I recall that when I first told a graduate mentor that I was planning to take a job in “educational development” (also called faculty development or academic development) they told me that they thought such people were knowledgeable about teaching ideas and technologies, but that they were out of touch with the actual experience of teaching. I asked why, and they said, “because they don’t tend to teach many classes.” I originally took this comment as a challenge to the authority or motivations of educational developers - I thought my advisor was saying that it was unfair for us to make so many suggestions about teaching when we were not actually doing much of the work. Over several years of working as an educational developer and observing the overall field of educational development, I have come to the conclusion that my advisor was making a fair point, but that this reality is not one that is usually chosen by educational developers themselves. I think most educational developers agree that it would be best if teaching support workers had frequent teaching experiences, but it just isn’t always possible.
How much and in what contexts do educational developers teach?
There are a wide variety of job descriptions and balances of duties among educational developers. Some positions include teaching one or two courses. Others do not include any teaching at all. One of the major factors that tends to influence whether and how much educational developers teach is academic staff vs. faculty appointments. It seems that most educational developers are in academic staff (rather than faculty) roles with the possible exceptions of those faculty affiliates/fellows or administrators who have involvement with the CTL. Those with faculty appointments can be more likely to teach because teaching is a part of the faculty job description (the one hiccup is that CTL duties are often assigned as service responsibilities or releases from teaching). Academic staff, on the other hand, are sometimes not even allowed to teach. As a small example, in a past educational development job that I had, several CTL staff had interest in teaching and sought out their own opportunities, but past political issues within the institution prevented those classified as academic staff from teaching, whether “in-load” or “above-load.”
Below I have presented a few hypothetical personas with their job titles and relationships to teaching that I developed using my own experiences plus some anecdotes from fellow educational developers.
Billie: Educational developer (Staff appointment)
Billie has no official teaching responsibilities, but does theoretically have an opportunity to teach ad-hoc every few years, subject to the approval of the supervising administrator. The last two times teaching opportunities arose, Billie’s request to teach was denied because of high workload in the CTL.
Sam: Teaching Center Director (Faculty appointment)
Sam’s teaching load includes one 3-credit course per semester during his 3-year appointment as the CTL Director (after which he will return to being a regular faculty member in Chemistry). Sam fought to be able to teach one course per semester during his CTL Director term. The Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning originally wanted him to be released from all teaching duties during this time to focus on developing the Center’s programming, but Sam insisted on retaining some teaching duties.
Louise: Assistant Director for Inclusive Teaching (Staff appointment)
Louise’s teaching responsibilities include two graduate student seminars on course design and pedagogy per semester. These courses are taught by Louise, but the instructor of record is actually a different faculty member because college policy prohibits a staff member from being listed as the instructor of record.
Farah: Instructional Designer (Staff Appointment)
Farah has no teaching responsibilities in her job description, but due to a negotiated agreement she teaches one course a year in the educational technology program (which is understaffed). The class Farah teaches is an online asynchronous course for graduate instructional design students, through she mainly supports on-ground undergraduate STEM classes as a designer.
Again, this exploration is hypothetical, and non-exhaustive of the reasons educational developers may not teach (very much). But I hope it helps communicate that educational developers often are very invested in teaching, but are not able to teach in their roles or their teaching opportunities are minimized. In fact, a fair number of educational developers (and other academic staff) that I know go so far as to give their time and energy to adjunct teaching at other institutions (not the one at which they are employed) in order to remain involved in teaching to some extent.
Returning to my former advisor’s gripe, I think that communication and humility (a theme of many of my posts about faculty development) could go a long way here. The reality is that many of the college or university staff responsible for pedagogical guidance or leadership may not teach very much, and as a result could be somewhat biased towards research and or theory instead of implementation. Faculty developers themselves should be sensitive to this reality and frequently look to instructors for information and experiential data about the classroom conditions in the institution. For any teaching frameworks or methods that are promoted by the teaching center staff, reports about how feasible these methods were to implement should ideally be welcomed and believed. One of the most common points of tension in CTL work is when instructors feel like new or inclusive methods are too time-consuming to implement (this frequently comes up with respect to UDL in my experience). When this concern comes up, I try to let the instructor be the expert on what scope of change is possible for them at the moment, especially if they are sensitive to the disparities in our teaching responsibilities. When I do draw on my own teaching roles and experiences, I make sure to be specific about what kind and amount of teaching I do, for the sake of transparency.
On the other side of the equation, I think it would be good for instructors who interact with CTL staff to keep in mind that they often did not choose the structure of their job that keeps them at some distance from the classroom and from undergraduate students. What I used to say to some skeptical instructors is that “No, we do not (currently) share the experience of teaching three or four sections per semester. But perhaps having acknowledged that, we can recognize what each of us brings to the table in terms of experiences and knowledge to help you meet your goals.”
There is another critique of CTL staff, I think most famously offered by the @ass_deans twitter account, that we are primarily interested in administrative power and surveillance, rather than actual academic activities. I do wonder if some of this belief is fueled by an incomplete understanding of how educational developers come to not teach very much. My overall advice to instructors is to be more generous to CTL staff than this satirical account is. Often coming from the world of teaching and occupying a slightly different space than classroom instructors, I think many educational developers actually crave proximity to the classroom and to undergraduate students, and our interactions with instructors can provide that closeness.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.
Yeah I think if we had significant evidence that continued teaching experience (vs past teaching experience) was an important factor for credibility, we might be able to argue for more defined teaching roles. Might be interesting to ask current or past CTL directors if published research on this would matter
So helpful to see these different roles and restrictions laid out! I’m always interested in how educational developers gain credibility especially as higher education pedagogy becomes more codified as a field. It would be so interesting to gather some instructor opinions on this. Does credibility come from having a PhD (whatever the discipline) and having gone through the graduate training process that faculty did? Does it come from teaching courses that give us knowledge of current student needs and challenges? The latter seems the most immediately helpful in my day-to-day work and I’m ABD, but as you point out, teaching is often actively discouraged or deprioritized.