The Changing Role of Faculty

Abstract

The role of faculty within traditional teaching institutions worldwide has always been multidimensional, involving administrative duties, research responsibilities, and a commitment to community service in addition to teaching. In the majority of institutions, this teaching role of faculty has remained unchanged for decades; in fact, most faculty teach the way they themselves were taught using the tried and trusted transmission paradigm in which sections of academic content are divided into 50-minute lectures and delivered to often large groups of passive recipients. There is simply very little incentive to make alterations to a teaching model that has been in place for hundreds of years (Buckley, 2002). Present-day faculty culture often values research productivity and quality over high-quality teaching, and student evaluations tend not to reward faculty prepared to experiment and take risks with models of learning that differ from the students’ previous learning experiences.