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From: Beth McMurtrie
Subject: Teaching: When disruption is perpetual, it’s time to think differently about work
This week I:
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This week, I:
As a new academic year starts, let’s take a moment to consider some of the ways in which instructors can do more than just survive another challenging semester. Teaching, as we’ve been reporting since the pandemic hit, has become exhausting and demoralizing for many instructors, even as they look for ways it can be a source of challenge and inspiration.
Given that workloads remain high and budgets remain tight, what can professors and their supporters do? I’ve been reading through some recent essays to gather ideas, a few of which I’ve highlighted here. I’d also like to hear from readers about what’s worked for you. Credit to Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Emily Pitts Donahoe, Kevin Gannon, Isis Artze-Vega, and others for these suggestions. (You can click on their names to read their pieces.)
Let’s start out with a couple of steps that faculty members can take on their own.
Set your boundaries. In a recent Chronicle advice piece, Gannon writes about how faculty members must create an environment in which they can thrive, not just survive. To that end, he posits a straightforward but hard-to-master idea: setting boundaries. Gannon suggests faculty look to Karen Costa’s scope-of-practice strategies to get started.
“Drawn from the work of therapists, counselors, and other mental-health professionals, the scope-of-practice framework asks you to list the types of work you are qualified to do and the tasks you are responsible for, and then focus on the things that sit at the intersection of both categories,” writes Gannon, a history professor at Queens University of Charlotte and director of its Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence. “Those duties — and only those — fall within your scope of practice.”
Professors have already started to move in this direction.
“I hear from many faculty and their leaders that people have placed limits on what they are and are not willing to do for and at work,” wrote Rebecca Pope-Ruark, director of the office of faculty professional development at the Georgia Institute of Technology, when I reached out to get her take on support for faculty well-being.
Pope-Ruark, author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, said that since 2020 she has noticed that more academics are willing to protect their mental and physical health. “Faculty are much more likely now to say, ‘You know what, my entire life doesn’t actually revolve around this place, and I like that it doesn’t. I like having a life. Hobbies. More time with my family.’ And that’s an active choice they are now making in ways they might not have in the past. They still do their teaching and their research, but for many they aren’t giving it every last drop in their bucket, and that’s OK.”
Find community. Professors often don’t like to share their teaching struggles. But you don’t have to go it alone. When classes went online in 2020, for example, many faculty members found strength in their shared struggles to learn new technical skills and pedagogical strategies. The same could also be true of figuring out generative AI. Does your department or college have a learning community that you could join? Gannon lists other options, too, such as writing groups and communities of practice.
Beyond that, there are several ways administrators and teaching centers can support instructors. Here are a few approaches.
Support teacher-centered teaching. This idea comes from Lindsay Masland, interim executive director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at Appalachian State University. Teaching-centered teaching represents the overlap between student-centered teaching practices and a faculty member’s “pedagogical values and personal context,” such as class size and job status, Cavanagh writes in a Chronicle advice piece on how to address backlash to the demands of student-centered teaching.
In her essay, Cavanagh, the senior associate director for teaching and learning at Simmons University, encourages teaching reformers to avoid criticizing routine forms of teaching. Multiple-choice exams and lectures are not inherently harmful or dangerous to students, she writes, and in a particular context they may work best. No good, in short, comes from shaming professors for choosing the pedagogical strategies they think are appropriate for their classrooms.
Focus workshops and events on well-being. Teaching centers have seen a dropoff in workshop attendance post-pandemic (with the exception, perhaps, of those focused on AI). This suggests that professors have reached their limit with trying new classroom strategies. So why not create sessions focused instead on faculty well-being? The University of Mississippi’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning is doing just that, writes Donahoe, its associate director of instructional support. One session this fall, for example, will talk about how instructors can reclaim joy and purpose in their classrooms. And a faculty reading group will focus on addressing burnout.
Make faculty wellness a priority. In a recent LinkedIn post, Artze-Vega, college provost and vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College, described how and why her division decided to make faculty well-being its sole priority this academic year. This means, Artze-Vega writes, that any new work proposed must be evaluated in light of people’s “need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness at work,” and that the college is committed to better understanding burnout, as well as digging into the ways in which faculty work is both “elusive and evolving.”
Pope-Ruark doesn’t see many institutions focusing on faculty burnout. To do that, she wrote, “they’d have to figure out how to reduce the chronic stress and expectation escalation academics experience due to things like the constant need to fund research and students with external grants, being beholden to student evaluations as the only measure of teaching effectiveness at many places, and being constrained by the political environment and whims of local, state, and federal politicians.”
But where she does see movement is in the area of well-being, like what Valencia College is doing. “Some places, like my institution, are adding a culture of well-being to its strategic plan. Others are hiring chief well-being officers to focus on the culture broadly. Others are looking internally for ideas and actions.”
And while it’s true that heavy faculty workloads seem almost a given, she notes, “It’s often a values misalignment that hurts the most — institutions espousing values that faculty don’t see them enacting, at least not toward them and their health and well-being. Being constantly asked to do more with less and less, to give more and more of themselves to students and students’ well-being, to pick up more of the administrative load as admin positions are cut. They simply can’t do everything they are being asked to do and stay well.”
We would like to hear from readers on the topic of faculty well-being. What are you planning to do differently this semester? Are you pulling back on service? Are you setting boundaries with students? Are you joining learning communities? Are you organizing workshops or other events that focus on faculty well-being? Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
- Beth
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