Facilitators’ Self-Study Of A Virtual Adjunct Faculty Self-Study Collaborative

ABSTRACT

A growing number of universities are expanding programs with increased use of adjunct faculty. This research describes our experience developing and enacting a low-resource, scalable peer-to-peer program of research and professional development for adjunct faculty. This transdisciplinary adjunct self-study collaborative simultaneously targeted our understanding of facilitating self-study communities, and the transformation of individual teaching in the service of enhanced student learning while working to create a professional network for adjunct faculty. The study blends existing understanding of facilitating self-study research communities while further understanding the use of critical friends to engage faculty in a more substantive fashion. Facilitating and supporting virtual critical friend collaboration while re-imagining facilitator and participant roles, responsibilities, and expectations are discussed. As universities increasingly employ adjunct faculty, collaborative, cross-disciplinary work has strong potential to cohesively improve teaching in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional development
• higher education
• self-study methodology
• adjunct faculty
• online learning communities

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the College of Education and Human Development and the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning. Our gratitude to Paula Cristina Azevedo, Arvinder Johri, Margret Hjalmarson, and Lesley Smith who joined us as facilitators in designing and enacting the project. We thank doctoral research assistants Lorraine Goldberg and Andrew Vardas-Doane for their important contributions to this study. Our sincere appreciation to each adjunct faculty member who participated in the collaborative.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning, GMU [NA]; College of Education and Human Development, GMU [Seed Grant].