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 excellent reference for adjunct instructors. This model highlights four types of scholarship: Discovery, Integration, Application, and Teaching. Adjunct…

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, discusses getting things done, by looking at the three rings of our personal circus: work, relationships, and self-time, and how we can get things done…

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 particular labeling is especially pejorative.

While many adjunct faculty do maintain secondary jobs, this is not all that different from research…

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 fit and she needs new ones ASAP. My husband has errands he needs me to run because he’s working late. Dinner needs to be made, and the kids have…

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 the classroom. There will be several activities going on to kick-off the new school year, including scheduled campus tours. Check your email for…

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 on scholarship. It won't take long, and will give you an overview of types of scholarship, why it's important, and how you can make a time plan for…

*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 Faculty Development.

*We are still looking to highlight adjuncts and for writers for our newsletter and/or blog. Please email me if you're interested…

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 enthusiasm because they enjoy the profession, the students, and/or the subject they teach ("American academic," 2010; Caruth & Caruth, 2013).

On…

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, etc…), work, teaching, scholarship and/or degree work, side-jobs (whether or not related to academia), and hobbies, downtime, and/or volunteer work.

As…