Innovative Models for Organizing Faculty Development Programs

This study reports on the impact of faculty development seminars convened at seven colleges and universities by the New England Center for Inclusive Teaching (NECIT). In these semester-long seminars, faculty participants reflected on their professional lives, identified strengths and competencies that they could share with others, and assumed the posture of being learners themselves, as they encountered new ideas and innovations that could enhance their work as scholars and teachers. The seminar process was more organic and free-form than the structured workshops and training sessions that are often offered to faculty through more conventional, functionally-oriented faculty development programs. This more organic, grassroots approach allowed faculty members’ own needs to be foremost in the development of related initiatives and programs. The study concludes with a set of principles that other colleges and universities can use to implement similar faculty development initiatives. 2 J AY R. D EE AND C HERYL J. D ALY H UMAN A RCHITECTURE : J OURNAL OF THE S OCIOLOGY OF S ELF -K NOWLEDGE , VII, 1, W INTER 2009 by critics, as scam artists who focus on selfinterested agendas at the expense of the education of tuition-paying students (Sykes, 1988). Collectively, faculties and their academic disciplines have been defined by some postmodernists as closed communities that endorse only certain forms of knowledge generation, primarily those forms that reinforce the power positions of well-established interests within those disciplines (Foucault, 1986). Recently, faculty have been characterized as managed professionals, whose autonomy has been eroded by extensive accountability-oriented measurement systems (Rhoades, 1998) and by a rising managerialism among college and university administrators, who now are more likely to make major decisions without faculty input (Bess, 2006). These various images and metaphors suggest that expectations for the academic profession have become highly differentiated and fragmented. No longer does a quick reference to teaching, research, and service suffice to explain the work of the faculty member. Faculty roles have become increasingly complex and challenging, both for individuals to carry out and for institutions to support. Despite the multitude of images and descriptors associated with academic work, one commonality is that faculty members are people who have human needs for growth, achievement, satisfaction, and connection with others (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Faculty development programs can play an important role on college and university campuses by acknowledging the human needs of faculty members, and by providing the resources, social networks, and innovative ideas that can foster the fulfillment of those needs. This paper reports on an innovative faculty development program that focused its energies on the idea that fulfilling the human needs of faculty members is an essential prerequisite for ongoing growth and success within the academic profession. Many faculty development programs are organized around meeting functional needs, rather than human needs. These programs, many based in centers for teaching and learning, focus on the functional roles that faculty perform, and attempt to identify key areas within those functions that present unique challenges for faculty (e.g., teaching with technology or assessing students’ writing). These functional needs are sometimes identified systematically through a survey of faculty members, but more often the needs are identified by a faculty committee, or by an academic administrator charged with responsibilities for faculty development (Sorcinelli, Austin, Eddy, & Beach, 2006). Once the functional needs have been identified, programs and services are designed to identify and convey a set of skills that can be used to improve performance within a given function (Akerlind, 2005). The programs may be tailored to fit the needs of particular faculty groups, such as junior faculty or disciplinespecific issues (e.g., teaching large lecture courses in the sciences). Although these programs may acknowledge different needs by career stage and by academic discipline, they typically are not organized around foundational human needs. The goal of many of these faculty development programs is to teach faculty, for example, how to use technology or how to assess students’ writing, rather than to fulfill faculty members’ needs for growth, achievement, and collegial connection. The New England Center for Inclusive Teaching (NECIT) was organized around a different set of assumptions. Rather than conform to a rational, linear model of identifying functional needs and then offering services to address those needs, NECIT faculty development seminars allowed developmental needs to emerge through processes of faculty interaction over time. Through semester-long seminars, faculty participants reflected on their own professional lives, identified strengths and comI NNOVATIVE M ODELS FOR O RGANIZING F ACULTY D EVELOPMENT P ROGRAMS 3 H UMAN A RCHITECTURE : J OURNAL OF THE S OCIOLOGY OF S ELF -K NOWLEDGE , VII, 1, W INTER 2009 petencies that they could share with others, and assumed the posture of being learners themselves, as they encountered new ideas and innovations that they realized could enhance their own work as scholars and teachers. The process was much more organic and free-form than the structured workshops and “packaged” training sessions that are often offered to faculty through more conventional, functionallyoriented faculty development programs. This more organic, grassroots approach allowed faculty members’ own needs to be foremost in the development of related initiatives and programs. This study reports on the impact of NECIT faculty development seminars on the initial set of faculty participants at seven colleges and universities. First, we examine the historical and contemporary context of faculty roles and faculty development. Next, we provide an overview of the structures and processes associated with the NECIT faculty development seminars. After describing our research methods, we present findings related to the impact of the seminar in three areas: 1) how participants engaged in pedagogical change, 2) how participants’ knowledge of students and student learning was enhanced, and 3) how participants developed as faculty leaders and change agents on their own campuses. We conclude with some recommendations for how faculty development programs can become more focused on the human needs of faculty members themselves. II. F ACULTY ROLES : H ISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES In this section, we outline some of the broad historical and contemporary contours that shape the landscape of faculty development programs in the United States. The goal, here, is not to provide a comprehensive treatment of the historical evolution of the academic profession. Instead, we begin by noting that several distinctive features of the contemporary model of academic work began to emerge in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. In particular, the structure of academic work shifted from a model of generalist faculty who taught a broad range of subjects, to a highly specialized faculty who were trained in specific disciplinary traditions (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). Distinct academic disciplines with their own learned societies began to emerge in the 1880s and 1890s. Moreover, during this time, increasing numbers of U.S. faculty received advanced graduate training in German universities. Some academics attempted to replicate the German model by founding new institutions in the U.S. that focused solely on research and graduate education, to the exclusion of undergraduate instruction. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, were founded along those lines, but the German model was not widely adopted in the U.S. Instead, research and graduate education functions were grafted on to existing institutions. Faculty at these institutions became responsible not only for undergraduate education, but also for graduate programs and research productivity within their academic disciplines. The growing level of specialization and professional expertise associated with academic work generated calls for academic freedom and for more extensive involvement in institutional decisions regarding curriculum and faculty appointments. In the early decades of the twentieth century, tenure systems became more prevalent as a means to ensure and protect academic freedom. The linkage between tenure and academic freedom was formalized in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure published by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). 4 J AY R. D EE AND C HERYL J. D ALY H UMAN A RCHITECTURE : J OURNAL OF THE S OCIOLOGY OF S ELF -K NOWLEDGE , VII, 1, W INTER 2009 The post-World War II era represents another key turning point in the development of the academic profession. Financial assistance through the GI Bill and other forms of access resulted in significant enrollment growth following the war. The number of faculty members also grew significantly in this era. Schuster and Finkelstein (2006) note that this expansion “nearly doubled the ranks of college faculty between 1940 and 1960, from about 120,000 to 236,000 and almost doubled again in a single decade, 1960-70, from 236,000 to 450,000” (p. 33). Concurrently, the U.S. government became much more directly involved in funding academic research, given its potential for military and economic applications. The growth of large-scale, government-funded science enabled faculty members to control revenue streams that were separate from institutional budgets, thus giving them some degree of autonomy from the administrators who controlled those budgets, which in turn reinforced notions of academic freedom. But the proliferation of research products from these endeavors also solidified within the academic profession a positivist, scientific-methods model of knowledge generation, which affected publication priorities not only within the natural sciences, but also in the social sciences, arts and humanities, and professional fields. Put simply, empirical research became the coin of the realm. Enrollment growth and increasing levels of role specialization within the professoriate led to attempts within the various states to rationalize the system of higher education. The California master plan of 1960, for example, is viewed as a seminal effort to differentiate the missions of public higher education institutions. The University of California system was assigned a prominent role in graduate education and research, the California State University system was to focus on undergraduate and professional education in fields such as education and nursing, and the community college system was to provide both practical training for direct employment as well as opportunities for students to engage in coursework that would prepare them for transfer into the four-year system. Many other states engaged in similar attempts at mission differentiation, yet the prevailing model of the “ideal” institution was that of the research university. College leaders, often with strong endorsements from their faculties, engaged in efforts to appropriate many of the features of the leading research universities. These normative pressures led to extensive institutional isomorphism in which many previously teaching-oriented institutions became more research focused (Morphew, 2002). These efforts were frequently formulated by college leaders and trustees as strategic plans for institutions to rise to higher levels within the Carnegie classification system where the research university was viewed as the pinnacle of success. Conversely, few efforts were made to prepare future faculty for the types of institutions in which they would more likely find employment. As Schuster and Finkelstein (2006) note, by 1969, fewer than half (48.3%) of all full-time faculty were employed by research and doctoral universities. The majority were employed in other institutional types that did not emphasize empirical research, such as teaching-oriented public universities and community colleges. Yet graduate programs continued to focus on preparing future faculty as researchers, largely to the exclusion of their future roles as teachers. The effects of this dramatic restructuring of faculty work were not realized fully for several decades. As Schuster and Finkelstein (2006) note, “During the first several decades following World War II, faculty members spent a majority of their work time, as much as two-thirds, directly engaged in instructional duties.” By 1987, however, “the portion of their effort deI NNOVATIVE M ODELS FOR O RGANIZING F ACULTY D EVELOPMENT P ROGRAMS 5 H UMAN A RCHITECTURE : J OURNAL OF THE S OCIOLOGY OF S ELF -K NOWLEDGE , VII, 1, W INTER 2009 voted to teaching declined to about half of their overall effort” (p. 89). The effects of this transformation were also directly observable through the increasing number of graduate teaching assistants, part-time faculty, and adjunct faculty who were teaching undergraduate courses, especially to firstyear students. During the 1980s, public stakeholders began to express significant concerns about faculty accountability to the teaching missions of their institutions. Some critics used Alvin Gouldner’s (1957) distinction between cosmopolitan and local orientations to characterize faculty in terms of divided loyalties between their employing institutions and their academic disciplines. Cosmopolitan workers are “those low on loyalty to the employing organization, high on commitment to specialized role skills, and likely to use an outer reference group” (Hoy & Miskel, 1991, p. 147) such as a learned society associated with one’s academic field. These faculty would tend to concentrate their efforts on producing high quality research that is valued by relevant external referents. In contrast, workers with local orientations are “high on loyalty to the employing organization, low on commitment to specialized role skills, and likely to use an inner reference group” (p. 147) such as colleagues within one’s own academic department. The argument in the 1980s was that faculty values and preferences had become much more heavily weighted toward the cosmopolitan orientation, at the expense of local institutional initiatives related to teaching and learning. The prevailing counterargument was that high quality research actually enhanced and strengthened teaching. The assumption was that good teaching was inseparable from rigorous research; good research informs, enriches, and keeps current both undergraduate and graduate teaching practices (Jencks & Riesman, 1968). In fact, the alleged synergistic connection between teaching and research was frequently asserted as an ex post facto rationale for grafting research and graduate education functions onto existing U.S. undergraduate institutions, in contrast to the German model which did not commingle undergraduate education and research. Many studies were conducted in the 1980s and 1990s to assess the relationship between faculty research productivity and their teaching performance. The preponderance of these studies revealed no correlation, or only modest positive relationships between teaching and research performance. These findings led higher education researcher Ken Feldman (1987) to proclaim that “an obvious interpretation of these results is either that, in general, the likelihood that research productivity actually benefits teaching is extremely small or that the two, for all practical purposes, are essentially unrelated” (p. 227). A slightly more optimistic interpretation is that at least the growing preponderance of effort toward research had not significantly damaged undergraduate instruction; there was not, after all, evidence of widespread negative effects. Nevertheless, by the late 1980s, higher education leaders and policymakers were increasingly concerned about the structure of faculty work roles. III. R EFORM AND RESTRUCTURING