Researchers

• G. Vasileva MSc
• Prof.dr. R.M. van der Rijst
• Dr. F.J. Prins (Utrecht University)

We know that the academic work broadly includes teaching, research and service tasks, but without listening to faculty, how can we truly understand and support them in their roles to foster teacher agency?

Social relevance

With the expansion of the higher education sector, teaching becomes a significant workload for many faculty members, but evaluation and promotion criteria primarily emphasize research contributions. As teaching becomes undervalued, concerns about education quality emerged. Therefore, research-intensive universities are introducing teaching qualification programs to enhance faculty pedagogic competence. However, the teaching role extends beyond classroom theory to include collegial support, educational innovation, curriculum design, assessment, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Initiatives like the Comenius fellowship grant in the Netherlands aim to support faculty’s teaching role development, yet many faculty members do not advance in their positions, likely prioritizing teaching innovation over research.

Scientific relevance

Research often oversimplifies development by examining activities and processes in isolation, neglecting the integration of formal and informal learning within the complex teaching, learning, and research environments that faculty navigate. Institutional policies, departmental culture, external societal pressures and available resources shape how faculty engage in their teaching role. Therefore, we took a holistic perspective to understand how faculty’s perceptions on their teaching role afford their agentic responses within the cultural and structural context of research-intensive universities.

Method

By exploring faculty’s (n=13) work experiences and responses to the diverse academic demands through in-depth semi-structured interviews and a photo elicitation task, we revealed the mechanisms that influence their decisions regarding their teaching role. We empirically adopted the social realistic framework and thematically analyzed the transcripts using an inductive approach to identify recurring motives and ideas that gradually provided interpretations based on the data.

Findings and conclusion

The mechanisms that shape how faculty view their teaching and make decisions (i.e. their agentic responses) include deliberate strategies such as professional learning or coping strategies, as well as automatic reactions that individuals may engage in with or without awareness. The latter appear to operate almost intuitively.

The Interrelationship between Faculty’s Tasks

The teaching role cannot be viewed in a fragmented manner. Faculty continuously seek balance between their responsibilities in teaching and research, but also administration, and community engagement. They have a facilitating role in students’ learning by effectively integrating their roles in teaching and research. Therefore, the need to consider these roles as interconnected is important for understanding how to support faculty’s development.

Context Re-Conceptualized

We suggest a more encompassing understanding of the interplay between the holistic way of being an academic and faculty’s perceived environment, viewing these not as separate entities but as integral components of a complex ecosystem or space where individuals both shape and are shaped. Our participants demonstrated agency by actively engaging with their surroundings, shifting their perception from a constrained view to one that acknowledges and leverages the potential inherent of their space.

• higher education

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