Faculty Identity Research Articles

The professional identity of STEM faculty as instructors of course-based research experiences

The professional identity of STEM faculty as instructors of course-based research experiences

Leaders' Perspectives on Approaches and Challenges in Enacting Faculty Vitality in the Contemporary Landscape of Academic Medicine: A Deductive Thematic Analysis.

Continual changes in organizational structures within medical schools have contributed to the expanded scope and the centralization of faculty affairs offices, which support faculty administration and supportive functions. Using qualitative interviews, we investigated the perspectives of academic medicine faculty affairs leaders regarding their offices' priorities in sustaining faculty vitality in the face of current and anticipated challenges. A semi-structured interview protocol based on the researchers' practical knowledge, informed by the study's research inquiries, and pertinent academic literature guided the interviews. Deductive thematic analysis approach was used to identify the patterns and themes across the interviews. Our analysis revealed a central theme: the pivotal nature of the leader's role in strengthening faculty identity. Additionally, three sub-themes emerged concerning the leader's role in nurturing faculty well-being within today's academic medicine context: redefining faculty role, acknowledging and appreciating faculty contributions, and maintaining faculty engagement through a whole-person approach. Faculty affairs leaders describe widening roles with an emerging focus on a whole-person approach valuing the diverse contributions of faculty across the academic mission, supporting professional development, reflecting the individual motivations of faculty, and championing institutional processes that holistically evaluate and recognize faculty contributions.

Perceptions of the Leadership Through Scholarship Fellowship Graduates: An Exploratory Qualitative Study of Leadership.

Despite increasing numbers of faculty identifying as underrepresented in medicine (URiM) over the last few decades, URiM representation in academic medicine leadership has changed little. The Society of Teachers of Family Medicine funded the Leadership Through Scholarship Fellowship (LTSF) to target this population and provide a framework for scholarly success. Based on responses to open-ended questions from a leadership survey, we characterize how early-career URiM family medicine faculty view leadership and assess attitudes and perceptions of leadership development. A survey, developed by survey experts from multiple institutions and consisting of multiple-choice and open-ended questions, was sent to the first two cohorts after the LTSF program. All LTSF participants identified as URiM and as early-career (5 years or less since fellowship or residency) family medicine faculty. Fellowship faculty collected anonymous survey responses through Qualtrics (Qualtrics, LLC). We conducted thematic analysis with emergent and iterative coding by two experienced qualitative researchers. All of the fellows surveyed (N=19) completed the survey. The qualitative researchers identified the following themes: leadership development (with subthemes of collaborative scholarship and request for mentoring), and barriers to leadership and scholarship (with subthemes of lack of time, lack of support, and diminished opportunities for advancement). These themes represent lessons learned from URiM faculty participating in a single faculty development fellowship. Collaborative scholarship, both as an early-career faculty need and a leadership responsibility, is a new contribution to the existing literature. While identified by URiM family medicine faculty, these themes are likely familiar to early-career faculty across all medical specialties and faculty identities. These lessons can guide senior academic leaders in preparing early-career faculty for leadership in academic medicine.

Exploring Professional Identities in Libraries: The Impact of Credit-Bearing Courses Beyond Student Learning

In this essay, we argue in support of library-led information literacy (IL) credit courses, emphasizing the impact that developing, teaching, and managing these courses can have on the professional identity of library faculty and staff. Existing research has indicated that librarians who teach credit courses may more strongly identify as teachers than those who teach only course-integrated sessions. We expand on this research by sharing the perspective of four individuals who are involved in the design, instruction, and coordination of credit-bearing IL courses, including two faculty librarians and two staff members. By providing these differing voices, we give a unique perspective on a critical question in the field: Should libraries offer credit-bearing IL courses?

Exploring Identities of Extension Faculty and Educators as Science Communicators

Exploring Identities of Extension Faculty and Educators as Science Communicators

I Gotta Represent My Community: Latino Male Faculty, Sports, and the Politics of the “Game”

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of sport as it pertains to Latino male faculty. Specifically, we offer a contribution to the dearth of scholarship at the intersections of sport and how Latino male faculty make sense of their identities and academic journeys. The use of sport as a reference for understanding Latinx faculty identity is for the most part non-existent within education research that is focused on Latino males. Drawing from this context, we offer this piece as a means by which to examine sport with links to family, community, faculty navigation and resistance skills.

Methodological Challenges in Studies of Personal and Professional Identity Formation

Demographic information about the identities of faculty, staff, students, and trainees is frequently collected in pharmacy education. A wide range of identities and characteristics can influence the choices and experiences of students as they progress through curricula and develop their professional goals. Understanding personal and professional identity formation within dynamic and complex environments is critical to promoting the success of pharmacy education and practice. Emerging research efforts highlight the importance of considering identity development from varying perspectives, and offer new methods for collecting and analyzing data. The objective of this commentary is to reflect on the methodological challenges of identity formation research in pharmacy education and offer recommendations for those interested in this work.

Constructing biology education research identities: a duoethnography

An emerging theme that has gained traction across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms in recent decades is acknowledgingwhois responsible for the discoveries and content that we teach. Centering the human aspect of who the researchers are and how their identities intersect with perspectives in research impacts the lens through which the work is done but also shapes the community of practice in our classrooms and the evolving ecosystem of research communities that contribute to STEM education. In particular, discipline-based education research (DBER) is an emerging interdisciplinary field aimed at understanding and improving discipline-specific learning and teaching. Entering and establishing oneself in a new research field can be a daunting process. For many DBER scholars who began their careers in another discipline, their career trajectories have necessitated this challenge. Here, we focus on our experiences in Biology Education Research (BER). We use duoethnography to explore our overlapping trajectories into and engagements with BER, allowing for the juxtaposition of our experiences to give meanings to and build new understandings of our pathways in BER, which include entry points, reasons for persistence, and identity navigation. Through collaborative reflections, we formulated novel insights that we experienced BER as a community of practice that values the participation of emerging scholars and arrived at a transformed understanding that our educator identities were important driving factors for our continuing pursuit of BER. Results from this duoethnography not only provide insights into how BER faculty may navigate multiple professional identities but can also shed light on potential opportunities and challenges for research and practice partnerships connecting science and education faculty where such identities reside not in single individuals but with multiple persons in a cross-disciplinary collaboration. We see parallels between this work considering faculty identity and pathways into BER with work considering student identity and pathways into STEM, and we hope that these results also highlight the value of utilizing qualitative methodologies that may be novel to both the BER and more broadly, DBER, communities as a tool for centering the human experience that can spark future work and applications within STEM education.

14. Characterizing Diversity Features in Plastic Surgery Residency Program Websites

Background: There continues to be an increased commitment in recruiting residency and faculty applicants from backgrounds that are underrepresented in medicine (URMs). These applicants have been shown to be more likely to attend programs where they perceive higher diversity. Because applicants rely most heavily on websites for program information, general surgery literature has identified 8 website elements used by programs to demonstrate diversity and inclusion. No study has examined how plastic surgery residency programs feature diversity and inclusion on their websites. This study aims to characterize how these programs’ websites demonstrate their commitment to diversity and inclusion, and assess whether trends vary by geographic region or rank. Methods: All 82 accredited integrated plastic surgery residencies were reviewed. Website diversity elements were defined by prior general surgery literature and initial review of 10 plastic surgery websites. These elements included 1) non-discrimination statement, 2) diversity and inclusion message, 3) community demographics, 4) biographies of faculty and 5) residents, 6) photographs of faculty and 7) residents, 8) list of resources for trainees, 9) gender identity or pronouns of faculty and 10) residents, and 11) scholarships for underrepresented visiting medical students. We evaluated the impact of Doximity rank and geographic location per U.S. Census Bureau definitions on the diversity elements. Results: Websites had a mean of 3.75 1.71 elements. Most programs had 0 - 4 elements (n = 54, 67.5%), some had 5 - 8 elements (n = 26.5, 32.5%), and none had greater than nine. Chi-squared test revealed no association with either rank (p = 0.40) or U.S. region (p = 0.458). The most common elements were resident photos (n = 73, 91.3%), pictures of faculty (n = 63, 78.8%), and extended faculty bios (n = 50, 62.5%). The least commonly included elements were gender identity or pronouns of residents (n = 0) and faculty (n = 3, 3.8%). Conclusion: Most plastic surgery websites include very few elements related to diversity and inclusion. This research highlights opportunities through which plastic surgery residency program websites can further demonstrate their commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Gender demographics of departmental seminar speakers reflect gender disparities of faculty hosts

Increasing access, representation, and retention of underrepresented groups is essential across academia. Invited speaker seminars are common practice in academic science departments and serve to disseminate research, establish connections and collaborations, advance faculty careers, and connect trainees to mentors outside of departmental faculty. Thus, lack of representation among seminar speakers can affect both faculty and trainee professional development. This study characterizes gender demographics of seminar speakers across science departments at an R1 institution for the years 2015–2019, using pronoun usage as a proxy for gender identity. We found that most faculty and invited speakers were male, and few were female or nonbinary. The percentage of female and nonbinary invited speakers increased from 2015–2019 along with the percentage of female and nonbinary host faculty. Overall, male faculty hosted fewer female and nonbinary speakers than their female and nonbinary faculty colleagues. This study provides evidence for a correlation between faculty identity and the scientists they host at their department and motivates further studies investigating this relationship at other R1 institutions and institution types.

Paradoxical tensions in faculty identity and allegiance

In the inaugural column, I introduced the concept of paradoxical tensions — critical, unresolvable tensions that all leaders, including those in academia, must balance. All organizations are balancing an array of paradoxical tensions in every decision, even in the design of their offices: privacy versus camaraderie, freedom of speech versus civility, legal risks versus innovation, work–life balance versus output, the organization's needs versus the needs of science. Leaders and managers are the fulcrum for balancing these tensions.

Practices and challenges of faculty members at Imam Abdul Rahman bin Faisal University to preserve the national identity in the challenges of globalization: the Department of Libraries, Information and General Sunnah as an example

The study aimed to identify the values of citizenship that Imam Abdul Rahman bin Faisal University seeks to instill among the faculty members to preserve the university's national identity; especially the Library and Information Department, and knowing the measurement tools used by Imam Abdul Rahman bin Faisal University in consolidation the values of the national identity among the faculty members. The researchers used the Imam Abdul Rahman bin Faisal University as a model, and to achieve the aim of the study, the researchers used the descriptive survey method based on the questionnaire to collect data. The study population consisted of faculty members from the Department of Library and Information, where the sample consisted of 30 members. One of the most important results of the study was its emphasis on the effective role that the courses play in trying to preserve the national identity of the department's faculty. The study also confirmed that the Department of Library, Information and General Year seeks, through scientific research, to all that serve the local community in the college and beyond. The study resulted in several recommendations, most notably the need to educate faculty members about all dimensions of national identity, through the establishment of training courses, and to enhance the various skills, values, and positive attitudes of students, and that educational curricula include vocabulary that helps students participate and interact with local and international issues, as well as social, political and economic issues.

Teaching in the New Millennium: An Autoethnographic Approach to Exploring Occupational Adaptation of Occupational Therapy Professors

This autoethnographic research examines the lived experience of occupational therapy faculty. Researchers penned their teaching narratives and identified themes related to teaching today's students. Upon completion, the researchers completed both first and second cycle coding of their own story and then the story of the co-investigator followed by the development of themes stemming from the collapsed data. Five themes emerged: faculty community, dancing as fast as I can, values, self-perception, and emotional rollercoaster. The findings provide insight into the lived experience of faculty members and the importance of these experiences to faculty identity, competence, and adaptation. The authors describe the implications of these findings to faculty growth and development and student learning.

Exploring Stem Faculty Professional Identity in Practitioner Inquiry Programs

One strategy for improving pedagogical practices is to engage STEM faculty in practitioner inquiry, where faculty identify a teaching-related problem relevant to their practice, collect and analyze data, and use the findings to guide instructional improvements. Research suggests that professional development opportunities to improve teaching can be complicated by STEM faculty members’ perceptions, proclivities and motivations built upon their past experiences, which also influence their professional identities. While some past is illuminative, we note a general under-specification of professional identity as well as under-exploration of how individuals’ professional identities interact with the complex contexts they work in, including any participation in practitioner inquiry. An especially underexplored factor concerning the interplay of practitioner inquiry research and STEM faculty professional identity is professional position (e.g. tenure-track, instructor, adjunct positions). Our study explored how STEM faculty, largely fixed-term faculty, experience practitioner inquiry in light of their professional identity. We found that many of our participants sought to use their practitioner inquiry experience to broaden their professional identities to include identity as scholars of education. Indicative of one who does/demonstrates publication and presentation of research, identity as scholars of education was thought to be respected by the research-intensive institution within which they worked. Participants’ scholar of education identities were shaped by their disciplinary notions of research and methodologies, which suggest tensions concerning how to legitimize scholarship in education. We also found that faculty identities as scholars of education can generally be facilitated by participating in a supportive group of other STEM faculty engaged in practitioner inquiry. We discuss implications for those leading and designing practitioner inquiry programs.

Development of a Novel Mentorship Platform to Foster Relational Mentoring, Empowered Vulnerability, and Professional Identity Formation in Undergraduate Medical Education.

Mentorship is valuable to medical students undergoing professional identity formation. Many institutions lack infrastructure to facilitate the personalized mentoring that supports students' integration of new professional identities with their personal identities and values. The authors developed a novel mentorship platform called Weave via a multistep, iterative design process, incorporating in-person and survey-based student and faculty feedback. Features of Weave include clear communication of mentorship offerings and expectations, plus opportunities to engage mentors based on professional and personal (identity-based) attributes. Faculty at Harvard Medical School who created a mentor profile within the first 3 months of launch and students who visited the website within the same period were invited to complete usability surveys in February 2019; students were invited to complete impact surveys in August 2020. Fifty-two of 132 invited faculty members (39.4%) and 80 of 185 students (43.2%) completed the usability surveys. Most of these faculty (86.5%) and students (73.8%) reported navigating the website was easy/very easy; 36 faculty (69.2%) created a mentor profile within 10 minutes. Key innovations highlighted by faculty and students were the listing of personal attributes and identities of diverse faculty; centralized, increased access to faculty mentors; ease of use; and provision of clear expectations. Nearly all students who completed the impact surveys agreed that Weave allowed them to connect with a faculty mentor whom they would not have found through other sources and to learn about the dimensions of diverse faculty. Weave is a customizable online mentorship platform that fosters empowered vulnerability and increases dialogue between medical students and faculty based on professional and personal interests and identities. Weave may be expanded to other mentoring contexts and adapted for implementation at other institutions to help cultivate an institutional culture that values mentoring and to strengthen broader diversity and inclusion efforts.

An Imbalanced professional identity: the experience of being social work educators in Mainland China

ABSTRACT This study explored the lived experience of social work educators in China (SWECs). Eleven SWECs participated in individual interviews to describe their experiences under the expansion of social work education in China, particularly related to research-practice-teaching collaborations. SWECs still questioned their social work attributes when facing challenges in social work education as connected to the country’s policy and practise development. They expressed that their faculty identity is much preferred over that of a social worker. They felt that they must weigh the pros and cons of engaging in practice versus research. They emphasised that social work education aimed to help students build personal capacity, while only three mentioned the importance of developing students’ commitment to the profession. Their inputs informed an essential structure for understanding social work as a profession and a discipline in China where there is a need and demand for its population.

Disciplining Academic Identities: Boundaries and Identity Work among Arts and Sciences Faculty

A large body of scholarship shows that even as interdisciplinarity gains recognition, the disciplines remain core aspects of the organization of modern academic life in the United States. We do not yet know, however, how faculty draw on disciplines and disciplinary boundaries in their academic identity work or how they construct their academic identities and convey those identities to others. We explore these questions through 100 in-depth interviews with faculty from 34 arts and sciences disciplines at a private, Research 1 university. We show how boundary battles over symbolic resources associated with disciplines contribute to faculty identity work. We identify four types of identity work arts and sciences faculty use: foregrounding disciplinarity, resisting disciplinary identities associated with administratively assigned departmental homes, emphasizing scientist identities, and pursuing question-oriented identities. Finally, we show how beliefs that disciplinary differences reflect underlying distinctions between “kinds of people” shore up the importance of disciplinary divisions, even in a university setting that provides material support for interdisciplinarity. We use these results to argue that even in institutional settings that provide support for interdisciplinarity, disciplinary boundaries may remain central by providing important symbolic resources.

Facilitating Identity Compatibility in Mentorships: Implications for Diversity in Medicine.

Despite intentional efforts to improve diversity in medicine, there is pronounced underrepresentation of minority groups and non-disclosure of minority identities by medical students due to societal stigmas and fears of acceptance. One way that medical schools address this challenge in supporting diverse student backgrounds is by facilitating faculty mentorship programs with underrepresented minority (URM) students. These efforts are valuable, but they are unfortunately not available at all institutions and do not always allow URM students to engage in the process of choosing a mentor confidentially. Medical schools largely do not make self-reported information from faculty about their various identities and allyships available to medical students, which limits the resources that students have to independently forge these connections. Helping students form their own mentor-mentee relationships by making faculty demographics available can lead students to find individualized support across their medical training. Identity compatibility between students and their role models has shown to correlate with academic achievement and senses of belonging. Enforcing that all medical schools share the identities of faculty who choose to disclose this information with students will thus be helpful to further diversity as a continuous commitment in medical education.

The Definition of Faculty Must Evolve: A Call to Action.

As academic medical centers and academic health centers continue to adapt to the changing landscape of medicine in the United States, the definition of what it means to be faculty must evolve as well. Both institutional economic priorities and the need to recalibrate educational programs to address current and future societal and patient needs have brought new complexity to faculty identity, faculty value, and the educational mission.The Council of Faculty and Academic Societies, 1 of 3 membership councils of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), established working groups in 2014 to provide a strong voice for academic faculty within the AAMC governance and leadership structures. The Faculty Identity and Value Working Group was charged with identifying the attributes and qualities of future academic medicine faculty in light of the transformational changes occurring at many medical schools and teaching hospitals. The working group developed a framework that could be applied throughout the United States by AAMC member schools to define and value teaching activities. This report adds to the work of others by offering a contemporary construct that is flexible and easily adaptable to enable fair and transparent implementation of an education value system; it is especially relevant for systems in which mergers and acquisitions lead to a large number of clinicians. An example of such an implementation at a large and growing academic medical center is provided.The ability to identify and quantify educational effort by faculty could be transformative by highlighting the fundamental importance of faculty to the development of the future medical workforce.

A Narrative Review and Conceptual Analysis of OER Perception Studies: Implications for Developing a Situational Scale for Faculty Self-Efficacy

A narrative literature review of faculty perceptions of open educational resources (OER) led to the development of an instrument to measure faculty OER self-efficacy. Through the evaluation of extant literature, three central faculty considerations related to ideological, material, and support barriers and motivators were identified. The research examined the empirical literature on faculty perceptions of OER, including the barriers and motivators that are considered. The self-efficacy research of Bandura (Bandura 1977, 2006; Bandura, Adams, and Beyer 1977) was considered as a lens to examine issues that may prevent faculty from attempting to use OER or cause project abandonment when coping skills to address known challenges are lacking. The literature coalesced around three central considerations related to ideological, material, and support barriers and motivators. Ideological barriers and motivators for faculty movement to included ideas fundamental to faculty identities, that they are part of an institution, and that they have professional commitments related to their teaching, research, and service roles. The desire to select high quality, peer-vetted resources figured prominently in the decision to use or not use OER, as did considerations of how cost would impact students. Material barriers and motivators identified were characterized by the inherent qualities of the materials themselves that may influence a desire to use them. The most-often researched material consideration was the usability of and access to OER, which were widely perceived as being in online formats. Finally, support considerations, primarily institutional support and general knowledge of how to find and OER, were widely reported in the literature. Faculty expressed concerns over a lack of release time or professional acknowledgement as barriers to considering course redesigns. Using these barriers identified in the narrative literature review, a self-efficacy scale is presented to support the further development and assessment of OER professional development programs.