Thanks, Brian and Suzanne for the insightful comments. I have been thinking about Brian’s point about how little we actually get to draw on each other’s collective resources and how difficult it is to find time to get together and work on projects to help elevate our teaching. I agree that I benefit just from the synergy of simply interacting with other people and the energy that we bring to the collaboration.
But this gets me to thinking about the larger issue of time and how much time it is that we have that can be devoted to projects that center on teaching. The reason we don’t get together more, or have more time to work on our projects, is because our group members are all involved in other kinds of research projects. Kurt and I have have had a number of conversations about priorities and it seems to me that there is a real divide between people whose job is primarily about teaching (lecturers) and those who are expected to be conducting research, doing service, and teaching. The advice that assistant and associate professors get from pretty much everywhere is that you must spend your time on research. As long as the teaching is solid, time spent working on improvement would be much better spent writing articles for submission to journals, etc. I know that some people turn their teaching experiences into academic publications, but for most of us that isn’t realistic or a coherent part of our larger research agenda.
so, my quandary is, how can teaching innovation become more relevant for tenure track professors who depend on research for promotion? It seems that teaching will always be low on the totem pole as long as these other demands are ebing held in higher regard. Is the pICT program something that benefits our lecturers more than t/tt faculty? what can t/tt faculty gte out ofthis program that can be implemented quickly and without the significant ramp-up time that trades off with research time? Would it make sense to have a different program for the two groups? The demands and expectations are so vastly different (to me) that I have a hard time seeing the time that some lecturers put into their projects as realistic for me, or others at a similar place in their career. Its; frustrating that this kind of work counts for so little in the big scheme, when it feels really important to me.
I don’t have any answers yet, but this is what i have been dwelling on….
5 responses so far ↓
We’ve been talking seriously about this issue since last year. One answer: The stipends for publishing and presenting. Fellows have begun presenting and publishing in their fields on teaching (Beth Pollard, History; Gary Girty, Geology; Kathy Williams, Biology; Mark Laumakis, Psych; Adisa Alkebulan, Africana Studies) These folks are tenured, tenure track faculty and lecturer, just to exemplify that professionals at various points in their careers, do make teaching an scholarly endeavor.
It’s a structural and cultural issue we’d like to help change, and see that happening in part at the departmental level. Have a chat with Beth Pollard, who’s also tenure track. She might shed some light on her process.
For me, this is an issue that hits close to home. I think there are some misplaced priorities at SDSU in terms of the relative emphasis placed on research within one’s discipline versus the development of excellence in teaching (and perhaps research about teaching, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning).
As a lecturer, I have enjoyed the lack of pressure to “publish or perish.” Freed up from these demands, I have been able to focus copious amounts of time on becoming an excellent teacher. By all accounts, I’ve become pretty good at that. Nevertheless, I have always been troubled by the “second class” status that either overtly or in a more subtle way is attached to research about teaching and learning. Often times, such research is not considered to be “real research” (whatever that means).
Let me put it this way: I have a doctorate in clinical psychology. With this degree, I can do research, I can teach, and I can do clinical practice. I have done all three. For me, teaching is far and away the most rewarding of these activities, for a number of reasons. Primary among them, however, is the effect size that I can witness as a teacher vs. as a researcher or as a clinician. By this I mean that I can tell that my efforts are making a difference when I teach. Students come in not knowing much about Psychology and they leave my course, by all indications, knowing a heck of a lot more. In contrast, in my prior research life and in my prior clinical life, I always scratched my head at the end of each day and wondered, “Did anything I did today really make a difference?” When I teach, I know that I’m making a difference.
So, I’d like to see more support and resources be made available at SDSU for the development of excellence in teaching. After all, that’s where we as professors will make the largest impact, isn’t it? (Seriously, how many people actually read our articles in the “Journal of Blah-Blah-Blah?”)
In my dreams, I envision a growing body of excellent teachers who research and identify effective teaching practices and receive commensurate support and recognition from the administration at SDSU. Can we get there?
Mark has summed up the problem rather succinctly. This is a rather large, and institutionally created and reified, issue. Excellence in teaching is simply not valued in the same way that research and publication are. It’s frustrating to have your priorities dictated by someone else. I don’t think the solution is doing research about teaching because that just seems to add an extra burden to digging into teaching innovation (not that we should’t share our experiences, I just don’t want study it). This seesms to me, along with the question of our students access to technology, one of the biggest hurdles that the pICT program is going to have to address in the future.
[...] Working with faculty and lecturers, we have the opportunity to see how their professional landscapes often differ. Or do they? All of our Fellows are committed to teaching regardless of their professional status. That’s a given. But how what we do map onto the RTP process? Or time commitments, when for example lecturers teach at other institutions as is the case with several fellows? Join the conversation HERE. [...]
Val takes a valid stand: Why should she feel compelled to making teaching in her field a research agenda? In fact the vast majority of our publication/presentation stipends have been used to present not publish. There’s an interesting irony there perhaps. We’re the #1 small research university and also becoming known for teaching innovations.
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