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Jan09-editorial.pdf

For a number of years now, regular tenure-track professors have not given all the courses in many university programs. The usual solution to this resource deficit has been to use sessional faculty, hired per-course, or faculty on limited-term contracts, with mainly teaching duties. The use of non-tenured faculty is not as excessive in physics as in some disciplines, a common subject of newspaper articles [1], but it is still significant on many campuses (in Québec the situation is a little different*). Slowly, some of these limited term faculty positions are gaining permanent status, a recognition that they are here to stay [2]. Provincial funding is not likely to be sufficient to hire enough regular faculty members and the increased research intensity of many universities, including the hiring of research chairs, makes them even more necessary.

Once these teaching-only positions are announced as leading to tenure, their role in the department is bound to change significantly. They should no longer be viewed as an unfortunate necessity but as a valuable component of a department: these faculty members are now stakeholders, having a definite interest in the successful fulfillment of our educational responsibilities, and their permanent status will attract high calibre candidates. Departments have changed. In the late 1990’s, as Canadian universities felt that they were losing their competitive edge in research, successful lobbying efforts gave rise to the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). These two programs created a great deal of excitement in the country. They provided an opportunity to raise the research profile of Canadian universities on the international stage. They made research in Canadian universities more visible, emphasizing its important role, at a time when the pressures, even from our provincial governments, to increase graduate training, were being felt. This new class of Faculty members spun off the creation of in-house chairs to retain local stars who could not be given CRC chairs. But it also revealed that what used to be a fairly homogeneous faculty body is now a more complex assemblage of academics with different priorities and responsibilities, and that administrators will have to be careful to nurture their talents to preserve a sense of community in departments. A simplified picture shows star researchers focussed mainly on their research, regular faculty members carrying the brunt of the administrative load, and a growing class of teaching-only faculty. This latter group was made up mostly of sessionals until recently, some doing it out of love, others for experience, and some out of necessity. But the unreliability of available suitable sessionals makes it more effective to operate with full-time teaching positions. I sent out a questionnaire in December to Department Chairs about these positions; their existence, the nature of the contracts and research responsibilities, if any. I have nineteen responses, including one from my own institution, ranging from small to large universities. Thirteen of those had positions with mainly teaching responsibilities, either in lecture courses or lab courses, under a varying range of titles: laboratory instructor (Simon Fraser University), lecturer (Simon Fraser University), senior instructor (Universities of Calgary and Victoria), faculty lecturer (University of Alberta), senior lecturer (Simon Fraser University), academic assistants (University of Lethbridge), science lecturer (University of Ottawa). Those who did not have such positions were mainly smaller institutions with a staff fairly heavily committed to teaching. York’s Department of Physics has five such positions, two of them tenured. Calgary has four tenure track instructors, three with “senior” in their title. They are probably the universities with the longest track record of such positions. A new category has been created at the University of Victoria, that of “teaching professor”, with a professorial status without the research requirements. Guelph and the University of Ottawa encourage these teachers to do education-related research. At the University of Ottawa, the current agreement states that “scholarly activities may be mainly or even exclusively of a pedagogical or professional-development nature”. Teaching-only positions are often resisted by unions and some faculty who fear, for good reason, that an increase in the number of such positions would be at the expense of regular faculty positions. At the University of Ottawa, they have been created on a trial basis and their numbers are limited currently to 10% of the regular faculty members of a department. But overall the system needs them, so the creation of such positions may be quite inevitable, as this route is more appealing than the alternative: disenfranchised limited-term full-time or part-time teachers, with an uncertain future. Academics will have to be extremely vigilant to maintain a good balance in a department. Teaching- and research-wise the department will have to operate as a community. The regular faculty will provide the courses pushing the limits of knowledge. Some senior faculty, free from the pressures to perform, may embark on significant pedagogical developments. Teaching-only faculty, chosen among graduates with a lot of enthusiasm and a natural talent for teaching, can provide a significant contribution to teaching, because they are free from the preoccupations of proving themselves as researchers. A classic mistake to avoid is to put into those positions academics whose primary ambition is to gain respect as researchers and not teachers. It should not be a consolation prize. Such faculty have to be chosen for their dedication to teaching while holding a great deal of respect for research. The selection process for such positions should reflect that.

Concern has been expressed about the evolution of the career of teaching-only faculty, as they age. Not benefitting from the challenges of a constantly evolving research environment, will they settle into a comfortable routine and lose their ability to inspire and stimulate students. This is a matter that could be debated extensively, and here I offer a personal opinion. All humans age, and the temptation to settle into a routine affects not only teachers but researchers as well. How many researchers spend their careers hanging on to scientific approaches that are no longer the most productive? Dedicated teachers working within a dynamic environment, surrounded by active researchers and eager students, will likely stay in touch with advances in their discipline. These faculty members are more likely to invest valuable time into developing new course material that is exciting than regular faculty members pressured to keep performing in research, or simply struggling to cope with the demands of their own success. This time invested may outweigh their lack of direct involvement with research. Good course development is not just time-consuming, but requires expertise that is not necessarily acquired simply by experience. In addition, student expectations of professors, in particular at the lower levels, keep rising. There is a growing recognition of this fact in various circles, as illustrated by the activities of our Division of Physics Education, the hiring of Carl Wieman (Nobel Prize in Physics 2001) at UBC to head the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative [3], the increased popularity of peer instruction teaching techniques developed by Eric Mazur at Harvard, and a number of other initiatives (see for instance, Physics in Canada, March-April 2005, now fully available on the web [4], and the article by Antimirova et al. in this issue [5]).

To keep physics alive, and to allow it to attain its potential, we cannot take our teaching responsibility lightly. It has to be a priority in each department. Faced by multiple pressures, there may be no simple answer on how to fulfill our mission well. Teaching innovation has to be nurtured and the mission accomplished by a combination of teaching-only faculty, and regular faculty including research chairs. A department is a community where expertise can be shared, where there should be an exchange of teaching experience and research knowledge, for instance the researchers learning and getting teaching material from the teachers and the researchers dispensing their newly acquired knowledge, the whole richer than the sum of its parts. We will have to be open-minded and creative, and nurture the talent available, be inclusive, and reward good teaching innovation as well as good research. The transmission of knowledge has to be recognized as a skill that can benefit from an expert touch. This could lead me to the whole issue of funding for education research [6] but that will be for another day.

Béla Joós
Editor, Physics in Canada

* In Québec, since what is usually known in the rest of Canada as the first year of university is taught in the CEGEPs, the teaching loads for service courses in science departments is often minimal and hence their reliance on sessionals and limited term contract faculty is also minimal.

References
1. Sandy Farran, “It hurts when you call me professor”, Macleans, 22 March 2007 (available on the web).
2. Moira Farr, “For teaching only faculty, a controversial role”, University Affairs, November 2008, p. 20-23 (available on the web).
3. Frances Backhouse, “The Science of teaching”, University Affairs, May 2007, p.18-22 (available on the web).
4. Special Issue entitled “Physics Education in Canada”, Joanne O’Meara and Robert Hawkes, eds., Physics in Canada, 61 (2), March-April 2005 (now fully available on the web).
5. T. Antimirova, P. Goldman, N. Lasry, M. Milner-Bolotin, and R. Thompson, “Recent Developments in Physics Education in Canada”, Physics in Canada, 65 (1) (this issue) p. 19-22.
6. Marina Milner-Bolotin, “Can we afford not to fund science education in Canada?”, Physics in Canada, 64 (1), p. 5-6 , Jan-March 2008.

Comments of readers on this editorial are more than welcome.