Balancing Acts: Tenure-Track Faculty in Learning Communities
Learning communities aren't just for students. Working together, faculty grapple with the familiar competition between research and teaching.
By Andrew Hershberger, Paul Cesarini, Joseph Chao, Andrew Mara, Hassan Rajaei, and Dan Madigan
In summer 2003, two of the contributors to this article—Andrew Hershberger, a third-year assistant professor, and Dan Madigan, a faculty development director—met to talk about "balance" in the lives of junior faculty. How, for example, can faculty in the early stages of their careers better negotiate their roles as teachers and scholars at research universities? Many junior faculty members worry about the relative value of teaching and research for their annual reviews and, ultimately, for their tenure dossiers. They question what it means to be a researcher, colleague, teacher, and learner in a university environment. Our meeting resulted in the development of a new learning community for faculty intended to help junior faculty members achieve a balance between teaching and research that is rewarding not only for them, but also for their students and peers.
The Research and Teaching Faculty Learning Community encompasses multiple groups of eight to ten interdisciplinary tenure-track faculty members each who meet every other week at the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Bowling Green State University. Prospective members are asked to select a research project, preferably one critical to their tenure prospects, and describe how courses that they teach, or will teach, might benefit from better integration with the development and ultimate publication of that project. The group provides a forum for sharing ideas, networking, mentoring, and learning how to become more effective researchers and teachers.
In this article, one facilitator and four members of our group recount their struggles and successes with balancing research and teaching. They explain their perceptions of what they thought they would achieve in the learning community and what they indeed accomplished: the surprises, the risks, the research outcomes, and their overall growth as scholars, teachers, and colleagues.
Andrew Hershberger, Art History
In spring 2002, I had the good fortune to win a "content development" grant co-sponsored by the university's provost and its Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. One of the best things about that award was that it put me into a faculty learning community, a first for me. In retrospect, the learning community, which was on technology in the classroom, probably had a greater impact on my professional development than the funding did.
After two years with the group, I was so impressed with the learning community format, all that I had learned, and how much I enjoyed the collegial atmosphere that I suggested a new learning community on a topic critical to my future in academia. That summer, I wrote to Dan Madigan, director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. Citing BGSU's president and the university's new "Academic Plan for a Common Sustainable Vision" on the benefits of "interdependence" between teaching and scholarship, I proposed a "first book" learning community based on that connection. Like many of my assistant professor colleagues across the university, I was struggling to find time to get my dissertation revised and published while I was teaching. I knew that I had to become a more efficient instructor so that I could also be a researcher. As I saw it, this learning community would provide a space for junior faculty to share their writings with peers, get critical feedback, and encourage one another to publish their work amid their busy schedules.
Eventually, we created two such learning communities. We also broadened the focus of the groups, because the "book" format was not relevant to faculty outside the humanities. I served as a group facilitator, which involved setting the agenda, leading the discussions, and following up on the questions raised during our meetings. I was also a member, however, and had my own project—revising my dissertation manuscript—to focus on within the community. After sharing my book proposal with my colleagues and revising it substantially in response to their insightful comments, I was pleased when it gained the interest of a press. I have no doubt that the criticism and feedback I received from the community strengthened my proposal. In addition to the proposal, I also completed a related chapter forthcoming in an edited volume and two international conference presentations. The community thus worked out well for me, both as a facilitator and as a member working on my own research project.
Paul Cesarini, Technology
It is easy to see a faculty learning community through the prism of discourse communities. A typical discourse community is made up of a group of peers who share the same specialized knowledge or jargon within a field. Yet our faculty learning community is not a discourse community, because the group members come not only from different disciplines, but also from different departments, schools, and even colleges. The community in which I participated focused on exploring the connections between research and teaching and the all-too-frequent juggling act involved in making both a priority on the march toward tenure. It included faculty members from computer science, social services, history, general studies writing, art history, and technology education. We did not share a particular jargon beyond the broad terms generally associated with academia. All too often, when one of us spoke, the others did not have the background to respond with any degree of authority on the subject in question.
Yet this lack of a common frame of reference is what worked. As a group, we acted collectively as a sounding board for our discipline-specific research ideas. The diverse backgrounds we possessed served as an excellent catalyst for the discussion of topics from perspectives each of us might not have otherwise considered. We functioned as a fresh set of eyes and ears when the expert in question could no longer be objective because of the myopia that develops when one researches a topic for too long.
In applying to participate in the group, I sought an environment in which a certain amount of cross-pollination between and among disciplines would serve as a vehicle for professional development. I needed such a setting, because I am the only tenure-track faculty member in my program. The instructors and lecturers with whom I work are capable and knowledgeable in our field, but publishing and related professional development simply do not register on their radar screens. I needed an immediate environment that placed scholarly discourse at the forefront and that would motivate me to push forward professionally, toward tenure and toward becoming a more effective teacher in my traditional and Web-based classes.
I had already made steady progress toward these goals before joining the group. But I do not believe it is safe to assume that a particular level of publication, presentation, or related work is adequate for any given year. More is always better, regardless of the effort and stress involved. Since becoming part of the group, I have published in two peer-reviewed journals and three trade publications, and I have presented at one regional and one national conference.
I consider these accomplishments entirely inadequate, yet I know that our learning community is one of the primary reasons I have done even this much. Simply meeting every other week and being in an environment in which scholarship is a central focus has helped me tremendously. Hearing my colleagues talk about the publication of their latest books, chapters, and articles was a strong motivator for me. If I had nothing to report at one of our meetings, I felt a bit guilty, as if I were not pulling my own weight. The payoff, for me, was precisely the kind of environment I expected, with precisely the kind of results I desired.
Joseph Chao, Computer Science
I was in my second year as an assistant professor in computer science at BGSU when I joined the Research and Teaching Faculty Learning Community. My department offers bachelor's and master's degrees but not a doctorate. Although the department makes it clear that teaching is our first priority, it is equally clear that research is a major requirement for tenure and promotion.
Before I began teaching, I was in the software development industry for many years. I switched to academia partly because I enjoy teaching. For me, teaching is an art and a lifetime learning experience. All faculty know that it is important, and it also seems urgent on a daily basis. After all, we need to perform in front of our students every day. I soon found myself devoting most of my time to teaching. Although I am proud of being a good instructor, my tenure clock keeps ticking. I noticed that my research had fallen behind. Finding the time and energy to do research while running three courses each semester is not easy.
When I heard of the learning community, I felt less alone. Initially, I joined the community to learn from others how to find research time in my busy schedule. The learning community provided a wonderful place for sharing and support, and I adopted time-management ideas suggested by others in the community. Still, there are only twenty-four hours in a day no matter how you slice it. Juggling teaching, research, service, and a personal life is stressful.
After serious thought and discussion with the learning community, I concluded that if I could integrate my teaching with my research, I would kill two birds with one stone. At one point, our learning community read Craig E. Nelson's essay, "The Research-Teaching-Research Cycle: One Biologist's Experience," in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, published in 2004. Nelson argues that "the effects of our research on our teaching are much deeper and more important than simply keeping the course content current."
I felt that this assertion was true. I do research in software engineering, and my latest emphasis is on "agile software development," which involves exploring new me-thodologies for developing better software faster. To integrate my teaching and research, I decided on two approaches. One was to teach my research findings to students; the other was to research pedagogical issues.
By teaching students about my research, I hoped to stimulate student research that would help me meet my goals while keeping my courses current. I found myself radically modifying the core topics in my classes, requesting courses that are related to my research and even developing new courses. With my department's blessing, I have now taught many classes on software development and have offered a new graduate course as well.
My experiment succeeded in teaching new methodologies and practices in agile software development to upper-class and graduate students. Even in "Introduction to Programming," I injected some best practices for software development into the syllabus. My students' attitudes toward learning new methods have been overwhelmingly positive. I turned this pedagogical experience into a research paper for which I received credit. I now plan to introduce additional agile methods to students and to do more research on the pedagogy of teaching agile methods.
Educator Ernest Boyer documented the benefits of faculty learning communities in 1990 in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. For me and my tenure-track colleagues, our learning community provided an excellent forum in which to share experiences, knowledge, and even anxieties. It was a wonderful support group that kept us going without stressing us out. It encouraged thinking, and it constantly reminded me of the balance between research and teaching. I consider the Research and Teaching Faculty Learning Community to be a great faculty retention program for the university.
Andrew Mara, English
Entering a learning community as a brand-new faculty member can be an especially vertiginous experience. I was the only first-year professor in the Research and Teaching Faculty Learning Community when I joined it, and I was confronted with a different picture of my campus from the one I encountered during job negotiations with the Scientific and Technical Communication Program. The presence of a learning commu-nity underlined to me just how universities have trouble functioning as learning communities.
BGSU's English department hired me amid increased academic pressure to offer more online and distance education courses. I brought with me an expertise in electronic hypertext and its use as a medium for creating online communities, but I did not have any experience connecting with the academic community into which I had just relocated. The learning community offered an opportunity for me to direct my efforts in ways that count for faculty.
The application to the learning community requires all members to explain what they expected to accomplish. Naturally, and perhaps naively, I asserted that I wanted to work on my dissertation and make it publishable. A biweekly meeting with newer faculty seemed to offer the pressure of public humiliation without exposure to any permanent damage. I thought that benign advice from members of other departments who would probably not be involved in decisions about my tenure would help me sharpen my arguments.
The community certainly facilitated my earliest wish by inviting several university press editors to discuss the finer points of refining and pitching a book. During the semester, though, as we discussed balancing, or combining, research and teaching, I dropped my plan to rewrite the book while an article that combined my pedagogy and research slowly took shape in the background.
My fascination and extracurricular involvement with community planning, and with some of the more idealistic expressions of New Urbanist architecture, led me to unite my research on constructing online communities with my inclination toward communitarian learning. The learning community provided three basic building blocks that helped me write an article detailing this unification: benign pressure, an atmosphere focused on unifying teaching and learning, and a reciprocity that modeled what I seek in my research and my teaching.
In addition to the article, I also completed a successful grant proposal (for a digital studio uniting disparate programs in the English department), an article abstract that was accepted, and a well-received conference paper. I did manage to work on my dissertation during this period, but more important concerns emerged from the impetus to combine teaching and scholarship. I have signed up for the same learning community again, but I am now approaching my dissertation through a new lens. Because of my initial work last year, I know better how I might revise my manuscript in a way that benefits both me and my students.
Hassan Rajaei, Computer Science
As a new faculty member in computer science, I needed to learn how to be an effective teacher, how to establish my research agenda, and how to become a good faculty member. The university regards these three issues as teaching, research, and service.
I found that the university has an excellent infrastructure to support teaching and service, and that my department had developed routines to assist new faculty in the pursuit of these goals. As a result, we are well trained to serve students and the institution. We succeed in these areas, however, at a cost to our research productivity. Recognizing this imbalance had a significant impact on my research agenda.
I had a research plan that I wanted to implement at BGSU. The plan was best suited for a department with a PhD program through which graduate students could work on the details of my project—but my department did not offer the doctorate. To compensate, I prepared a plan to engage students in our master's program for research. The ideal, I thought, would be to chop the tasks into smaller projects and to assign them to one or two of these students. The typical length of each assignment would be one or two semesters, an approach mandated by the availability of student assistants.
It took me a year to realize that my original plan was not doable because of a lack of infrastructure. BGSU has traditionally been a teaching-oriented institution with an excellent record of achievement. The consequence of this focus for the faculty is twofold: relatively high teaching loads and great expectations for student learning. New faculty members trying to meet these requirements often find it difficult to be productive in research in the early years. Although a lack of productivity might be acceptable from certain standpoints, it could have a significant negative impact on a new faculty member's long-term career.
So I was forced to change my strategy. I joined the Research and Teaching Faculty Learning Community to find answers to my questions—for example, how could I integrate my research and teaching by getting students involved in my research? In our learning community, we concluded that students should be cultivated early on through our undergraduate research initiative. The students could be familiarized with the concept of scholarly work and its rewards at the beginning of their studies. The curriculum should allow investigations of certain topics as part of their assignments, and the topics should be relevant to the research of the instructor. Groups of two to four students could be assigned to each topic, and they could document and present their results in class.
From my first year on, I have employed variations of this method with excellent results, especially in upper-level settings. While pursuing this strategy, I was not aware of BGSU's academic plan, which actually promotes such activity. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that my initiatives were not at odds with the university's policies, but were advocated by them.
I believe I have found some answers in the learning community. Predictably, my peers in the community shared more or less the same concerns about how to establish a research agenda. I had to compromise and modify my goals. I was especially pleased that the leader of the learning community forwarded records of our discussions and concerns to the provost, so that the group's voice was heard by the right person.
The group thus worked like a double-edged sword. From one side, the community employed positive peer pressure to encourage scholarly activity, and it supplied practical tips and advice about how to accomplish the goals and agendas of its members. From the other side, the community forwarded the anxieties and concerns of its members to the top levels of the institution. It was interesting to find out that new faculty members and top university administrators share many of the same concerns. This commonality of interest should facilitate the implementation of the academic plan's policies and help to remove remaining obstacles on the road to success for BGSU's current tenure-track faculty.
Andrew Hershberger and Dan Madigan
Perhaps it is no coincidence that some answers to our questions about balancing faculty research and teaching can be found within a learning community of cohorts. Clearly, the five junior faculty members who contributed to this article benefited from investigating this issue and sharing their experiences within a group of peers. Learning communities—among both faculty and students—have become a mainstay at our university over the last several years. We have begun to appreciate their ability to help break down faculty isolation and loneliness. Junior faculty members particularly need colleagues who will help them achieve a desired sense of balance.
Entire universities were once regarded as large and interactive learning communities. Ironically, they gradually moved toward creating separate communities that acted as silos-places where faculty did their individual research without interacting with colleagues from across campus. Some junior faculty were even encouraged to see learning communities as a liability that would not contribute to the research that would lead to tenure.
In Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest Boyer rekindled a new interest in this phenomenon among university faculty and administrators. One of Boyer's guiding principles for developing and sustaining effective learning communities provided us with a solid foundation for our Research and Teaching Faculty Learning Community. We created a learning community that, as Boyer recommended, is "a place where the well-being of each member [is] sensitively supported and where service to others [is] encouraged." We also made possible an interdisciplinary collaboration of faculty representing different areas across the university. This notion underscores the value of learning communities that promote intersections, collaborations, and new ways of thinking.
In developing our community, we relied on our university's academic plan and the words of our president, who wrote: "We aspire to be the premier learning community in Ohio, and one of the best in the nation . . . through the interdependence of teaching, learning, scholarship, and service, and in academically challenging teaching, fully connected with research and public service."
Many tenure-track professors on our campus and others see the relationship between teaching and research as mostly antagonistic, because they are often so busy preparing for their classes that they must carve out their research agenda from the time left over. Our learning community therefore sought to strike a balance between research and teaching in the professional lives of faculty. The result was a truly dynamic learning community.
All of the contributors to this article are affiliated with Bowling Green State University. Andrew Hershberger is assistant professor of art history; Paul Cesarini is assistant professor of technology; Joseph Chao is assistant professor of computer science; Andrew Mara is assistant professor of English; Hassan Rajaei is associate professor of computer science; and Dan Madigan is professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology.
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