San Francisco State University
Vol. 4:5 February 2013

Focus on the Faculty    


By Dr. Robert Gabriner 
Director, Educational Leadership Program
([email protected]) 
 

    There are approximately forty faculty in the Ed.D. Faculty Group from five of the six colleges in the University. They serve as instructors in program courses and as members and chairs of dissertation committees. They represent an extraordinary diversity of disciplines and interests, and this multi-disciplinary mix has been one of the program's strong suits. Since the program first began in fall 2007, faculty has found common ground building an educational leadership program with equity and social justice at its core. The multi-disciplinary character of our faculty is one our signature differences with most other educational leadership programs both in and outside of California.

 

     To introduce the members of the Ed.D. Faculty Group, we have assembled a limited list of publications of book and papers published from 2011 to the present. You can access this list at the following link, edd.sfsu.edu/edd/facpublist 

 

     In keeping with our focus on faculty we asked Dr. Savita Malik to discuss her study of faculty learning communities which operate at San Francisco State and City College of San Francisco. Dr. Malik is faculty in the Department of Health Education at SF State and a recent graduate of the Ed.D. Program.

 
Prospective Students

Upcoming Events
 Dr. Norena Norton Badway
SFSU Main Campus
Feb 21, 2013 at 6:00pm



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Room 313B District Office
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 Dr. Norena Norton Badway
SFSU Main Campus
Mar 7, 2013 at 6:00pm


Engaging in the Beautiful Struggle: The Influence of Faculty Learning Communities on Teaching 

Dr. Savita Malik is the Director of Curriculum and Faculty Development for the Metro Academies Initiative, a partnership between City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University. She graduated from the Educational Leadership program in May 2012.

 

 

 Overview of the Study 

    Faculty members in higher education institutions often work in isolation. This individualized approach is encouraged by the two-fold belief that (1) instructors are content experts and their methods come secondary and (2) the development of appropriate teaching methods is an individual endeavor. Couple this belief system with the fact that most post-secondary instructors have no formal training in teaching, face increasing class sizes - likely due to budgetary constraints at most public institutions - and an increasing workload outside of their teaching responsibilities, and one can see why there is an need for ongoing support of faculty at all levels.

  

     This study focuses on teaching experience and practice in postsecondary education - an important and understudied topic. I conducted an in-depth qualitative study of instructor experience in Metro Academies' Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs), which currently operate at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and San Francisco State University (SF State). As a Metro instructor and the facilitator of these FLCs, I worked with my colleagues and students, to apply Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) principles in the design and implementation of this research. Drawing from narratives of participating faculty gathered from in-depth interviews, I illustrate some of the most significant struggles that faculty face, including their persistent and pervasive fears of inadequacy and failure as teachers. This study also demonstrates the potentially promising role of FLCs in helping faculty embrace the inherent challenges of engaged and critical teaching, addressing their struggles as individual teachers, as well as their collective struggle as members of an FLC.  

 

Significance to Teacher Education/Research             
      This study uses a community-based participatory approach to explore how FLC members perceive their own teaching practice after participation in Metro. I hope to add to the body of literature concerning FLCs, particularly by adopting a critical-pedagogy lens to faculty development in higher education. Professional development is often discussed as a series of skill-building workshops that do not have a plan for where faculty start, and where they are going. The literature on FLCs also does not account for the need to explore a social justice approach to teaching and learning, which the study hopes to address. Through conversations with Metro FLC participants, I look deeply at both strengths of the existing FLC and ways to improve it. The more we can improve our teaching practice, the better engaged and more successful our students (especially underrepresented, first-generation, low-income) will be in their college years (Elmore, 2004; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991).
             
     I also hope that a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to this project will inform the development of new research methods for studies of teaching effectiveness. The CBPR approach lends itself to a critical examination of knowledge and practices that ultimately influence student outcomes. Conducting research studies with the communities involved in every aspect of the study, can lead to more authentic and shared experiences, reminiscent of the community one is trying to profile (Israel, Eng, Schulz, Parker, & Satcher, 2005; Minkler, Wallerstein, & Hall, 2002). It would be difficult to approach a study of this nature without taking into account the identities and needs of my fellow faculty members and without students.

 

Theoretical Framework             
    The theoretical framework for this study is based on several different components. At the base, is a community of practice, where faculty members support one another and work together to elevate teaching practice. On the outside, there is reflective cycle as described through the lens of critical pedagogy, which uses several steps to explore how people transform, of unlearning, learning, relearning, reflection and evaluation (Darder, 1991; Darder et al., 2008; Shor & Freire, 1986). The FLC that encourages collective transformation uses a belief in critical pedagogy and social justice to implement faculty development programs. At the heart of this is movement toward developing culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogical ideals for their students, sharing effective teaching methods and content and self-reflection where faculty are working together to improve their teaching.

 

      In addition to a focus on the instructional core, research shows that all students benefit from a model of culturally relevant teaching, which comes from an integration of personal, moral, social, political, cultural and academic knowledge and skills taught in tandem (Gay, 2000). Students are taught positive ethnic identity development while learning about the contributions of cultures outside their own. Replace the discussion of student with faculty member, and the same principles apply. This theoretical framework has implications for improving teaching and learning of in higher education, both at the community college and university level, as there is little in the literature that talks about institutional structures for incorporating critical pedagogy into professional development. Finally, integration of deep critical reflection can allow instructors to "examine their beliefs, frames of reference or assumptions that implicitly guide or influence their practice" (Bernacchio, Ross, Washburn, Whitney, & Wood, 2007, p. 1548). In other words, it gives faculty time and space to make sense of the purpose behind particular classroom behaviors. Each of these components can lead to a transformational faculty development experience.

 

Methodology             
     The study questions, which concern individual identity, experience and change over time, lend themselves to an in-depth, qualitative approach. Each of the fifteen faculty members completed a one-on-one interview of between 75 and 90 minutes in length. The interviews were audio recorded over a two-month period. They were then transcribed and coded for analysis. In addition to my own examination of the data, I convened an advisory group made up of two instructors and four students. The advisory group helped think collectively about how to best gather information from faculty and served as a way to reduce isolation, even for myself as the researcher. The expertise and wisdom that came from the students and faculty members who were advisors and provided a greater diversity of thought in the data collection, analysis and dissemination discussions. The individual struggle of developing a research study from start to finish became a collective one where all involved contributed and all benefited in some way. This study attempted to embody the principles of critical pedagogy and CBPR in the development of the research questions, study design and plans for data dissemination.

   

Overview of Results             
    Faculty talked a lot about how their identity played an important role in their teaching practice. They wanted students to have the same or better experience than they had in higher education and that was highly motivating. One of the most poignant aspects of this study was faculty sharing their fears about teaching. Faculty felt unprepared to teach and expressed feelings of inadequacy and worried about judgment from peers and students. They struggle with discussing difficult issues in the classroom, like issues of race and class and felt underprepared to handle it when emotions run high. The FLC was a space where faculty began to break some of these fears down and gave them time and space to talk about teaching; something they rarely get in day-to-day life in academia. They also discussed ways that the FLC could support them more fully, including a richer discussion of social justice education and more time for trust and relationship building. As a result of these findings, there are implications for practice and policy at every institution if they want to support teaching and learning more fully.

 

Implications for Practice and Policy  

     Faculty members wanted to go deeper and confront their fears. They described feeling that there wasnot enough time to talk about issues of social justice, or to really dig deep into how theirunderstanding of critical pedagogy could be implemented individually. One facultyparticipant talked about wanting the FLC to mirror an amazing class she took as astudent. If our mission in Metro is to have culturally and socially relevant, engagingcurriculum for our students, we need to provide the same for our faculty. Professional development needs to meet these needs. 
     On a policy level, faculty members in the academy need to begin to develop a culture of collegiality specifically around teaching practice. Theremust be a shared commitment to student-centered instruction as this requires some extrawork (internally and externally) from each faculty member At a department level, the ideal scenario is to build in time at every faculty meeting that is devoted to building FLC and discussion of teaching practice. At an institutional level, a few days of faculty development a year are simply not enough. There needs to be a commitment on an ongoing basis to work with all faculty and linking scholarship to teaching at the 4-year university could be one way to ensure continuous improvement.  

 

Conclusion

     I have a deep belief that communities of faculty getting together and tackling some of the difficult, yet beautiful struggles in the classroom, can completely transform teaching practice. This means that we need to rethink professional development for faculty holistically, from the program to the institutional level. Creation and maintenance of a FLC is a great way to invite faculty into a safe space; to allow them to face their fears and not hide from the struggle. It's a place for faculty to struggle together; to struggle against inequity, to struggle for voice and representation, to engage in the beautiful struggle to be the best educator humanly possible.

 

Dr. Malik's dissertation can be accessed at Ed.D.'s digital information virtual archive, where you will also find other Ed.D. graduates' academic contributions to social justice.

References

Bernacchio, C., Ross, F., Washburn, K. R., Whitney, J., & Wood, D. R. (2007).  

Faculty Collaboration to Improve Equity, Access, and Inclusion in Higher Education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 40(1), 56-66. doi:10.1080/10665680601066511

Darder, A. (1991). Culture and Power in the Classroom: A Critical Foundation for  

Bicultural Education. Bergin & Garvey Paperback.

Darder, A., Baltodano, M. P., & Torres, R. D. (2008). The Critical Pedagogy Reader:

Second Edition (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Elmore, R. F. (2004). School reform from the inside out: policy, practice, and  

performance. Harvard Education Press.

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching:Theory, Research,  

and Practice. Teachers College Press.

Israel, B. A., Eng, E., Schulz, A. J., Parker, E. A., & Satcher, D. (2005). Methods in

Community-Based Participatory Research for Health (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Minkler, M., Wallerstein, N., & Hall, B. (2002). Community-Based Participatory  

Research for Health (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Pascarella, E. T., & Terenzini, P. T. (1991). How College Affects Students: Findings  

and Insights from Twenty Years of Research (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1986). A Pedagogy for Liberation. Bergin & Garvey.