Faculty Agency Research Articles

Staying Engaged and Achieving Promotion: The Role of Collegial Support and Career Reflection and Assessment for Mid-Career Faculty

The challenges and tensions experienced by mid-career faculty (MCF) can lead to frustration, disengagement, or leaving the professoriate altogether, a trend noted by researchers prior to and especially after the pandemic. In this article, we explore the role that collegial support and career reflection and assessment strategies targeting mid-career faculty can play to preserve institutional vitality, support faculty agency, and promote student success. Additionally, we propose initiatives and supports that may assist these faculty members in staying in the academy and staying well as they pursue professional fulfillment and work towards their goals, including promotion to full professorship. We contend that post-secondary campuses should invest in keeping MCF engaged because of the crucial roles they serve on campus.

Changing person-environment fit among underrepresented undergraduate physics students: Successes from a small department

Female students, Latinx students, first-generation students, and transfer students often feel uncomfortable in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) environments. However, some departments have been making progress in changing that. Guided by double consciousness and person-environment fit theory, we investigated the lived experiences of historically marginalized undergraduate and masters-level physics students at a large state university to understand how this particular department provides an environment encouraging all students they fit in physics. Graduated students and faculty were interviewed from California State University, Long Beach. Through the interviews, we gained an understanding of significant student experiences and their perceptions of fit in this physics environment. Department community members perceived the department environment to be open, which contributed to broadening fit and supporting diverse students to thrive. The importance of faculty agency in creating a welcoming and supportive physics environment is highlighted. Finally, we found students in this department take with them an approach to physics that they see applicable to other areas of study and their lives. We called this a physics state of mind. We include suggestions for other STEM departments based on the findings and previous research. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Counternarratives that illuminate faculty agency: A five-year longitudinal qualitative study of physician educators in academic medicine

Purpose Physician educators are often expected to direct educational programs and assume roles that conform to field norms for career advancement but that may not afford meaningful work for educators. The purpose of this study was to describe and analyse the perspectives and actions taken by physician educators in response to tension between feeling compelled to direct an educational program and doing educationally meaningful work. Methods and Materials We used data from a longitudinal study and focused on three participants who, over the course of the five-year study, offered significant insights into how physician educators act in ways that run counter to expectations for career advancement. Our narrative analysis entailed organizing data from interview transcripts into time-ordered displays, weaving data into counternarratives that were edited by participants, and using the theory of faculty agency (and its key constructs, strategic perspectives and strategic action) to thread the stories together. Results In each counternarrative, the participant deliberated their sense of being a physician educator (strategic perspectives) and when expectations became untenable, they did what they needed to do to engage in meaningful work (strategic action) rather than comply with expectations for career advancement in academic medicine. For one participant, faculty agency meant leaving academic medicine; for another, it meant reducing clinical time so that unpaid time could be devoted to education; and for another, it meant opting not do direct a reputable education program. Conclusions Faculty agency is a useful theoretical lens for conceptualizing how physician educators navigate their careers in academic medicine. Counternarratives that illuminate faculty agency offer stories that describe alternate career paths and portend a different future for physician educators.

Creating an equitable and inclusive STEM classroom: a qualitative meta-synthesis of approaches and practices in higher education

How can Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) faculty integrate a humanistic approach to create environments where students do not feel marginalized? Changes are necessary to address the historically exclusive climate and systemic oppressive classroom policies and classroom practices dominated by White, patriarchal, Eurocentric perspectives pervasive in many STEM higher education classrooms. By incorporating approaches and practices documented in the literature over time and across multiple STEM disciplines, faculty can create equitable and inclusive (EI) classrooms. However, the challenge for individual faculty members is consolidating the information to identify fundamental elements necessary for establishing EI spaces. This project addresses that challenge by conducting a comprehensive meta-synthesis of higher education literature to identify themes for what constitutes an EI classroom and recommendations for how faculty can facilitate one. The dataset includes 61 articles from 277 authors and 48 unique journals and reflects a timeframe of January 1995–June 2021. Our findings are organized into four key concepts, indicating that EI pedagogies related to the affective, cognitive, and metacognitive categories of learning are vital to an equitable and inclusive classroom. However, the essential finding of this analysis was the importance of the fourth key concept, faculty cultural competency and elements related to the climate and structure of the classroom, referred to as Faculty Agency and Action (FAA). The results of this meta-synthesis were compared to the most frequently cited seminal works within the field, demonstrating that although these individual works contain most, they do not include all of the themes indicated by this study and, in some cases, over- or underrepresent some of the topics discussed. As mirrored in the most frequently cited works and the findings of this meta-synthesis, it takes incorporating classroom-focused approaches and faculty’s reflective resolve to understand and change how dominant and privileged identities are reflected for classrooms to be equitable and inclusive in STEM.

Creating New Knowledge with Undergraduate Students: Institutional Incentives and Faculty Agency

ABSTRACTUndergraduate students today face a more demanding and competitive labor market than their parents’ generation. In response, some pursue double majors to signal breadth to potential employers and to improve their job prospects. Some students also realize that a strong signal of workplace readiness is acquiring in-demand skills through independent and collaborative research. In this article, four professors at an undergraduate-focused public university in the United States share their experiences working with undergraduate students on research, focusing on the “supply side” of student research training and mentoring. We discuss how institutions can support differently situated faculty members, who face different career incentives and constraints, to integrate undergraduates in their research. We also address the limits of what is possible for faculty‐student research and suggest ways to overcome them.

In pursuit of impact: Toward a contextualized theory of professional agency of engineering education scholars

AbstractBackgroundEngineering education scholars (EES) seek to advance innovation, excellence, and access within education systems and the engineering profession. To advance such efforts, the intentional and strategic actions taken by scholars must be better understood.Purpose/HypothesisThis study aimed to advance the field's understanding of agency toward impact by (1) closely examining the experiences of early career EES pursuing impact in engineering education and (2) co‐constructing a contextualized theory of agency. We define agency as taking strategic actions or perspectives toward professional goals that matter to oneself and goals that relate to impacting engineering education.Design/MethodBuilding on previous work about faculty agency, we leveraged approaches from grounded theory and integrated multiple qualitative approaches to analyze our experiences as six early career EES over the course of a 4‐year longitudinal study.ResultsSeven key insights about the professional agency toward impact in engineering education of early career EES emerged from the analysis. The contextualized theory and resulting visual representation illustrate this agency as a cyclical process with three components: (1) the factors influencing one's agency, (2) the agentic process itself, and (3) the output of the agentic process.ConclusionsOur co‐constructed contextualized theory extends previous work by incorporating the temporal nature of agency, the generation and assessment of available moves, and the importance of feedback on future agentic practices. Our results have implications on how the engineering education community supports graduate students, early career scholars, and new members in their efforts to impact change.

The conceptualisation of socially responsible universities in higher education research: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT With the transition to knowledge-based economies, higher education (HE) has become a driving factor for economic and social development. Alongside high-quality education and excellent research, social responsibility (SR) has become an important aspect of universities’ accountability and legitimacy. Considering the growing importance of SR for universities operating in stratified systems, the objective of this study is to analyse how HE research has conceptualised a socially responsible university over time and to understand the role of the institutional and organisational environment in the implementation of SR in universities. The study employed a systematic literature review of prominent HE journals, covering a 30-year period. Findings show that SR is an umbrella concept, which has evolved from being a moral duty to provide service to society, to engaging external stakeholders in universities’ core functions, and more recently to showing evidence of social impact. The extent to which SR becomes implemented and legitimised as a core HE function is influenced by institutional and organisational factors. National policies and public funding, organisational strategy and incentives, and faculty agency were found to be important levers of implementation. This study informs practical application by showing that the implementation of SR requires coherence between SR strategies and structures, and incentives to strengthen internal commitment to SR. Furthermore, it proposes a research agenda on the evaluation of universities’ social impact and the influence of institutional pressures on organisational responses for SR.

Teaching: The expression of freedom?

Zaidi uses neoliberalism to analyze Du et al.'s, discussion of faculty agency, posing the question of whether we actually have agency in medical education

Evaluation of University Review Program for Teachers’ Licensure Examination: A Transformative Mixed Methods Study Using Bourdieu-Scheerens Framework

Guided by the Bourdieu-Scheerens framework, this study uses transformative mixed methods exploratory sequential design to evaluate the “LET Intensive Review,” a university program for the Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET). The review program is regarded as an input, a means for achieving an output. While analysis includes the context, inputs, process, and outputs in education function, close attention is given to processes to elucidate contributing factors in the LET outcomes. Ethnography as the primary research design was used to explore pre-service teachers' (PSTs) experiences in the review, deploying the Bourdieusian framework in the analysis. In support of the qualitative findings, a descriptive research design was employed. The Mann-Whitney U Test and the Independent Samples t-test were performed to analyze the university passing percentage ratings in the LET elementary and secondary levels for first-timers before and during the conduct of the review. Integrative analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results followed to draw the mixed methods research findings. This evaluation reveals that the LET Intensive Review is effective, and the faculty agency and the administrator agency play a big part in the process. Most of the LET elementary level first-timers who took the review obtained significantly higher LET ratings than those from the previous batches who had not gone through the review. Financial constraints, weak basic education foundation, majorship, and low motivation affected the PSTs’ performance and education quality. The educational policy implications related to the urban-rural divide are also presented in this study.

Becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution: A Case Study of Faculty Perspectives on Teaching Philosophies and Pedagogical Stance

ABSTRACT Conducted at a university that has just transitioned into a Hispanic serving institution (HSI), this exploratory case study investigated the formation of new institutional identity from a pedagogical perspective. Examining faculty perspectives on what it means to teach and learn at a newborn Hispanic serving institution, this study sought to uncover a less frequently explored aspect of a Hispanic serving identity – faculty teaching philosophies and pedagogical stance. The data were gathered through interviews and focus groups with 29 faculty members of varied ranks, disciplines, and teaching experiences. The results revealed the following six themes in relation to participants’ teaching philosophies and pedagogical stance: (1) understanding the complexity of Latinx student identity, (2) moving from a deficit to asset paradigm, (3) building student peer communities, (4) infusing culturally relevant curricula, (5) implementing culturally responsive teaching practices, and (6) increasing faculty agency and support. The study presents practical recommendations for applying the findings in both HSI and emerging HSI settings, as well as on all campuses serving the growing population of Latinx students.

Equity Advocates Using Equity-Mindedness to Interrupt Faculty Hiring's Racial Structure

Background/ContextEducation scholars have recommended steps for college and university leaders to take toward creating a more racially diverse professoriate. However, the majority of the scholarship is neither empirical nor focused on faculty actively negotiating barriers during search committee meetings to create equitable practices.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThe study examined faculty within search committees who received formal training to interrogate exclusionary hiring procedures and create race-conscious and equitable hiring practices. My goals were to understand the strategies and efforts to advance racial equity of faculty trained on equity-mindedness to negotiate and use practices to change exclusionary hiring procedures. Thus, I answer the following research questions: (1) How do professors enact their agency to create equitable hiring practices during faculty search committee meetings? (2) What challenges do professors encounter when using equity-minded practices during faculty search committees? How do professors overcome such challenges?SettingThe study site was a religiously affiliated private liberal arts university with a predominantly White student and faculty population. Senior administrators invested resources in a ten-month intervention to train 17 faculty to advance racial equity in faculty hiring.Population/Participants/SubjectsStudy participants consisted of 10 faculty members whose university leadership designated them as advocates of racial equity on search committees.Research DesignData for this critical narrative analysis were collected through eight interviews with faculty equity advocates, observations of two faculty search committees, and documents of hiring materials such as hiring criteria, interview questions, and evaluation rubrics.Findings/ResultsUltimately, faculty enacted their agency to deactivate exclusionary practices and inscribe new rules for search committees to follow. The findings illustrate that faculty agency for racial equity is an effort to establish positional power, to use equity-minded practices, and to informally strategize to overcome resistance as members of faculty search committees.Conclusions/RecommendationsI conclude that faculty advance racial equity by manipulating and subverting practices (e.g., recruitment strategies, evaluation criteria), rules (e.g., conversations about race), and roles (e.g., legitimate roles as committee members, who have the knowledge to integrate equity-mindedness) that historically excluded racially minoritized professors from the hiring process. Study findings suggest for senior administrators to train faculty search committee members on taking active steps to create an equity-minded evaluation system, including the appointment of people who are explicitly trained to advocate for equity in the evaluation process.

Beyond teaching methods: Highlighting physics faculty’s strengths and agency

Much work in physics education research (PER) characterizes faculty teaching practice in terms of whether faculty use specific named PER-based teaching methods, either with fidelity or with adaptation; we call this research paradigm the "teaching-method-centered paradigm." However, most faculty do not frame their teaching in terms of which particular named methods they use, but rather in terms of their own ideas and values, suggesting that the teaching-method-centered paradigm misses key features of faculty teaching. These key features include the productive ideas that faculty have about student learning and faculty agency around teaching. We present three case studies of faculty talking about their teaching, and analyze them in terms of two theoretical frameworks: a framework of teaching principles (How Learning Works) and a framework of faculty agency (Self-Determination Theory). We show that these frameworks well characterize key features of faculty teaching practices and agency, and can be combined in a new paradigm for modeling faculty teaching which we call an "asset-based agentic paradigm." We therefore encourage physics education researchers to move beyond the teaching-method-centered paradigm and think about faculty teaching using an asset-based agentic paradigm.

Ren-de agency in international faculty professional development: a China case study of glocal identity integration

ABSTRACTGlobal experiences are a significant form of professional development for teacher education faculty preparing teachers to support twenty-first-century diverse classrooms. This case study examined the international professional development (IPD) experiences of teacher education faculty at a Chinese university as involving personal-professional, researcher-practitioner, and aesthetic-pragmatic development. Faculty interviews, courses, and publications evidence challenges met and strategies for integrating global and local (glocal) identities, values, and practices – abroad and upon returning home. A Confucian ren as social benevolence and de as virtuous introspection served as a form of faculty agency in bridging the global and the local to bring new perspectives to home institutions, while maintaining an integrated sense of glocal identity. Implications for teacher education practice, policy, and research encourage IPD cultivating a ren-de agency via glocal collaborations.

Invisible Labor, Visible Change: Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Agency in a Research University

Applying O'Meara, Campbell, and Terosky's (2011) faculty agency framework, this qualitative case study examined full-time, non-tenure-track faculty (FTNTTF) members' perceptions of their agency at an elite public research university. Participants experienced greater agency over time and in the classroom, but felt their agency was constrained by departmental and college leadership's inconsistent interpretation of university policies regarding FTNTTF. Participants experienced feelings of invisibility and exclusion, unclear perceptions and undervaluation by their colleagues, and felt vulnerable to leadership transitions that might affect their roles. This study suggests that overarching power structures—administration, tenured faculty, formal and informal policies—may contribute to experiences of constrained agency and invisibility for key members of the organization. These complex dynamics undermine FTNTTF's capacity to actualize their skills, experience, and expertise to the full extent of their abilities.

Faculty Learning at Boundaries to Broker Racial Equity

ABSTRACTOn many college campuses, faculty are being called on to act as change agents for racial equity. Through narrative inquiry analysis using the theoretical constructs of boundary crossing and boundary objects, this case study examined learning among faculty (n = 12) who attempted to broker structural changes at their universities through participation in action research. The findings illustrate that boundary negotiation across the “silos” of academic departments and administrative offices to promote racial equity involves perspective taking (regarding current norms and discourse) and perspective making (about equity as a legitimate institutional goal). These findings contribute to the literature on faculty agency and organizational learning for racial equity in higher education by identifying boundary objects as cultural tools that facilitate faculty learning and agency.

Faculty Agency in Applying for Promotion to Professor

Aim/Purpose: In the United States, faculty who wish to pursue promotion to the rank of professor do so without clear guidance or structure. Even the timing of such a process is nebulous. As such, an individual engages in agentic action to pursue the rank. Background: This study examined the experiences of faculty members who chose to pursue the application process to be promoted to professor but were rejected or dissuaded. Methodology: Utilizing a case study of one institutional setting, we conducted 10 in-depth qualitative interviews. Contribution: Very little is known about the process of promotion to full professor in the U.S. and even less empirical research exists. This study advances knowledge of the process and the experiences of those undertaking it. Findings: We learned that cues from the social context greatly influenced these faculty members’ sense of agency.

Invisible but Essential: The Role of Professional Networks in Promoting Faculty Agency in Career Advancement

The benefits of professional networks are largely invisible to the people embedded in them (O’Reilly 1991), yet professional networks may provide key benefits for faculty careers. The purpose of the study reported here was to explore the role of professional networks in faculty agency in career advancement, specifically focusing on the overall relationship between the social capital gained from networks and faculty agency in career advancement. Findings suggest that off-campus networks are particularly important for faculty agency but that the benefits of networks may take time to develop.

Faculty agency in striving university contexts: mundane yet powerful acts of agency

Drawing from Archer's critical realist theory of agency, this paper has two specific aims. First, the cultural and structural features of one ‘striving’ institution are outlined. Then, I illustrate how faculty members asserted agency inside their striving university in ways intended to disrupt the structures and cultures that striving universities produce. Forms of faculty agency included negotiating, critiquing and resisting. The work is relevant to those who study the academic profession; those who provide support and professional development to contemporary academics, especially academics serving inside striving universities; and, finally, to those interested in the study and possibility of human agency inside a higher education field that is marked by the pressures of both fiscal and cultural markets.

Framing Faculty Agency inside Striving Universities: An Application of Bourdieu's Theory of Practice

Drawn from a qualitative study and framed with Bourdieu's theory of practice, I present a three-pronged framework to describe how tenure-line professors assumed agency as their university strove to establish itself as a national research institution. Implications for practice and future research are offered.

Framing Faculty Agency Inside Striving Universities: An Application of Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice

Drawn from a qualitative study and framed with Bourdieu's theory of practice, I present a three-pronged framework to describe how tenure-line professors assumed agency as their university strove to establish itself as a national research institution. Implications for practice and future research are offered.