The majority of higher education faculty have no preparation for the work of teaching. And most elite universities, even ones paying lip service to teaching and learning, have no intention of taking necessary steps to change this.
The first part gets talked about (not enough), but the second part rarely (if ever) does.
What’s most disheartening is that many smaller teaching-focused institutions invest very little time or money in developing the under-prepared faculty they hire.
At one elite institution where I worked, folks were quite proud of the one-week intensive they offered graduate students before throwing them into a classroom. The graduate students told me that much of that week was spent on bureaucratic (not pedagogical) concerns.
As a finalist for a teaching center director position at several elite institutions last year, I asked, “what are the opportunities for me to continue teaching?” The answers were shocking. At one, I was told, “That hadn’t even occurred to us. This is a staff position.”
Far too many institutions imagine “preparing and supporting teachers” is purely instrumental: where to make copies, how to upload a PDF to the LMS, what syllabus statements are required, when are grades do, how to deal with “problem students,” etc.
Too many institutions fail to recognize that Higher Education Pedagogy is a discipline with a literature, history, philosophy, praxis, conferences, disciplinary community, etc.
And, honestly, it isn’t just that institutions fail to recognize higher education pedagogy as a discipline, it’s that they too often denigrate the work and dismiss the folks engaged in it.
Teaching centers are one possible answer, but we need to have a lot more conversations about how these should be resourced and structured. And, more importantly, what cultural shifts are necessary for them to work.
