You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
A new survey of part-time faculty members in Ontario offers additional evidence that most adjunct instructors are no longer professionals who teach on the side. The typical instructor surveyed was female (60 percent), with 66 percent reporting having finished a Ph.D. That’s a big shift from a similar, previous survey conducted in the early 1990s, which found that most part-time faculty were male professionals who taught a course or two for fun, fulfillment or service. The involuntary part-timers in the new survey reported working four to five years on short-term contracts and wanting to find full-time academic work with benefits.
The report also notes that among these “precarious sessionals” are those who have “given up” on academe and are seeking any full-time position and those who have taken up work in other fields but who are “in waiting” for a full-time academic position. “A Survey of Sessional Faculty in Ontario Publicly Funded Universities” was written by Cynthia Field, a Ph.D. candidate in education at the University of Toronto, and Glen A. Jones, the Ontario Research Chair in Postsecondary Education Policy and Measurement and a professor of higher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at Toronto.
Twelve Ontario colleges and universities participated in the survey, with response rates among temporary faculty members varying by institution, from 16 percent to 48 percent. The overall response rate among 7,814 instructors surveyed was 21.5 percent. In addition to demographic data, the survey sought open-ended answers to questions about how learning environments can be improved as part-time-faculty numbers continue to increase.
Respondents said that hiring faculty to more stable positions would reduce stress and enable instructors to better prepare for upcoming courses, according to the report. Many said that undergraduate class sizes were too big for providing opportunities for critical thinking and student engagement, and others said they worried classrooms were poorly laid out for learning. Some wanted private meeting spaces. Others reported wanting more opportunities for professional engagement, as well as more pedagogy and classroom training in their own graduate programs as preparation for teaching. Another concern was a perceived increased need to spend classroom time on remedial work in first-year courses, such as on essay structure.
