I have had a few students, over the years, who expressed an interest in pursuing strictly teaching careers at an university. Of course, my advice to them was to focus on their research during their Ph.D. as even small departments with typically large teaching loads, expect some research from their tenure-track faculty and largely make their hiring decisions placing a greater emphasis on research. Historically, teaching only positions, such as adjuncts and instructors, tend to be ad hoc and not permanent.

Teaching, research and service has traditionally been the three requirements of tenure-track full-time faculty positions in the US. However, I have been seeing quite a few teaching only positions being advertised in recent times. While many still tend to be non-tenure track, these positions increasingly appear to have some form of permanency that is not common with adjunct or instructor appointments. Our university recently approved a long-term contract for lecturers who have been with the university for more than six years. They also created a pathway for them to get promoted to senior lecturers. Talks are also underway of “gateway faculty” or tenure-track positions whose primary mission is teaching. Is this emphasis on teaching track faculty the new reality of pandemic or is there a growing recognition that “research” and “teaching” are two distinct endeavors that need people with different skills?

Teaching faculty are being viewed as being at a higher level than an ‘adjunct’ or an ‘instructor’ whose sole purpose is to teach courses which are already designed and well established.  “Gateway Teaching Faculty” are expected to bring teaching innovations into their departments, teach other faculty – how to teach effectively and help with academic administrative tasks such as ABET accreditation.  In addition, there is also an expectation that these faculty will conduct pedagogical research’ and establish an active research program focused on engineering education.  In other words, these faculty will still be evaluated for contributions to teaching, research and service, albeit in a different ratio.    

While the idea of having a separate teaching-oriented track may bring in much needed attention to undergraduate instruction at many research-oriented schools, there are many issues that need to be addressed.  Who is there to mentor these teaching faculty in traditional engineering programs that mostly have faculty who have moved up the ranks by largely demonstrating engineering research productivity?  Will faculty and administrators view engineering education research on the same footing as making discipline specific advancements?  Engineering research may yield much better grants (at least in terms of $$) then educational research which tends to rely on more competitive federal funding from a few agencies.  How will the likely disparity in funded research affect promotion and tenure decisions?  In a similar vein, engineering education research publications tend to have lower impact factors than most top-tier engineering journals.  This again might work against a faculty taking the teaching route. 

There is also a very high risk that these gateway faculty may be viewed as glorified adjuncts and given a larger than normal share of courses to teach or asked to take on courses that entail a higher workload (e.g., capstone or large introductory classes).  This load distribution may affect the research and service components of these faculty.  Finally, will dissertations with an engineering education focus be treated on par with traditional discipline specific contributions?  If not, recruitment and retention of high-quality students would be a major challenge for these gateway faculty. 

The hiring of ‘gateway’ faculty is also another challenging topic.  Traditional engineering programs do not provide much in terms of pedagogical training.  While some engineering education programs exist, they tend to focus more heavily on pedagogical aspects and students in these programs might not have advanced training or specialization often necessary to teach in engineering programs.  It is important that those hired in this track not be viewed as ‘second-class’ in any way nor should the ‘teaching track’ become the pathway for tenure of the ‘regular faculty’ who have a reasonable teaching evaluations but could not build a research program.  Doing so, would be a clear indication that the department and college does not value pedagogical research. Therefore, there is no need to create a pathway that not viewed as being valuable.

Many of the challenges identified above are fixable.  However, it requires creating an environment where pedagogy as a whole (and not simply teaching classes) is viewed as a worthy endeavor.  It will require clear guidelines from the college and department administration on what is expected from these ‘gateway faculty’.  There should be a commitment to provide these faculty with startup funds and other resources to succeed. In particular, create an environment where ‘gateway faculty’ can take risks and try out new pedagogical innovations.  This will require a general change in the mindset where pedagogical contributions are valued as much as research contributions by all faculty in the department. 

Innovative models for dissertation, wherein a student can publish both in ‘engineering’ and ‘engineering education’ fields to meet the requirements of the degree is necessary to support research endeavors of ‘gateway faculty’. This is also necessary to train the future ‘teaching track’ faculty who can play in both engineering and education sandboxes and better integrate the two.  There is definitely merit in creating future ‘pedagogically-oriented’ academic leaders.  However, in the absence of total commitment to this cause, maintaining status-quo is perhaps a better choice.