Adjunct Blog

What is leadership?

Sandi Van Lieu — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 15:17:06 -0700

“Leadership is influence nothing more and nothing less” (Maxwell, 2007, p. 11).

If leadership is influence, then as adjunct faculty members how can we build our influence in the classroom? The easiest way to describe this is by building our personal brand. Our brand has values and beliefs and leads us in all that do. However, many of us go…

Integrating Scholarship into Academic Life as an Adjunct

Sandi Van Lieu — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 15:02:48 -0700

What is Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?

“The scholarship of teaching is not merely teaching our scholarship. Nor is it simply teaching well... The scholarship of teaching means that we invest in our teaching the intellectual powers we practice in our research” (Bender & Grey, emphasis added).

Boyer’s Model of Scholarship is an…

Adjunct Faculty and Work Life Balance

Sandi Van Lieu — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 17:04:18 -0700

The idea of work life balance (WLB) is not a new topic, so I am not going to focus on what it is, and what the experts say in this discussion. What I want to focus on is what we can do as adjunct faculty to maintain our WLB, which is a focus between our non-work life, our full time work, and our adjunct faculty work. My colleague, Jones Loflin,…

How You See Your Adjunct Role in Your Relationships with Students

Sandi Van Lieu — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 09:11:06 -0700

The adjunct teaching profession receives lots of attention for a myriad of reasons. These include the growing usage of adjuncts in both ground and online modalities, concerns about teaching quality from tenured faculty members, and even fairness in compensation. Many times, adjunct faculty are referred to as “part-time teachers.” I think that…

An Adjunct Reflects on Scholarship

Sandi Van Lieu — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 13:25:18 -0700

As an adjunct faculty member, a mom, and a doctoral student, I have struggled with balancing my life and making room for everything. A typical afternoon of my thoughts looks like this:

My nine-year-old son needs money for band, and my twelve-year-old daughter needs a doctor physical to play school sports. She is growing so much her shoes never…

Updates: Fall 2015

Sandi Van Lieu — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 16:47:14 -0700

Welcome to a new fall semester! I’d like to highlight a few areas that might be of interest to you as you begin the new semester.

Fall Faculty Conference

*The fall faculty conference will be held the week of August 10. Faculty development will be holding workshops, such as faculty orientation, LoudCloud campus training, and using technology in…

This Summer...

Sandi Van Lieu — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 07:42:35 -0700

For ground adjunct faculty, the semester is about over. I would like to encourage everyone to consider spending the summer working on a research project. This could be anything from empirical research to reading articles about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

In addition, before you start you could take the new faculty workshop…

A Few Updates...

Sandi Van Lieu — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 06:45:52 -0700

*I enjoyed meeting many adjunct faculty at the Lunch and Learn last week. Look for more of these events from Faculty Development in the near future.

*There are some exciting things coming for adjuncts, including the adjunct advisory board, which you should've received an email about. Stay tuned!

*New on-demand workshops are coming soon from…

Teaching New Year’s Resolutions

Sandi Van Lieu — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 13:45:30 -0700

It's a new year, and with a new year often come "resolutions," or goals we would like to accomplish for the coming year. This concept of goal-setting or creating new habits can apply to teaching as well.

Research shows that while adjunct teachers are concerned about issues such as pay, benefits, and job security, most teach with determination and…

Balancing Time, Teaching, Family

Sandi Van Lieu — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 11:16:27 -0700

Adjunct faculty can be very busy individuals. They often teach on the side in addition to holding a full-time job ("American academic," 2010), or they teach multiple classes and sometimes for multiple schools (Caruth & Caruth, 2013).

Many adjuncts find themselves on a daily and weekly basis trying to juggle family (spouses, kids, parents,…