Overcoming Barriers to Adjunct Engagement: A Community-First Approach to Professional Development

Abstract

We present a model for professional development of instructional faculty. Though initially conceived for accreditation compliance as a credentialing process for adjunct faculty, this project led to increases in participants’ collaboration on lesson design, investment in curricular decisions, and adoption of active learning methods. In this paper, we identify five barriers that initially impeded these outcomes: Time, Isolation, Connection Between Content and Pedagogy, Change, and Risk-Taking. Through extensive coding of discussion board posts and participant interviews, we show that participants initially encountered these barriers but largely overcame them by the end of the project.