CTLL Faculty Academies and Reshaping Faculty Identities

The University of North Georgia’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership (CTLL) implemented two faculty academies to support faculty now facing increased scholarly productivity demands that resulted from institutional change: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Academy and the Write Now Academy. Drawing on the community of practice model (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder 2002), CTLL academies fostered interdisciplinary, cross-rank and cross-campus support for collaborative or individual research projects. These academies helped faculty re-envision their roles as a teacher-scholars capable of engaging in systematic, peer-reviewed studies of teaching and learning (Booth & Woolacott 2018) and complete a publication using Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. In researching the effectiveness of these academics, we ask the following question: What is the effect of academies designed to support the scholarly productivity on faculty perceptions and ability to meet shifting institutional expectation? In this proposed poster presentation, we illustrate how these academies fostered interdisciplinary, cross-rank, and cross-campus scholarship among faculty participants. Data culled from focus interviews with participating faculty illustrate that these initiatives helped faculty re-envision their roles as a teacher-scholars amid institutional change. We situate our findings within literature on supporting faculty writers (Geller and Eodice 2013) at teaching-intensive universities (Cox & Brunjes 2013)