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Our evidence-based practice paper will present a Teaching Excellence Network (TEN) implemented at a large, multi-campus, North-Eastern US, R1 institution. TEN was funded by a 5-year NSF IUSE grant (institutional and community transformation track) that was part of a multidisciplinary collaboration of science and engineering faculty and Learning Centers staff. We discuss our practices, the reasons behind them, and impacts on participating faculty, emphasizing building connections between the institution’s offices, departments, and schools. TEN addressed perceptions of fragmentated and siloed faculty development initiatives at our institution. Faculty development efforts are distributed across departments, including an office for teaching with technology, one for assessment and evaluation, two school-based offices, a center for faculty research excellence, and an office for DEIB efforts. While each contributes significantly to faculty development, the siloes and disconnected communication channels lead to a perception of scarcity when it comes to support around teaching. In addition, most units focus on specific areas of development and not the kind of holistic teaching support we implemented. Recently, engineering departments have hired full-time teaching-focused faculty to improve teaching practice and education quality. While some science and math departments have many teaching-focused faculty, our engineering departments often have only a few faculty in these positions. We designed our BDI to bring siloed faculty together and create easier access to the many and varied programs across campus. TEN, and our study, are grounded in questions about how institutional structures impact faculty agency and motivation. Our work is guided by three theories: Structuration, Agency, and Expectancy-Value. These theories conceptualize human motivation as being connected to instructors’ expectations of success in an endeavour (e.g., transforming aspects of their course) and the perceived value of that endeavour, while allowing us to examine the interdependence of human decision-making and institutional structures. We planned TEN around maximizing value for faculty, while generating structures that supported faculty becoming involved in our programs and focusing efforts on teaching development. TEN has two major components: summer institutes are focused on pedagogical content delivery, and the production of usable materials and course design plans; semester support groups focus on the production or implementation of specific smaller projects, or the in-depth discussion of particular research-based ideas to provide faculty continuing support and a sense of connectedness with peers. Our analysis will start from a thematic analysis of interviews with faculty, in the style of Braun and Clark, to develop a sense of our data and the impacts that this program has had on participants. We will be using our theoretical lens to look for themes around how the structures of TEN have impacted faculty. Through the iterative process of thematic analysis, other themes may also emerge for investigation, which will enrich our understanding of participants’ experiences. Presentation of these themes, alongside illustrative cases of STEM faculty, will demonstrate the impacts of TEN on participants, provide context for engaging roundtable discussions of what participants are taking away from the programs, and present implications for faculty development initiatives.
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Equity-Minded Faculty Development: An Intersectional Identity-Conscious Community of Practice Model for Faculty Learning
Equity-minded institutional transformation requires robust faculty learning. Research has shown that the single most important factor in student success is faculty interaction. Positive, supportive, and empowering faculty interaction is particularly important to the success of female students, poor and working class students, and students of color, but most faculty are not prepared to offer the kind of support that has been shown to be most effective for marginalized students. If institutions are serious about equity and about transformation, then they are obligated to provide professional development that will support the learning necessary for faculty to fulfill these important roles and to support faculty financially or by buying their time to participate in it. An effective way to do this is to align such professional development with the urgent needs of the campus and their related campus-wide initiatives. This article describes a community of practice model of identity-conscious professional development that engages faculty in a scholarly approach to the science of learning and evidence-based teaching and curriculum development while at the same time insistently and consistently incorporating critical reflection on and exploration of how systems of power and oppression impact learning. We believe this faculty engagement is key to transforming our institution into a more equitable and inclusive learning environment for students and faculty alike.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1727086
- PAR ID:
- 10078838
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Metropolitan Universities
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1047-8485
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.18060/22170
