| Abstrakt: |
Adjunct faculty are part-time or contingent full-time faculty who are ineligible for tenure and exist outside of the tenure-track system. Emerging from their increased use by higher education over the past fifty years (Donoghue, 2008), there are a variety of narratives attached to the adjunct experience. One such tale describes the plight of the adjunct who is teaching several courses, perhaps at different institutions, desperately trying to cobble together the semblance of full-time employment. Stories like this one highlight the different lived experiences of adjunct teaching faculty and their tenured and tenure-track colleagues. Although adjunct faculty are not always in teaching roles, this work focuses on adjunct teaching faculty, without the inclusion of those in contingent research faculty positions. We have defined a category of adjunct faculty, the Industry Expert Adjunct (IEA), as instructional part-time teaching faculty whose primary, full-time employment is outside of academia (Walker & Boyer, 2020). Other fields, such as Nursing and Business, use positions such as "clinical teaching faculty" or "professor of practice" in much the same way as Industry Expert Adjunct, however, with IEAs, there is a clear distinction that the adjunct position is part-time and teaching is not the IEA's primary employment. The IEA model is different from other forms of adjunct teaching roles as it is based on the instructor's current, authentic industry knowledge and the opportunity to convey that knowledge to students in the classroom. IEAs are the primary course instructor, rather than co-teaching or guest presenting, providing students with a semester-long experience through which they can interact with an experienced and knowledgeable expert from industry. In this paper, we share the broader context for adjuncts in current literature and synthesize results from the authors' previous research with evidence from current practice towards a better understanding of the programmatic impact of IEAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
