Tenure decisions typically hinge on a candidate’s research contributions, providing an incentive for even the most dedicated instructors to prioritize scholarship over teaching.
A new fellowship program aims to help “rising postsecondary education stars” bolster their commitment to teaching. The Course Hero-Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching will provide each of five professors who “love teaching” and are “making their mark as exceptional researchers” with a one-time award of $40,000, according to the announcement.
Course Hero, a company that provides tutoring and other study aids online, was looking for a way to highlight the role good teaching plays in student success, said Andrew Grauer, its co-founder and chief executive. Through conversations with professors, the company identified the period after tenure-track faculty members complete their midpoint institutional reviews as a point when pressure to focus entirely on research is especially high. The award is intended to help such professors devote more energy to their teaching “so they don’t do one at the cost of the other,” Grauer said.
Recipients might, for instance, use the award to pay someone else to complete mundane tasks required for their research, freeing up more time, said Stephanie Hull, executive vice president and chief operating officer at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Among the benefits of supporting faculty members at this point in their trajectories: They’re likely to remain on campus for decades to come, perhaps influencing their peers. The Woodrow Wilson foundation administers a couple of other awards for faculty members at this important juncture in their careers, Hull said. With the new teaching-focused fellowship, she said, “we’re betting on people who will be, once they’re tenured, still committed to that.”
Strong candidates “can serve as replicable teaching models for other educators,” among other things, according to the announcement.
The fellowship program is unusual in both its generosity and focus. One well-known teaching recognition, the U.S. Professors of the Year Awards Program, run in partnership by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, awarded recipients $5,000 — and was discontinued last year.
The approach being taken by the new fellowship sounds promising to KerryAnn O’Meara, a professor of higher education at the University of Maryland who’s an expert on faculty careers. “This award is an excellent way to acknowledge teaching and research roles do not have to be a zero-sum game,” she wrote in an email.
Tenure-track professors are sometimes given well-meaning advice to downplay their commitment to teaching, O’Meara said, but she thinks the fellowship would only be an asset in a tenure decision. “Given the emphasis today on student success and learning outcomes, the higher expectations for teaching portfolios and overall teaching performance, and that the award will be a substantial recognition given out to only a very few individuals,” O’Meara wrote, “I think it can help change the narrative and showcase the work of exceptional teachers and scholars.”
Applications for the fellowship are due April 30. Winners will be chosen by a selection panel and announced in July.
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
