarship of discovery” . This approach doesn’t at all get to the the central issue Boyer was uncovering, a reinvention of faculty-roles to “reflect more realistically the full range of academic and civic mandates“.
Click on the links below for some interesting reads in this arena …
- Dismantling inequality regarding scholarship.
- Change Tenure
- Advancing Engaged Scholarship in Promotion and Tenure: A Roadmap and Call for Reform