Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donald H. Wulff is director of the Center for Instructional Development and Research and assistant dean in the graduate school at the University of Washington. He is past president of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD).
Ann E. Austin is professor of higher education, adult, and lifelong education at Michigan State University. She was identified as one of forty Young Leaders of the Academy by Change magazine and is a recent past-president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"The next generation of college and university faculty members will face many new challenges and opportunities from enhancing teaching and learning among an increasingly diverse student population, to utilizing new teaching and learning technologies for preparing students to pursue rapidly evolving career options on domestic and global scales. This volume addresses these challenges and provides insights into what the nation s graduate schools must do in order to prepare this new faculty for a new generation."
Orlando L. Taylor, vice provost for research, and dean, Graduate School, Howard University

"Exceptionally stimulating and comprehensive, Paths to the Professoriate offers a synthesis of research findings on the graduate student experience and provides vivid examples of a number of models of good practice in graduate education."
Mary Deane Sorcinelli, associate provost and director, Center for Teaching, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"By highlighting key findings from significant national studies and describing innovative strategies that are improving doctoral education, this book is an indispensable tool for current and future faculty members."
Anika E. Sandy-Hanson, past president, National Association of Graduate-Professional Students

"The foundation of research-driven evidence coupled with practical experiences provides the tools we need to change graduate education to better fit with the needs of hiring institutions and the new Ph.D. s who will work there."
Caral B. Howery, deputy executive officer, American Sociological Association

Aus dem Klappentext

It has been estimated that in the next ten years, about half of the current higher education faculty will retire. How can we best prepare the next generation of faculty members to fill this tremendous gap in our educational system?

Paths to the Professoriate offers all those involved in higher education everyone from administrators to scholars to graduate students a much-needed resource that brings together major research, the most important developments in practice, and informed analysis on improving graduate education and preparing the future faculty. This important book includes chapters from some of the best-known researchers, practitioners, and scholars working to prepare the faculty of the future.

In one volume, the authors offer a synthesis of what has been learned about the challenges and concerns in graduate education as preparation for faculty careers, highlight the various projects and approaches for improving graduate education, and identify strategies for institutional leaders, department chairs, faculty advisors, and graduate students. Paths to the Professoriate:

• Presents important reasons for considering ways to improve the preparation of the next generation of faculty
• Describes research studies concerning the graduate school experience
• Highlights illustrative examples of innovative programs and projects
• Provides a synthesis of key lessons from the research and projects addressing the preparation of future faculty

This solidly research-based book covers such vital topics as: the lack of systematic developmentally organized preparation for those aspiring to teaching careers in higher education; graduate students perceptions of their graduate experiences and their preparation for faculty work; particular challenges confronting Black doctoral students; reasons students leave doctoral study; programs to prepare graduate students for roles as teaching scholars and engaged citizens; strategies to help graduate students and faculty members identify mutual goals and resolve conflicts; and much more.

Paths to the Professoriate offers all those concerned with the fate of higher education a valuable resource for the future.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Paths to the Professoriate

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

Ann E. Austin, Donald H. Wulff

Improving graduate education, and specifically, strengthening the preparation process for future faculty, has become a significant issue in higher education, of importance to a wide-ranging group of stakeholders. In fact, the growing interest in graduate education and the preparation of the future professoriate has been evident over the past decade and a half in an array of conferences, institutional programs, initiatives by professional organizations, funded research, and print and Web material. A quick review of such recent literature, programs, and research shows that, clearly, there is a movement afoot to address the challenges of preparing the next generation of faculty.

This volume provides a summary and synthesis of key information about this movement. Although there are valuable resources in the research literature and publications describing the activities of various associations, institutions, and organizations, there has been no comprehensive effort to bring those pieces together. This volume fills that gap by gathering in one place ideas from major research studies and action projects that have focused, over the past dozen years or so, on improving graduate education and preparing the future professoriate.

This chapter first examines factors that together have contributed to the growing interest in improving graduate education. Employers, leaders of foundations and government agencies, graduate deans, and doctoral students have added their voices to a call for examining the quality of the graduate experience and its success in preparing students for their future roles as professionals. Then, the chapter turns to the specific interest of this book-graduate education as preparation for an academic career. We make a case for why it is critical at this moment in the history of American higher education to ensure that graduate education is appropriately preparing students who are pursuing paths to the professoriate. In this chapter, we hope to convince readers of the importance of considering strategies for enriching the preparation of future faculty.

Factors Contributing to Interest in Improving Graduate Education

We have identified four of the main factors contributing to the increased recent focus on graduate education: the teaching assistant role, the academic labor market, graduate student attrition rates, and researchers' interest in expanding conceptions of faculty career stages.

The Teaching Assistant Role

Although interest in strengthening graduate education as preparation for a faculty career has gained considerable momentum in the past two decades, signs of concern appeared much earlier. After World War II, when universities increased their emphasis on research productivity and scientific excellence, concerns emerged about both the amount of instruction left to teaching assistants, particularly in introductory courses, and the preparation of teaching assistants for providing quality education when their own education was so heavily focused on preparing them as top-flight researchers. Chase (1970) captured this concern about teaching assistants: "There is a growing awareness-spreading from within academia to interested groups outside-that there are many serious problems associated with the utilization of graduate teaching assistants in contemporary American higher education" (p. 2). Another comment during this period was even more succinct: "It is sometimes wryly noted that college teaching is the only profession requiring no formal training of its practitioners" (Nowlis, Clark, & Rock, 1968, p. iii).

In the spirit of these remarks, over the past two decades the public at large has expressed greater interest in the nature and quality of the undergraduate learning experience as well as the outcomes of that experience. Such public interest, evident in newspapers and legislatures, has contributed to growing attention on the part of university administrators to the quality of teaching provided by teaching assistants who work with large numbers of undergraduate classes.

In response to such concerns, beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s and 1990s, universities developed increasingly credible programs for preparing graduate students to teach. Originally, such programs focused primarily on initial training designed to prepare those graduate students who had immediate roles as teaching assistants (TAs). Then, over time, many institutions and departments began providing graduate teaching assistants with ongoing training that reflected the recognition that they needed different kinds of information and preparation at different times in their development as teachers.

As faculty developers and TA supervisors gave more attention to preparing teaching assistants, The Pew Charitable Trusts helped build a cross-institutional dialogue about these issues by sponsoring several national conferences on the training and employment of teaching assistants, the first occurring in 1986. Some of these conferences resulted in published proceedings (Chism & Warner, 1987; Lewis, 1993; Nyquist, Abbott, Wulff, & Sprague, 1991). During that same period, the Journal of Graduate Teaching Assistant Development, published by New Forums Press, was initiated and complete volumes were written specifically on the issues of TA preparation (for example, Allen & Rueter, 1990; Andrews, 1985; Marincovich, Prostko, & Stout, 1998; Nyquist, Abbott, & Wulff, 1989; Nyquist & Wulff, 1996). Simultaneously, various researchers (among them, Abbott, Wulff, & Szego, 1989; Darling & Dewey, 1989; Nyquist & Sprague, 1992, 1998; Sprague & Nyquist, 1989, 1991; Staton & Darling, 1989) also turned their attention to questions of teaching assistant development, thus contributing to an emerging research base to guide professional practice.

The network of faculty developers, TA supervisors and trainers, foundation leaders, and researchers interested in teaching assistant training and development has been a major factor in the movement to improve the graduate experience, and specifically to prepare graduate students appropriately as future faculty. Indeed, once institutions had initial and ongoing training for TAs in place, they had a base from which to expand efforts to prepare graduate students for their future careers as teachers, not only for their immediate assignments as TAs. In addition, teaching assistant conferences that were held every other year in the late 1980s and early 1990s are now incorporated into discussions and presentations about TA development specifically and preparing future faculty more broadly at many disciplinary and professional conferences.

Labor Market Issues

Besides the growing interest in TA preparation on many campuses, job market issues also emerged as a factor in graduate education. Interest in critiquing and reforming graduate education in the 1990s was likely stimulated by observations, grounded in the tight academic labor market of the 1980s and 1990s, that many doctoral graduates were not being hired into faculty positions. Faculty members and administrative leaders in universities, as well as leaders of scholarly associations and national agencies and foundations, considered what skills and abilities graduate students should master and...