Professional development is more important than ever for adjunct professors at community colleges, according to speakers here at the annual meeting of the League for Innovation in the Community College.
Part-time instructors teach more than half of all classes and students at community colleges but often feel only a flimsy connection to their institutions, where they’re often hired at the last minute and offered little or no job security beyond that semester.
At the same time, they are increasingly in the front lines as the colleges struggle to meet mandates to improve completion rates, overhaul remediation, and teach growing numbers of at-risk students. Many adjuncts have far less experience than their full-time colleagues, yet they are teaching some of the most challenging students, including many who are the first in their families to pursue a higher education.
Colleges that have been criticized for years for treating part-time faculty members as second-class citizens are realizing that the institutions’ success, and continued financial support, may depend on creating a more supportive environment for their growing ranks of adjuncts, speakers said at a session here on Wednesday.
Part-time or contingent instructors teach 58 percent of community-college classes and 53 percent of their students, according to a report last year by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.
“If we don’t engage the adjuncts at least as much as we engage the full-time faculty, we’re never going to reach the goals that have been set out for us,” said Bill Lamb, vice president for academic affairs at Kirkwood Community College, in Iowa.
Connecting with students is particularly hard, he said, for adjuncts who are on the campus only one night or two days a week. One strategy the college might use to help them is to set up a separate Facebook page or blog to encourage communication.
Steps that can help adjusts feel more engaged include making sure they’re represented in faculty governance, textbook, and hiring committees, speakers said.
On some campuses, full-time faculty members serve as mentors to adjuncts, but at Estrella Mountain Community College, in Arizona, adjuncts mentor one another.
Jennifer Copeland, an adjunct professor of communications at Estrella Mountain, described how she shares teaching strategies and develops interdisciplinary lessons with an instructor she mentors, who teaches English as a second language.
Estrella Mountain also offers adjuncts an online orientation they can refer to throughout the year, with tips for the first day of classes and other milestones in the calendar and guidelines on how to identify students who are academically struggling or to deal with those who are unruly.
Comparing Notes
If everything is bigger in Texas, so are the challenges for Lone Star College, a Houston-area system where enrollment grew by 68 percent, to 95,000, from 2007 to 2014.
The influx included growing numbers of low-income and minority students, most needing remedial, or developmental, courses. Meanwhile, Texas, like the rest of the country, was experimenting with a variety of approaches to remedial education, trying to improve success rates while lawmakers were tying dwindling state appropriations to completion and other performance measures.
“When you have success rates of 50 percent or less in some developmental classes, you have to provide opportunities for adjuncts to compare notes” on strategies that work, Katherine B. Persson, president of Lone Star’s Kingwood campus, said after the session.
To help encourage those connections, adjunct professors are invited to attend department meetings that are scheduled during “dead times” between classes, she said, and some meetings are held in the evenings to accommodate those with other jobs.
A “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work when engaging adjuncts, said Judy Korb, executive vice president for instruction and operations at Johnson County Community College, in Kansas.
“Some of our faculty want to be there, actively participating on campus, while others with full-time jobs can’t do that,” she said. “Creating a system that allows everyone to be as engaged and informed as they want to be is a challenge.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
