Contingent Faculty as Knowledge-Bearers: Navigating Complex Institutional Cultures to Best Educate Students

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: Precarious Terrain: Burnout Prevention and Faculty Well-Being (Table 1)

Abstract

This study explored how 26 contingent faculty members navigated institutional policies and practices in for-profit postsecondary education. Habermas’s (1984, 1987) theory of communicative action and neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005; Maskovsky; 2012; Olssen & Peters, 2005; Ovetz, 2017) were theories that highlighted faculty working conditions. Faculty lifeworld concepts of autonomy, belonging, value, knowledge-creation, and community building were sustained under a shared set of cultures, norms, and values, allowing faculty to implement curriculum, teaching, and learning in mutually beneficial ways, where hierarchy was suspended (Habermas, 1987). Neoliberal system forces on the micro (classroom) levels (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) encroached upon lifeworld concepts and restricted faculty autonomy in exercising them. This study highlighted how faculty reasserted these concepts under a profit-driven structure.

Author

• Ashley N. Gaskew, Baruch College - CUNY
  Presenting Author