Faculty Identities and Disciplinary Cultures: Exploring Their Interrelationships With College Teaching

• In Event: Faculty Identity and Faculty Careers

Abstract

While scholarship has often and importantly focused on broadly effective student-centered teaching practices, too little scholarship has examined the contextual influences on such teaching practices. This large-scale quantitative exploratory study fills a gap in the literature by examining how disciplinary cultures and faculty identities influence teaching practices around deep approaches to learning and collaborative learning. The results of multilevel models suggest limited, yet potentially meaningful, interactions exist between disciplinary cultures, as represented by the Biglan categories, and faculty racial, gender, and sexual orientation identities. Though interactions are likely subtle in practice, the results highlight the importance for faculty developers to more consciously take into account identities and disciplinary cultures when seeking to understand and improve faculty teaching.

Author

• Stephen Craig Hiller, Indiana University