New Learning Compact Institute, A Conversation with Dr. Adrianna Kezar
New Learning Compact Institute, A Conversation with Dr. Adrianna Kezar: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix
New Learning Compact Institute, A Conversation with Dr. Adrianna Kezar: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Randy Bass:
Well, hello, and we are here with Adrianna Kezar, who is a professor at the University of Southern California and the director of the Pullias Center at the University of Southern California. And we're delighted to be talking with you today about ways of supporting non-tenure-track faculty and professional learning and professional development.
Randy Bass:
So, Adrianna, for several years, you have been overseeing what you call the Delphi Awards, which recognizes outstanding work in supporting non-tenured faculty contingent faculty, adjunct faculty, and where they fit in institutional priorities. What can you tell us about what you've learned from the Delphi Award winners over the years about supporting tenure-track faculty? And maybe you can also tell us a little bit about some of the resources that exist around the award winners that help contextualize them?
Adrianna Kezar:
Thanks. I'm so happy to be here to speak about this really, really important issue. I think there are a couple of lessons to learn from the Delphi Award winners. First, as I think about professional development, they really recognize the ways they could build the most amazing professional development.
Adrianna Kezar:
But if it's not designed in ways that are accessible in terms of timing and format and outreach, then they're not going to be successful. And I think that's a really important lesson to take across these award winners. So they were really thoughtful. And they understand the challenges that are facing adjuncts and lecturers as they design their programs and policies and initiatives in order to support them. So second, the award winners also recognize that other policies and practices on campus can prohibit adjuncts and lecturers involvement in professional development. So it's not enough to develop the most thoughtful program... It needs to take into account their constraints and needs. If your teaching award excludes non-tenure-track faculty members, for example, then you've got a disincentive for people to get involved in professional development. What about your evaluation systems? Are they aligned with reboarding involvement in professional development or adjuncts simply evaluated based on student evaluations? That's a policy that needs to be examined. So, it's this whole set of campus policies and practices that really end up preventing or being disincentives for involvement and professional development. So we've seen that they've been able to overcome that. So, our award winners really looked at the overall situation or the system on their campuses and tried to address those issues. So, it made it possible for the lecturers and adjuncts to be involved. So understand their particular needs interests. And then also look at what is the campus doing that's really preventing them from being successful. And then the majority of our winners have been institutions that have created more of a suite of changes that help support an on tenure track faculty because they've seen the way that those can get in the way of them being involved in professional development.
Adrianna Kezar:
But we've also had a few that really have dug deeper into a kind of a vexing issue. So Harper College is one of those. And they realized that the campus evaluations for adjuncts were really inadequate and they were not supporting quality teaching and learning. So as a result, they gathered a team to design a more thoughtful process of evaluation and they now have observation options and portfolios. So we like to provide awards for campuses that are really trying to innovate and explore areas where we've made much less progress as an entire enterprise, some of these really vexing challenges. So I really recommend that individuals look to our award winners for both these range of supports that they need to be thinking that they need to put in place that help adjuncts and lecturers be involved with professional development. But they also want to look at some of these detailed issues like evaluation that are really preventative of us being successful on these issues. And in terms of resources, we have case studies of all of the award winners and there are six of these case studies at this point, but we also have case studies of some of our finalists who developed really amazing projects as well. So they are also profiled on our website.
Adrianna Kezar:
And we also have resources, campus guides to help with that work of how to redesign your campus policies and practices, which are the ones that are probably getting in the way of adjuncts participating in professional development. So we have guides for both departments and campuses. So whether you're just a single department on a campus that's motivated to make a change, you don't have maybe the support of the entire campus. That's OK. We've got resources designed for different leaders on campus at different levels to try to go about thinking about making these changes. We also have a guide specifically for those who are working for centers of teaching and learning about what can they do specifically to support an on tenure track faculty. So just a guide directed towards that audience and population, because we know that on many of the campuses we've been at, they're aware of the struggles of adjuncts and lecturers, but they don't often know exactly what to do. So we've tried to offer a guide that tells the individuals working in those positions precisely what are the kinds of ways they can be advocates and allies to support them and rethink their own work and how they're doing it. We've also got guides for people to help convince colleagues who may think that nothing needs to be done differently. It's called the imperative for change that helps get reluctant colleagues to consider these issues as well as the cost of these issues, because, on a lot of campuses, they think about, well, it's too costly for me to make the kinds of changes that you're talking about.
Adrianna Kezar:
So we also have guides that talk about how much does it really cost to try to provide more comprehensive supports so that campuses get a better sense of what they're in for. If they go down this road and we and we have a lot of what we call low cost or no cost changes that can be instituted. So there are lots of different resources for change agents.
Adrianna Kezar:
And I really recommend that people take a look at the Delphi website to really sort out where are they at or they tried to convince people or are they just trying to come up for ways to do this in a cost-effective way, or are they ready to lead the charge? And we've got resources to help do that.
Randy Bass:
Thank you.
Randy Bass:
It sounds like a wonderful, both comprehensive and very system-focused, systems-thinking focused set of resources. So that's terrific. That'll be really helpful for folks. Can we now dig in a little bit then on to some of the things that you've learned from the winners? You tell us a little bit about how some of the Delphi winners have supported professional development on their campuses?
Adrianna Kezar:
Yeah, I'm really excited about the award winners and the ways that they've been thoughtful about professional development in a very expansive way. And I think that's what I want to highlight, is often we'll think about we're going to hold a workshop; some single events. And it's the way that they've been thinking in a broad way about multiple types of professional development. And that different, you know, whether it's a part-time adjunct versus a lecturer, they might have different possibilities for the ways that they can be involved. So, they're really thinking that through. So, let me give you the example of Santa Monica College. As I mentioned, too many campuses are offering these one-time workshops or orientations. But what we found from our research about these award winners is they do a needs assessment on campus to try to find out what is it the adjuncts or lecturers are interested in? What do they want to participate in? And they understand then that vary the varying needs of, even by department sometimes, that their faculty and one department that are interested and would participate in one kind of professional development versus another. So they start upfront with the kinds of needs assessment because they identify different needs by different groups. Santa Monica did a really extensive needs assessment that involves both surveys as well as focus groups. And I want to underscore that because a lot of times campuses will do surveys and they'll get five responses because adjuncts are notoriously difficult to get information back from surveys.
Adrianna Kezar:
And all the campuses we've talked with really describe the benefit they obtained from doing focus groups and sitting down and really understanding adjuncts needs more specifically or lecturers. So as a result, then each of these campuses, but in particular, I'm talking here right now about Santa Monica College, that led them to understand the need for a really extensive orientation program. They have kind of a quick one hour one like many campuses have. And people didn't like that was a lecture type of format. And they utilized a much more engaging style that left a lot more open space for back and forth questions and more discussion-style format. And that was something they learned from the adjuncts themselves. I participated in the orientation and it was exceedingly boring and I forgot everything. So they understood that like that was had been really ineffective and help them to build something different. And that the adjuncts didn't just want the information. They wanted some community-building opportunities to meet some of the other adjuncts. There was a lot of assumption that part-timers didn't want that sense of community, that we often make assumptions about how interested part-timers are in connecting or not, and some aren't and others aren't. So they really need to listen. But they're part-timers, wanted this community-building kind of experience. And so they built that not into not only orientation but then future kinds of professional development.
Adrianna Kezar:
They made sure there was an element of that involved. And then they developed an adjunct mentorship program so that the adjuncts could get more ongoing support and help specifically in their departments. They were hearing that faculty members really had needs as they were going through teaching, of course. And this was a way that connected them to a veteran adjunct faculty member who had more experience and that that sort of partnership arrangement worked out really well. And that person was a senior adjunct. So they understood the life of an adjunct as well. So they created resources within the campus to pay these veteran adjuncts for their work on this professional development. And so this mentorship also, they found had this broader a. That of creating more of a culture of caring and support and colleagues, if that really extended beyond even its purpose around supporting them and being better teachers and their specific class, that's what it was set up for. But it had this really rippling broader effect. And so they really also learned from this process that it helped create a glue that created a stronger sense about commitment to teaching and learning departmentally. And then they created this intensive Professional Development Day. And this annual event is called the Spring Flex Day. And it's an all-day professional development that is based on input from adjuncts and part-time faculty about what are they interested in learning about.
Adrianna Kezar:
And it is everything from things you would expect around active learning or providing feedback to students. But it also includes other kinds of things about managing stress, about like how to successfully apply for full-time openings that they might have at the college. So it really had a kind of a gamut of topics and they lit that emerge out of the agenda and contingent faculty and the classes are canceled for that day so that they can make sure that everybody can attend. So and everyone's paid for attending that day. So, there is all of these things that are in support of involving the adjuncts in this intensive day. So what we found on campuses that have been successful in supporting adjuncts in professional development is that they have a suite of programs. They're thinking across needs over time, across ways they can support people that are intensive, less intensive and really important to think about needs assessment upfront, multiple kinds of options for different adjuncts and lecturers and a real thoughtful process for bringing them.
Adrianna Kezar:
And that makes it accessible to them and responds to their needs. So, Santa Monica is one example, but on our website, we have examples of other supporting other kinds of adjuncts and other kinds of programs that they offer to do that.
Randy Bass:
Terrific, that's a really rich example.
Randy Bass:
And in addition to it, really exemplifies this really whole context approach that you talked about at the beginning, really also illustrates how you connect individual needs to building community to institutional priorities and linking all three of those levels. Is there... You've talked in other places about kind of a broader underlying methodology behind all of these approaches, maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that?
Adrianna Kezar:
Thanks. You know, it was really exciting. We conducted a study to examine, you know, we were capturing all of the good work that these different award winners were doing. And we wanted to understand better their process, like how did they go about designing these really successful programs and policies?
Adrianna Kezar:
And what was really interesting is that we found that most of them used design thinking, which we didn't expect. We knew about design thinking, but we didn't necessarily think that these campuses would be using it. And in fact, they use something that's a particular type of design thinking, which is liberatory design thinking, which has been a more recent development that looks at design thinking, applied to more social human processes versus design thinking that comes out of product development. But here we matched up what we when we asked them how they went about making the change on their campus, it really mapped on really closely to liberatory design thinking, which I think is a pretty exciting model. So I want to talk about that a little bit.
Randy Bass:
Ok, let me just take a second then to share. I just happened to have a visual of liberatory design thinking right here. Let me bring that up... Okay.
Adrianna Kezar:
So, one of the things that we learned is that they use all the steps that are participatory design thinking, and but they also do some things that are unique, that have to do with the higher education context. And I think what we think is this has to do with the more political or hierarchical nature of certain types of organizations.
Adrianna Kezar:
We don't imagine this is just particular to higher education and probably you would find this in health care and some other fields. But there's more of a need to navigate, collaborate and negotiate with different stakeholders and coalitions that you don't see in, for example, like traditional design thinking. But what was so exciting and what I want to describe is how campuses that we spoke with used pretty much the design thinking model to develop this process. So first you'll see. We have this organized phase that we think is a little bit more unique to higher education in terms of the thoughtfulness, they went into creating the teams that were representative of various kinds of stakeholder groups on campus. So they wanted to make sure that they had faculty of varying types, of course, including adjuncts. So this was designing for adjuncts, but also different administrators and staff that may have a stake in these policies and practices. But then, true to design thinking, this is where it picks up design thinking has traditionally five phases: Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. So we saw them using all of these phases, so in the empathize stage, the design teams really get an understanding of the motivations, experiences, and emotions of those who they're designing for. So here it would be adjuncts. So that's in many senses what we're talking about, the needs assessment.
Adrianna Kezar:
So I'm going to give the example here of Harper College and how they went about designing that new evaluation process I talked about. So, in terms of the ways that they went about this empathize stage, they shared all they have collected, as I recommend many campuses should do; college-level data and departmental data about adjunct faculty. So they shared this with the organizing team. Gave them everything from the length of service backgrounds, what faculty were teaching, but also surveys they've done about climate. So I want to make any data that you have to share. But then they specifically formed an advisory group where adjuncts were coming to share their own experiences and perspectives. So it was a combination of data they had collected with specific data the committee developed. So as they were thinking about this evaluation process, they wanted to know what had been the adjuncts' experience with this process? So they went through a really detailed, empathized phase to make sure that before they were going to design anything related to better valuing faculty, they understood their needs and their experiences so far. Then moving into this defining stage in the design thinking that entails that after the data has been collected, then they really sort of look at and sort of prioritize, understand this data and make sense of it in order to sort of forge a story about the experience that they can then better understand the issue so they can move towards ideating.
Adrianna Kezar:
So at Harper, after getting this better understanding of adjuncts' experiences, this advisory group then really wrestled with the reality that the program would need to be designed to accommodate multiple sets of faculty interests and concerns, as well as serving these different adjuncts and their needs. So they found out there were lots of different competing views about the evaluation, and that meant they weren't real as design. They thought they were going to have a more sort of simplistic design at first. And so they really started to say, OK, how do we define this problem of evaluation for faculty who are not coming up with, if you will, a single design solution? And so they really were trying to figure out how they were going to coalesce around these very different perspectives that were shared. So that's what they were doing during this defining phase, to flesh that out. Then you move in design thinking to ideating. So the idea phase is sort of the heart of where innovation occurs and the design thinking. So here, designers brainstorm of a wide variety of possible solutions and then they don't let anything get in the way like the politics on campus, whatever like they need to let their thinking be real, really free-flowing. And this is often really hard in higher education. We heard that the campuses talk about this as a struggle ideating like being free about it.
Adrianna Kezar:
So Harper talked about how they spent about six months identifying some of the characteristics of the programs that they thought were important in terms of other models.
Adrianna Kezar:
So they were looking at other campuses, different models of evaluation that they might use. They also then brought in and rethought some of the experiences they've been hearing about the adjuncts and their experience.
Adrianna Kezar:
And they just had a lot of open debate about approaches that they might develop. And so instead of sort of one new evaluation approach, this is where they came up with the multiple ideas. So after they looked at those different models, then they were fighting this in the group. Like people often wanted something sort of easier, more prescriptive rather than trying to keep it open-ended where they ended up with a portfolio option, as well as the observation option, as well as their traditional something kept some of the traditional options because some of the adjunct faculty preferred a less robust model. So they were trying to accommodate varying needs that they heard. Then they moved on to the prototype. So this is the phase and design thinking where you outline or mock-up, what you think of this new process will be amper then this is going to be this new evaluation process. This is one of the things that we learned, though. I think that the prototype phase is challenging in higher education. We like things to be really final. So we don't like to test things out. We want things. You know, there was this tension in the group to say we want an absolute final product of what the new evaluation system or model will be.
Adrianna Kezar:
And they kept saying, well, let's try it out, let's just try it out for a year, and then we can make changes.
Adrianna Kezar:
But there's all these pressures and groups to solidify ideas early because things get often pulled apart. The people are afraid that you don't get to re-tweak that like it's sort of like a one time. So they're putting a lot of effort. So I will say what we learned is across all of our cases, they wrestle and I struggle with this prototype idea, but they recognize the importance and they all were able to convince and push their campuses into piloting something that they would make changes on. And all of them made some modifications after they had done some prototype work. So they also went about this process of testing their prototype and realizing that there were some modifications that they needed to make in terms of the portfolios that they were making available. They recognized that there was a bias towards certain fields or departments that had sort of better skills in terms of writing, in terms of the way that they present themselves. So they tried to present different options of what about way the e-portfolios could be utilized, recognizing that, for example, some in the STEM fields weren't having the same success using some of the e-portfolio tools. So... There are these modifications you can be made once people try out the system, right, so they went through it in a sense, they tested and then they were fine. So they evaluated it and they did this refining. But the sort of the contours of liberatory design thinking were really there, particularly as you'll see this idea of the equity-minded practice and one of the major aspects of liberatory design thinking is what they call notice and reflect, which is notice is kind of looking for power conditions that may be exhibiting themselves and the groups.
Adrianna Kezar:
So this curve shows that throughout the teams would talk about how when they were defining the problem, they noticed, like certain voices were trying to prescribe a solution and it wasn't attentive to adjuncts needs. And then when they saw that happening, the other members said, hey, hey, it looks like we're trying to move in this direction. We're ignoring certain adjunct voices. And so throughout this liberatory design thinking, they had people who played roles and noticing when people were trying to dominate the conversation and reflecting back and saying, does this truly reflect what we're doing? Does this work truly reflect the needs that we understood in the empathize stage? So there's this idea of constant reflection constantly going back. And that's really important in these processes to not get lost from that initial phase, I mean, you can end up designing over time away from those initial important interests. So the idea of the liberatory is keeping connected to the needs and interests of those that you're designing for and noticing if power is emerging in the process. So we really saw how they were able to have group processes in place that help them to combat those issues.
Randy Bass:
Thank you for sharing.
Randy Bass:
It's a fantastic vision of a process and one that ironically, I think that at least in terms of the testing and prototyping, faculty are comfortable talking to their research and all the time. But applying it to our own practices is... There's a bias in the other direction. But thank you for talking through that. It's a great model.
Randy Bass:
Just as a final question and really just by way of wrapping up. Thank you for your insights. We're all so very committed to the role of professional learning as key to advancing student success and improving teaching, learning, and really focusing institutions of quality, teaching, learning. You've been so committed to making sure that non-tenured track and adjunct faculty are included broadly in the conversation at every level. But I... But can you just say may be by way of conclusion, just why you think it's so important to connect, not-tenure track faculty to larger initiatives around professional learning?
Adrianna Kezar:
That is a great question. I mean, the reason I got into this work was noticing the shift and changes in the faculty. Right. So across the country now, we have 70 percent of the faculty are off the tenure track. And at least when I started getting into this work a decade ago, often completely invisible, and our institutions operated as if every single faculty member was tenure track, even though that's never been the case. We've always had adjunct faculty associated with our campuses. But we... We did not provide the kind of support for them to be successful in their roles and in fact, it's gotten worse because I have talked to long-time adjuncts when I started doing this work and they said, you know, 20 years ago, they used to get more support and their departments. But as the adjunctification occurred across higher education, it actually got worse for adjuncts, there was even less attention to supporting them. So even though they were invisible before they managed to find some relationships and some support and an interpersonal level. But those relationships, they said, just frayed and went away and the only manner of support they had through some of the interpersonal relationships they develop dissipated. And so as a system, we have now created significant barriers to what is now the majority of our teaching faculty to being able to create a quality teaching and learning environment. And so what's so important about this work is that we have to recognize that we as a sector cannot be successful in supporting student success unless we start opening up our minds to thinking about who are educators, what are we doing to support them. And I would say every almost every campus across the country has work to do when it comes to this area, has not explored it deeply enough. And this is really one of the most important imperatives that we have ahead for us. If we are going to turn the curve of creating the kind of student success, that equitable student success that we talk about now rhetorically a lot in terms of policy and practice circles, but we overlook often some of the most significant kinds of activities we need to be doing to ensure that we're moving in that direction. And to me, student success means a quality teaching and learning environment.
Randy Bass:
Outstanding, thank you. Very powerful.
Randy Bass:
Well, thank you so much for your time, Adrianna. And there are supporting materials, as you've said, both the Delphi Award materials and for all the cases, as well as some of the supporting materials, going deeper on equity-minded liberatory design thinking. So thank you so much for your insights and for your time.
Adrianna Kezar:
Thank you all for the work you're doing.
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