The Academic Gateway: Understanding the Journey to Tenure investigates the experiences of professors employed in tenure-track positions who are starting their career within a university environment, but have not yet attained the affirmation and permanence that tenure offers. The role that they have taken on entails the preparation of students within a professional school. Some of them have very limited professional experience, while others bring multiple years of experience with them in their transition to a faculty of education. The contributors speak to the three key components of their faculty role: teaching, service, and research. Addressing organizational structures and differences relative to prior roles, they examine how these changes have assisted, confused or altered the way they conduct their day-to-day work. They speak about relevant prior experiences, the preparation they received through graduate school, and the details of the learning curve as they entered into their tenure track role. Have they been successful? The reader will experience the same uncertainty and anticipation every professor goes through during their journey to tenure.
This approach amplifies the realism of not knowing whether issues that are spoken about will ultimately be overcome and enhances the validity of their experiences by not biasing the contributions towards those who expect success.
Author Biography:
Timothy Sibbald is a tenure-track professor with the Schulich School of Education at Nipissing University. His transition from secondary education to the school of education built on many prior experiences, but also posed unique challenges that inspired the idea for this volume. Victoria Handford is a tenure-track professor with the School of Education at Thompson Rivers University. She has spent her career in multiple roles in public education at the local level. Cecile Badenhorst is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education in the Adult/Post-Secondary programs at Memorial University. She teaches courses on academic literacies and adult teaching. She has published three books in this area: Research Writing (2007), Dissertation Writing (2008), and Productive Writing (2010). Lee Anne Block is a teacher educator at the University of Winnipeg. Her research and teaching are focused on how we name and engage with difference in educational locations and on cultural sustainability. She recently completed Gandhi, Globalization and Earth Democracy, a course on sustainability with Vandana Shiva, in residence at Navdanya, India. For twenty years, she was a classroom teacher in Winnipeg. Joan M. Chambers is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University. She teaches elementary science and environmental education to teacher candidates in the BEd program. In the graduate program, Joan teaches introductory and qualitative research-methods courses; science, technology, society, and environment (STSE); and science curriculum. Cam Cobb teaches in the Faculty of Education and Academic Development at the University of Windsor. His research focuses on such topics as social-justice issues in special education, co-teaching in adult-learning contexts, and narrative pedagogy in the arts. Frank Deer is an Assistant Professor and current Director of Indigenous Initiatives in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba. Frank holds an earned PhD in Educational Administration from the University of Saskatchewan and is published in the area of Indigenous education. Frank has been awarded funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for his work in ancestral languages. He is the current President of the Canadian Association for the Study of Indigenous Education. Lyle Hamm is an Assistant Professor in Educational Administration and Leadership at the University of New Brunswick. He teaches face-to-face, online, and blended pedagogy courses in teacher supervision, educational theory, school culture, leadership theory and leadership in culturally diverse schools. His research, broadly speaking, focuses on the impact of demographic change on teachers, students, administrators, schools, and community members. In 2015, he was presented with the Allan P. Stuart Award for Excellence in Teaching at UNB. Lloyd Kornelsen has worked in the field of education for the past 28 years, primarily as a high-school social-studies teacher. His recently published book, Stories of transformation: Memories of a global citizenship practicum, is based on research for which he was awarded the Manitoba Education Research Network award for outstanding achievement in education research. Currently, Lloyd is as a member of the Faculty of Education and Director of the Global Education Project at the University of Winnipeg.
