Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Unfamiliar Topics

I discuss teaching as contingent faculty in the small college environment, having taught multiple topics outside of my research area. My essay focuses on resources for course preparation and how teaching unfamiliar topics can enhance one’s pedagogical practices. Teaching an unfamiliar topic is an opportunity to thinking creatively about learning activities and to model lifelong learning.

Learning to Swim

As institutions of higher learning increasingly rely on contingent faculty members to carry the load of required courses, more and more new contingent faculty find themselves thrown into the “deep end” of teaching in areas outside of their fields. By focusing on broader learning goals, appealing to the power of story, and emphasizing real-life application by incorporating experiential learning, these faculty members can make almost any course feel like a course they are qualified to teach. Furthermore, they can allow their wonder at learning new material inspire students to embrace unfamiliar topics as well.

Embodying Solidarity on Catholic Campuses: The Case of Worker Justice

This chapter focuses on the situation of adjunct faculty, the largest group of contingent faculty. The chapter presents what the author perceives to be the unjust, dire circumstances of these faculty members. The author appeals to the ideals of solidarity, justice, the option for the poor, the common good, and the workers’ rights tradition of Catholic social teaching to evaluate the adjunct situation. The situation of adjunct faculty is presented vis-à-vis expenditures on athletics and salaries of the highest paid university employees to raise the question of mission-oriented priorities. After describing the situation on the ground, the author argues that complicity in the unjust treatment of adjuncts at Catholic universities glaringly violates CST. Moreover, perpetuating this situation by appealing to its purported inevitability, budgetary constraints, or the excuse that “everybody else is doing it” seriously undercuts the mission of Catholic institutions of higher learning. After critiquing the efforts to prevent adjunct faculty from forming unions, which exacerbates an already unjust situation and runs the risk of causing scandal, the author turns to some of the positive steps taken at Catholic colleges and universities to improve the situation of adjunct faculty.

Staffing the Higher Education Classroom

We discuss some centrally important decisions faced by colleges and universities regarding how to staff their undergraduate classrooms. We describe the multitasking problem faced by research-intensive institutions and explore the degree to which there may be a trade-off between research and teaching excellence using matched student-faculty-level data from Northwestern University. We present two alternative measures of teaching effectiveness—one capturing “deep learning” and one capturing “inspiration”—and demonstrate that neither is correlated with measures of research success. We discuss the move toward contingent faculty in US universities and show that on average, contingent faculty outperform tenure-line faculty in the introductory classroom, a pattern driven by the lowest-performing instructors according to our measures. We also present some of the ways in which instructor gender, race, and ethnicity might matter. Together, these pieces of evidence show that several institutional objectives associated with staffing undergraduate classrooms may be in tension with one another.