Tbers,
Hope to see many of you tomorrow, March 10, in the TLTC, Milne Library for a
demo and discussion of the Personal Response System - "Who Wants to Be a
Millionare" type technology that faculty can use to get feedback from
students during class.
The posting below is from a monthly series called Carnegie Foundation
Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues
are produced by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
<<http://www.carnegiefoundation.org>. The Foundation invites your response
at: [log in to unmask]
With respect to the posting below (February, 2004), Carnegie Foundation
president, Lee Shulman notes:
In this month's Perspectives, Mary Taylor Huber and Rebecca Cox look at
one of the most vexing issues facing education at all levels--incentive
systems that impede serious scholarly work on teaching and learning. The
essay stems from Mary's most recent book, Balancing Acts: The
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers, published by
Carnegie and the American Association for Higher Education. The book is
based on case studies of four faculty members at doctoral
universities--an engineer, a chemist, a psychologist and literary
scholar. These teacher/scholars have, despite the career risks, achieved
academic prominence for their work on teaching in their disciplines.
Huber and Cox explore whether these experiences can serve as harbingers
of a new era in the evaluation of academic faculty or will simply remain
anomalies in an otherwise unchanged academic landscape.
FACULTY EVALUATION - WORK THAT MATTERS SHOULD BE WORK THAT COUNTS
By Mary Taylor Huber and Rebecca Cox
The hallmark of academic freedom is the opportunity it affords faculty
members to pursue innovative or unconventional scholarship. But what happens
when innovative scholarship is hard to judge by the standard metrics of
faculty evaluation?
Consider the scholarship of teaching and learning. Over the past decade or
so, inquiry into college teaching has become more than just a specialist's
concern. Across the country, teaching initiatives in higher education are
gaining visibility, innovation is on the upswing, and mainstream faculty are
consulting the pedagogical literature, looking critically at education in
their subjects, researching the ins and outs of student learning in their
classrooms, and using what they are discovering to improve their teaching.
Many are also making this work public in order to benefit from peer review
and contribute to understanding and better practice in the teaching and
learning of their
fields.
Yet these extraordinary efforts are not always rewarded when it is time for
a tenure, promotion, or merit review. In part, this is because using the
scholarship of teaching and learning for purposes of academic advancement is
so new. But the pioneers are also finding that the "standard
metrics"--despite their apparent objectivity--can make unfamiliar kinds of
scholarship look substandard instead. The conferences and journals in which
they present their work may not be
well known to departmental colleagues. The funding may be less generous; the
external reviewers less prestigious; the methods might seem soft.
Pedagogical and curricular reform projects are often highly collaborative,
aimed at improving practice. They may also draw on literature from other
fields, and involve unusual products, like course portfolios or new media
materials. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that successful teaching
innovations often circulate without the innovator's name attached--making it
hard to trace and lay claim to the impact of one's work.
This is not just another case of the teaching versus research debate.
Faculty who bring their disciplinary expertise to community development have
also had white-knuckle experiences gaining academic recognition for their
work. And in many fields, research itself is changing to include
more multi-disciplinary, collaborative work oriented to solving real-world
problems, and resistant to the standard evaluative practices of academe.
Clearly, this is all work that matters, and there is a lot at stake in
finding ways to ensure that it is work that counts.
For the past few years, we have been studying the careers of four research
university faculty who have achieved national prominence in the scholarship
of teaching and learning in their fields. Each was warned by caring and
responsible mentors that they were taking risks in treating teaching so
seriously. But they persisted, were tenured and promoted to associate
professor, and so far two have further advanced to full professor. And their
stories now circulate in their scholarly
communities as signs that the scholarship of teaching and learning can be
woven successfully into an academic career. That is the good news.
The bad news is what their experiences reveal about the faculty evaluation
strategies commonly used in American universities. Scholarship may be
changing, but evaluation continues to reward most
readily work that conforms to older norms. Many campuses have changed their
guidelines to encourage innovation, but whether this new work will really
count is a question that is now being answered case by case. People still
tell discouraging stories about faculty who take the risk
and find their careers derailed. But there is much to learn from the growing
number of scholars who succeed.
These more hopeful stories underline how important it is for faculty who
take up new kinds of scholarship to be strong advocates for what it is
they're doing and explain in every way possible why it is both
intellectually and professionally serious. But the primary responsibility
should not be borne by the most vulnerable. So the second lesson concerns
the responsibility of senior faculty and academic administrators who believe
in the work's value to support it as mentors, interlocutors, external
reviewers, and recommenders. There is also ample need for lobbying, policy
reform, and debate about standards that might strengthen the communities in
disciplines and on campus that understand, value, and reward such work.
The scholars we have worked with in our study, and many many more, are
helping to make teaching and learning in higher education an area that
advances through discussion and demonstration. They are showing that faculty
who are trained and committed to the standard subject matter and methods of
their fields and disciplines can use those same habits of mind to become
informed and inquiring college teachers. They are showing that their
students are benefiting from such work. And they are showing through the ups
and downs of their own academic lives that it is possible to make the
scholarship of teaching and learning a vital and viable part of an academic
career.
With good policy, good work, and good will, it appears, colleagues who care
can make faculty evaluation systems flexible enough to "see" and fairly
judge such unconventional kinds of scholarly work.
...............................
Mary Taylor Huber is a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, where she works with the Carnegie Academy for the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) and Carnegie's Initiatives in
Liberal Education. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Huber directed the
research program on Cultures of Teaching in Higher Education, which gave
birth both to Balancing Acts and to her co-edited volume, Disciplinary
Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning ( 2002). Huber is a
coauthor of Scholarship Assessed (1997), the Foundation's follow-on report
to Scholarship Reconsidered (Boyer, 1990), to which she also contributed.
Rebecca Cox is a research assistant for Carnegie's Cultures of Teaching
program, directed by Mary Huber. A Ph.D. candidate at University of
California Berkeley's School of Education, Cox's research interests center
around community college teaching, and include the organizational contexts
of faculty work and the dynamics of classroom-level teaching and learning.
Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers
is available for purchase online from AAHE Publications
(http://www.aahe.org/publications.htm) or by calling 301/645-6051. (AAHE;
February 2004; $24.50 (AAHE members) or $29.50 (nonmembers); paperback; 250
pages; ISBN 1-56377-065-2).
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