Actions

  1. Program level: Designing & running faculty development programs
    • Part-time faculty program, January 2023
    • Full-time library faculty program, January 2021
    • Building accessibility training into PD programs, 2016 –
  2. Individual:
    • Cailean – college initiative coordinator:
      • Center my role as teacher (relational, community-centered) instead of administrator (institutional, compliance/performance -oriented)
      • Advocate for PD opportunities for myself (that are funded)
      • Put boundaries on the academic calendar around faculty programming
    • Jo – part-time team member:
      • Echoing Cailean: Center my role as a teacher and advocate for the recognition of library workers as educators
      • Advocate for PD and funding opportunities for adjuncts (in some cases, exclusively for adjuncts)
      • Support and amplify issues faced by non-teaching and teaching adjuncts as a (formerly very active) union member

Themes

Precarity

“Contingent faculty are often precarious in multiple senses. First, their employment depends on factors outside their control and is subject to frequent and unpredictable changes, of which they are sometimes notified only days in advance (Baldwin and Chronister 2001; Hart 2011; Waltman et al. 2012). Second, they are vulnerable in the workplace because they can be dismissed—or their contracts simply not renewed—for any reason, without recourse to an appeals process (Harper et al. 2001; Paul 2004; Hart 2011). Third, the low pay and lack of benefits characteristic of many non-TT positions can subject them to the threat of poverty, homelessness, and illness (Brown, Goodman, and Yasukawa 2010; House Committee 2014). Finally, contingent faculty often hover on the brink of leaving the profession altogether (Gill 2014; Barcan 2017).”

Care: the individual, the institution

Relational care vs. empathy, as per Jade Davis:

“Empathy’s displacement of other methods of caring for and about people who aren’t you is hegemonic.”

Ideology

Open ideology and OER discourse: the work is inherently a ‘positive’ – Yoon (2023), Macintyre (2015)