Engaging in Scholarship at a Teaching Institution
When I was in graduate school, I participated in a professionalization organization called Preparing Future Faculty. Our meetings involved a lot of discussion about what type of school was the right fit for us. A private liberal arts university that emphasizes teaching? A research one institution with a 2-1 teaching load and a book-plus-one requirement for tenure? A regional state school with some combination of the two? A community college? I knew fairly early on that I didn’t want to be at an R-1 school. I wasn’t interested in the cutthroat departmental politics and the race to the top of the academic dogpile I was hearing about at such institutions. But I also hesitated to put myself squarely in the “teaching institution” category, because I enjoyed researching and writing so much. And as a graduate student who was only beginning to get her feet wet in teaching, I was pretty sure I had more natural gifts in the area of scholarship than in pedagogy.
Here at ACU, where I daily see excellent examples of teaching and mentoring, I learned how much work and how fulfilling good teaching can be. I’ve also had myriad opportunities to hone my skills as I’ve picked up new courses in order to help my small department cover all necessary bases, especially in semesters when a colleague was on leave or abroad. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’ve prepared and taught thirteen distinct courses since coming to ACU in August of 2010. In some ways, the opportunity to teach so many different courses in a wide range of subject areas has been a major advantage for me, providing a rapid introduction to new material and many chances to develop my teaching styles and pedagogies.
In other ways, though, the ongoing pattern of heavy preparation for teaching, with one or sometimes two new course preps in almost every semester of my career thus far, has been a liability. I think that this is most evident in my scholarship. I am proud of the scholarly record that I have been able to achieve in the last five years, but I am not as far along as I expected to be at this stage. I would like to have my book published, that chapter of research closed, and be ready to move on to new ideas and new areas of research at this point. But I have found it extraordinarily difficult to devote sufficient time and mental energy to scholarship—especially to such a major project as book preparation—when I constantly need to prepare new courses. For me, writing a class from scratch requires a significant commitment of time and intellectual attention. I prepare very methodically; each class meeting is planned in detail, and then I work back through the course to check for consistency of themes, variety of historical approaches, and sufficient practice of skills specific to my field. I have difficulty giving substantial thought to anything else while I am writing a new class. I can try to prepare and teach new courses and conduct scholarly research and writing simultaneously, but one or the other inevitably gets neglected.
For a couple of reasons, I am optimistic that I will be able to achieve greater scholarly productivity in the next few years. For one thing, I’m running out of possible new courses. With the exception of one class, I have now taught every European history course in our catalog, as well as our majors courses. So having already gone through these classes at least once will help. When I teach them again, I’ll still have to brush up on the relevant material, but it won’t require nearly as much time as starting from scratch.
Secondly, I hope that, if I receive tenure and promotion, I can actively pursue a sabbatical semester or a summer institute grant that will allow me to focus more intensely on Chosen Race. Also, Jeremy and I are slated to be the study abroad faculty in Oxford in the fall of ’17, and I would love to spend that semester in the archives searching out new material. Oxford is the perfect location because the archives of the Baptist Missionary Society–the group who produced most of the sources I use in my book–are located in Regent’s Park College, Oxford. More research time is in my future, and I’m really looking forward to it!