Engendered Roles in Physical Therapist Education: A Feminist Vision for Scholarship in Clinical Education

Abstract

Background and Purpose. Although professional education programs, including physical therapist education, require unique roles and qualifications of faculty, academic rank and promotion typically follow traditional university structure. Expectations that all physical therapist academic faculty members, including the director of clinical education (DCE), have a defined, ongoing scholarly agenda can perpetuate a traditional university construction of academic roles unless scholarship is extended to divergent ways of knowing. A feminist understanding of scholarship values connectivity of knowledge through direct community involvement and intensive student engagement. This article, a feminist critique of the DCE role, informs the scholarly potential of the DCE within a context of a more broadly defined and reconstructed definition of scholarship. Position and Rationale. Current academic roles in physical therapist education programs are aligned with engendered definitions of traditional academic structures which can lead to academic devaluation of the DCE. A social constructionist analysis of the DCE position in light of higher education feminist literature provides an alternative perspective of scholarship. Discussion and Conclusion. Academic structures ideally support realization of all faculty potential; however, a paternalistic metric determines faculty promotion with administration, management, and specialized research at the top of the hierarchy. A feminized metric would value those roles inherent to the DCE: student and community engagement, counseling, organization, and content integration. Acceptance and embrace of the feminized nature of the DCE position serves students and professional community more than have attempts to realign the DCE position to traditional masculine academic roles. Key Words: Clinical education, Feminist critique, Director of clinical education, Scholarship. BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Physical therapist education program faculty comprises an academic administrator, a director of clinical education, academic faculty, clinical education faculty, and adjunct faculty. While all of these members serve integral roles in successful physical therapist academic programs, the director of clinical education (DCE) serves in a tenuous position in terms of academic definitions and traditional academic structures of promotion.1 The inherent qualifications and responsibilities associated with this position can make academic career advancement challenging. This position requires broad clinical perspectives and intensive and direct contact with practicing physical therapists and students through advising, counseling, and teaching. Organizational skills and information management are essential to the position. These responsibilities are not of high academic value in terms of academic promotion, which often situates the DCE as junior faculty or as an assistant professor within traditional academic structures. Rather than accept the prevailing rank of the DCE, the purpose of this article is to challenge the traditional academic status of the DCE and offer an alternative vision for this position based on feminist critique and critical social theory. Feminist perspective has been extended to higher education programs in medicine, nursing, business, engineering, basic sciences, the humanities, and economics to evaluate work distribution, promotional structures, and characteristics of leadership.2 As with these fields, physical therapy academic roles do not exist in isolation but are socially constructed and interpreted within the context of accepted norms, values, and shared beliefs. POSITION This article will present an evaluation of the DCE position as it is socially constructed. That is, the interpretation is developed from the unique viewpoint of the DCE and informed by a higher education and feminist literature. A social constructionist approach accepts multiple realities, as all individuals form knowledge and make meaning of experience contextually and through social understandings. …