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Understanding the Faculty Forum
Having a Faculty Forum
The Role of P&P
What is a Faculty Forum?
The Faculty Forum is essential help for faculty scholarship success. It is a unique faculty development project supporting faculty scholarship, specifically scholarship that entails writing and that culminates in presentations at conferences or publishing.
A Faculty Forum consists of three parts:
(1) Writing workshops (occuring weeks or months before the conference) in which faculty develop a scholarly project or paper
(2) A one day in-house conference at which faculty present their work
(3) Assistance for participants to present at external conferences or to publish their work.
These activities are guided and facilitated by a school's coordinator who receives the assistance of P&P in this process. The Faculty Forum website provides needed resources to accomplish these goals.
See also What is a Faculty Forum? for a more detailed description.
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What is general purpose of a Faculty Forum?
The purpose of a Faculty Forum is to serve college faculty's professional development needs and the institution's faculty development needs by providing scholarship mentoring assistance. For those faculty interested in scholarship, a Faculty Forum will help with that and help make it possible and more successful through the interaction, support, and feedback of peers. The availability of necessary information through the website, the assistance of P&P, and networking with colleagues makes faculty scholarship endeavors easier and more successful.
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What do you mean by scholarship?
Faculty scholarship can be many things, all kinds of which improve content area knowledge, improve teaching, and retain faculty involvement in and enthusiasm for what they do. Traditionally, scholarship has meant faculty's original research into their content area and presentation of new discoveries and ideas to the public in scholarly venues such as conferences and journals.
Today the definition of scholarship is much broader, including four different kinds of scholarship: that of "discovery," "integration," "application," and "teaching and learning." This can mean original investigation into one's field, or synthesis and interpretation of many others' ideas, or applying knowledge of one's content area to the real world through the creation of a product or program, or the examination of pedagogy through applying research methods and scientific analysis to the act of teaching itself. Each of these types of scholarship are appropriate for a Faculty Forum as they reach their written stage (which all can culminate in) and are then subject to writing workshops, and eventually made public and available for peer review.
See also Defining Scholarship for more thorough discussion and clarification of this concept.
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Why should faculty do scholarship?
Scholarship has a variety of benefits for the faculty member as well as for all involved in the educational process. Scholarship improves the teacher at the foundation of good teaching: content knowledge. Through the process, it increases faculty enthusiasm and vitality for their teaching and learning endeavors. It improves critical thinking and communication schools. Scholarship also increases professionalization -- professional organization involvement, discipline depth and currency, and recognition, networking, and advancement. In these and many other ways, faculty scholarship helps to improve the quality of higher education delivered at participating institutions.
Awareness of the need for scholarship mentoring varies by institutional type and by individuals involved. Research universities, which compose 7% of universities today, consider faculty scholarship a priority. Teaching institutions usually do not value scholarship at the same level, and some may even consider this activity unnecessary. However scholarship's benefits to faculty, students, and institution extend across institutional type.
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Why is a Faculty Forum necessary? Why have a Faculty Forum?
Scholarship does not occur in isolation; collegial support has been cited as the single most important factor in determining whether faculty produce scholarship. However, this kind of support is increasingly absent today. Scholarship mentoring was once naturally occurring in university departments, but the "silent revolution" in higher education has changed that. The Faculty Forum is a unique response to these changes, filling a gap created in the past few decades by current economic trends. In this current "silent revolution," a scholarship mentoring program such as the Faculty Forum is especially needed to replace this former naturally occurring scholarship guidance and ongoing support.
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Who benefits from a Faculty Forum? What are the benefits of a Forum?
The activities of a Faculty Forum immediately and directly benefit faculty in their scholarship efforts. Through the mentoring and support offered by peers in the workshops, faculty are assisted in a way that usually would not be otherwise possible. Besides receiving the benefits of scholarship noted above, participation in a Forum's writing workshops improve faculty communication skills not only on their scholarship project, but in general. The in-house conference provides practice and recognition, and the opportunity to present or publish through professional organizations provides faculty desirable contacts, networking, and experience in their field. All these activities are made simpler and easier through the assistance of the Faculty Forum resources and the peer mentoring encouraged by the process. Because all of this improves faculty's depth and breadth and currency of content area, students also benefit, as does the institution.
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What kinds of institutions benefit from a Faculty Forum? (or: why should a "teaching institution" encourage faculty scholarship?)
Faculty scholarship activity has far-reaching benefits, apart from the recognition and knowledge advancement normally embraced by research universities. Faculty scholarship improves teaching in a variety of ways: it keep faculty current in their fields and involved in their professional organizations, it revitalizes faculty and helps prevent "teaching burnout," it improves communication and critical thinking skills. See The Awareness of the Need for Scholarship Mentoring by Institutional Classification.
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How does the Faculty Forum fit the faculty development context of higher education today?
The Faculty Forum is a unique faculty development program in higher education today. Most faculty development programs focus on pedagogy and improving teaching skills by directly focusing on that area; the Faculty Forum is the only program of its kind that focuses on mentoring scholarship, improving scholarship skills, providing scholarship writing feedback and support, and assisting faculty in producing an actual scholarly work for publication or presentation. Through scholarship activity, teaching skills are also improved.
See Faculty Development Context for more information on faculty development in higher education today.
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What is scope of a Faculty Forum (in terms of faculty level and experience)?
The Faculty Forum works just as well for both experienced, senior professors as for novice professors who have never participated in scholarship. Scholarship rarely occurs in isolation and the support of peers is often the single most important factor in determining whether or not a professor produces scholarship or not. (Actively producing professors often already have an informal network of support similar to the Forum.) All professors, including those who frequent present or publish and those who have never done so, can benefit from the feedback offered in the Forum's workshops and the information and support made available through the process of participating in the Forum.
For junior faculty, the Faculty Forum serves as a "how to" resource, with information coming from both contributing peers, the website, and the consulting services of P&P; for experienced faculty, the Faculty Forum serves as a motivating tool (deadlines and peer involvement) and a means to improve and perfect their work, though peer feedback in writing workshops.
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What is scope of a Faculty Forum (in terms of scholarship format and type)?
The Faculty Forum can accommodate all types of scholarship, as defined by Ernest Boyer and others. From a practical viewpoint, the scholarship should be able to be integrated with the Faculty Forum format: in written form, presentable within a reasonable time frame, and mesh with the Faculty Forum venue and objectives (the specifics of which may vary from institution to institution).
For many reasons, scholarship should be written and available for peer critique or review at some point during the process, though scholars may innovate from the written format during the actual conference presentation itself and enhance the presentation with visual aids and audience interaction as desired. See Scope of the Faculty Forum for more detailed discussion of scholarship format.
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What institutional resources are needed? What support should the school provide?
The school chooses a "coordinator" who will, with the help of P&P, coordinate the individual institution's own Faculty Forum, including the writing workshops, the in-house conference, and the assistance with outside presentation of work. The Faculty Forum, and all faculty development efforts for that matter, will thrive with institutional administrative support, which can take a variety of shapes depending on the unique needs of the school and its faculty. In general, encouraging collegiality, offering recognition, providing resources, providing training, and ensuring flexibility are ways an institution can support its faculty development efforts. The Faculty Forum program itself offers some form of all of these to faculty's scholarship efforts.
See General Suggestions for Support for more detailed support ideas.
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How long does a Faculty Forum take?
The length of the process of a "Faculty Forum" is determined by faculty and institutional needs. Faculty generally meet once every two weeks, or sometimes every week, at a one to two hour "writing workshop" to discuss their progress and peer review each other's work. Usually three to four months is the shortest feasible time period to have faculty develop an idea or fledgling outline into a finished scholarly work with each other's support, and to hold an in-house conference for that. Six months is a reasonable average. After the in-house conference, more time to find outside venues for faculty work may be needed. Most institutions will find that a year is the longest a Forum will take from beginning to end.
Questions to consider are: How much time can faculty devote to working on a scholarship project? How much time do the particular projects need? What discipline is the faculty member? How much support can the institution offer? Many factors will influence the length of a project; for example, some disciplines, such as the sciences, may require materials and time to do research that entails more than other disciplines, such as the humanities.
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How can we be sure to get to the "finish line"?
Set dates. A Forum coordinator can work with her local campus administration to set a day and location for the Forum -- preferably a few months in the future. This date will provide a deadline to work towards. Also, the first sessions of a Faculty Forum can be devoted to professors writing abstracts (sometimes only 250-500 words) of their ideas/papers/projects and finding appropriate conferences (or vice versa). (See Conferences and Journals). Then the faculty have deadlines for completing their papers, in addition to the in-house conference. This is one significant way to ensure that the meetings continue and your papers and conference manifest.
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What about protection of intellectual property (copyright)?
Writers and artists, including college professors writing academic papers, own the intellectual copyrights to their work, as soon it is written or created. U.S. copyright law does not demand any other action on the part of the writer or artist; the act of producing the work means that it is their "intellectual property." If a professor's paper is on this Forum website under "Faculty Accomplishments," he still owns the rights. If a professor presents it at a conference, he still own the rights. If he has it accepted to an academic journal, whether electronic or print, he no longer owns the rights (usually). The journal does. (Still it's desirable to have it published!) Some journals will still let a professor keep his own paper at his own website or other electronic location; other journals will ask the professor to remove it from all other print/electronic sources. The paper CAN be reprinted in other places but the journal has to give permission, and may charge.
Under any circumstances, if information in the paper is used elsewhere, whether through direct quotes or paraphrase, the author's name must be cited, even if the journal owns the paper.
This can be problematic with dissertations -- some professors have published a chapter or two of their dissertation as a paper in an academic journal and then want to publish their whole dissertation as a book, but occasionally the journal won't release rights. (Although often most academics -- who these editors are -- are very understanding.) If a professor's paper is going to be a chapter in her dissertation, you should make sure the journal allows you to publish it later as a chapter in a book before you grant permission.
On the other side of the coin, a book publisher does not want to publish a dissertation that has the majority of its content already published elsewhere. The CELJ suggests publishing no more than 20-25% of the dissertation as separate articles if you do plan to publish it as a book. However, the fact that at least part of it has been published (20% or less) is a plus to book publishers -- it means your ideas are timely and desired.
The paper CAN be presented at a conference with no intellectual property rights conflict, though.
Institutions of higher education do not own the intellectual property rights to the academic work (scholarship) their faculty produce unless a professor signs a contract for a particular project, and the contract specifically states the institution had ownership of the product -- or -- unless a policy indicating such is written in the faculty policy manual or employee handbook. Some institutions may have such a policy for certain situations, such as creation of on-line courses, but not for faculty academic papers. Furthermore, a professor may create a product, such as, for example, a "Writing Across the Curriculum" program, that the institution may own, but the professor may then write about the creation of that program, and the paper itself would be his intellectual property, though the program itself may not be.
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What services does P&P provide?
P&P provides information through consulting services and through web support:
1. Consulting: P&P mentors and guides an institution's participating faculty members through each step of the scholarship process.
a. The institution selects an in-house coordinator who will run the Faculty Forum at his or her own campus
b. The institution's coordinator works with P&P consultant to learn how to guide their faculty in:
i. research and writing for scholarship
purposes
ii. effective writing workshops
iii. in-house conference for presentation of material
iv. faculty application of work to outside venues: journals, conferences, publishing houses
2. Support information: P&P provides information, available at the Faculty Forum support website, to support this process. This information on writing, scholarship, and executing a good Faculty Forum assists the coordinator as well as faculty participating in the project.
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How does the website help?
The Faculty Forum main website, www.facultyforum.org, links to the Faculty Forum support website that provides the necessary information for successfully accomplishing a Faculty Forum. This includes information on writing, publishing, and presenting scholarly work. It also assists with the various activities of the Faculty Forum, such as running writing workshops effectively, directing written work for various professional situations, and producing and implementing an effective Forum in general. Information provided for scholars includes how to write a paper and publish, how to submit to a publisher, how to find conference, journals, or other places for academic work. This information is necessary to be successful in scholarship, yet often not commonly known by professors today.
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How much does it cost?
The participating college or institution pays $5000 for one year's consulting services and support website use. Faculty and administrators at that institution then receive the services of P&P for implementing a faculty forum at their campus, including full access to the support website. One or more Faculty Forums (with several professors/scholarly works each) is accomplished during this year time period.
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How can my institution sign up?
To contact Perkins & Perry with questions or comments, or if you are interested in having a Faculty Forum at your school, e-mail, mail, or call:
The Faculty Forum
Perkins & Perry, Inc.
305 Roswell Farms Road
Roswell, GA 30075
Phone: 770-649-7764
Fax: 770-649-7879
E-mail:
Karey Perkins, President:
kperkins@facultyforum.org
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