Arthur Chickering is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at Memphis State University. On leave from the Directorship of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Memphis State, he is Visiting Professor at George Mason University. Zelda Gamson is a sociologist who holds appointments at the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education: Faculty Inventory. Institutional Inventory.

This is a conceptual review of the literature variously referred to as faculty development, educational development, instructional development, and academic development in higher education. Previous empirical reviews covering more than 30 years of published literature could draw only tentative and weak conclusions about the effectiveness of educational development practices. The authors used different questions that queried the nature of educational development practice and the thinking underlying practice. Their conceptual review yielded a framework with six foci of practice (skill, method, reflection, disciplinary, institutional, and action research or inquiry) that was drawn from an analysis of the design elements of the educational development practices in the research they reviewed and from an analysis of the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical literature cited by those articles. This six-cluster framework provides a new way of thinking about the design of practice and a more meaningful basis for ...

Are We Asking the Right Questions?: A Conceptual Review of the Educational Development Literature in Higher Education

Guided by research on gendered organizations and faculty careers, we examined gender differences in how research university faculty spend their work time. We used time-diary methods to understand f...

Asked More Often: Gender Differences in Faculty Workload in Research Universities and the Work Interactions That Shape Them:

Community engagement is one of the major innovations that has occurred in higher education over the last 20 years. At the center of this innovation are faculty members because of their intimate ties to the academic mission. This article examines the progress that has been made in understanding this critical area of faculty work. It builds on past research to consider how the conceptualization of faculty community engagement influences the kinds of questions we ask about it and the kinds of recruitment, support, and professional growth we provide. Implications of the study and for the practice of faculty community engagement are provided for researchers, administrators, and faculty members.

Studying the Professional Lives and Work of Faculty Involved in Community Engagement

Faced with the challenges of the changes in: higher education, educational developers’ roles and the use of innovation to stimulate change, this study aimed to synthesise literature dealing with the diffusion of innovative learning and teaching practices in higher education to determine what lessons could be learnt. The findings suggest that the following need to be considered if innovations are to influence widespread change: senior management support, recognition of the time needed to change practices, appropriate skill development, contextualised innovation, supportive networks and a solid institutional infrastructure. The paper also considers the difficulties faced when trying to generalise guidance in an area wrought with the complexities of change and calls for further research that problematises the realities of innovation diffusion.

Lessons Learnt from Literature on the Diffusion of Innovative Learning and Teaching Practices in Higher Education.

It is widely assumed that developments in information and communication technologies are fundamentally transforming and improving higher education. As a part of an ongoing evaluation of technology-supported pedagogy in one university, our three-year research project was designed, on the one hand, to determine if and how selected technologies were beneficial for learning and, on the other hand, to offer professional development for faculty members. In this paper, we reflect on our participation in a pedagogy and technology (referred to as PedTech) pilot project, describe some of the relationships that developed between ourselves as researchers and evaluators and our faculty collaborators, and share what we have learned from this experience. We suggest that a scholarship of teaching approach to evaluating innovations in teaching and learning is one way to support institution-wide adoption.

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Katherine McWhaw

Papers

Reflections of Researchers Involved in the Evaluation of Pedagogical Technological Innovations in a University Setting