Sessional academics undertake a large proportion of teaching and marking and are essential for current university structures and student success. Employment of sessional academics has primarily been driven by cost savings and flexibility in hiring practices for employers, in addition to managing academic staffing shortages. Despite the increase in…

Despite decades of research indicating that active learning techniques (ALTs) are more effective than traditional lecture, ALTs are not widely implemented in STEM undergraduate classrooms. While ALT implementation is happening in a number of disciplines, including the geosciences, most STEM teaching remains lecture-based. Understanding the…

The shift to online learning that occurred in March of 2020 created an unprecedented period of intense work for faculty and sessional instructors at the postsecondary level. This shift necessitated courses be adapted under short timelines, new technology be integrated into course design, and teaching strategies and assessment methods be adapted…

To be successful, junior faculty must properly manage their time in the face of expanding responsibilities. One such responsibility is supervising undergraduate research projects. Student research projects (either single or multi-student) can be undertaken as a full-time summer experience, or as a part-time academic year commitment. With many…

This study details the experiences of new faculty in tenure-track positions without prior experience in academia beyond the post-doctoral level. Semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted using phenomenological methodology with six faculty members meeting the criteria at a mid-sized, public institution in the southeastern United States…

Researchers have identified some of the factors that inhibit the success of mothers in academia, including overt and covert discrimination, inequitable teaching and service assignments, and the lack of policies that support combining motherhood and academic work. Pretenure mothers are particularly vulnerable, as they attempt to balance increasing…

This article examines motivations for faculty involvement in shared governance. Faculty members at a mid-sized, Midwestern university were surveyed to assess reasons for serving and leading in the shared governance process. Five predominant themes were identified as affecting faculty participation in university governance. The five predominant…

Recent scholarship has underscored the need for a new paradigm in university foreign language programs and put forward literacy as a necessary curricular goal (e.g., Byrnes, Maxim, & Norris, 2010; Kern, 2000; Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016; Swaffar & Arens, 2005). In light of the high percentage of courses they teach, non-tenure-track…

Administrators of schools of social work are paying more attention to the changing roles and types of faculty in their institutions, particularly given the surge of non-tenure-track faculty in academia. This topic is timely as social work grapples with the divergent roles, structure, and demographic characteristics of non-tenure-track faculty…

The purpose of this investigation was to identify College of Education (COE) faculty members' perceptions of motivators and barriers to grant writing at a public university in the South, to compare the university's COE faculty perceptions to previously published survey results of Colleges of Education at Research I institutions, and to compare…