Becoming and being a faculty is a dynamic journey defined by various career transitions, such as moving up through promotion and tenure, moving on to other institutions, and sometimes moving out of the academy altogether. This longitudinal qualitative study explored women faculty experiences of academic transitions and their impact on faculty identity development and transformation. Using the constant comparative method, the authors analyzed multiple interviews with 23 female faculty members in education, focusing on their transition experiences across their early career. Academic transitions are described in terms of provisional professional identity (transient or resilient) and transition responses (professional equilibrium, professional advancement, and professional integration). Transition patterns are discussed as both social and developmental; implications for career counseling, faculty preparation, and development are noted. The findings and discussion highlight professional growth across the academic career spectrum and the importance of humanistic career enrichment beyond the traditional role-based training in teaching and research.
Professional identities are socially produced and maintained in communities of practice. Becoming a faculty member often requires dual participation in at least two broad communities of practice-vocational and academic. While negotiating membership in higher education, faculty members generally maintain some level of expertise and credibility in their disciplines. This study explores this dialectic from the vantage point of adult education. Interviews with eight adult education faculty members revealed three dimensions of the practitioner-academic identity dialectic: Intellectual Seduction, Inside-Out, and Silencing the Practitioner Voice. These dimensions coalesce into a core theme: Balancing Act. The findings illustrate a continuous tension between professional identities as adult education practitioner and academic. Further, they imply social and cultural scripting of faculty identity and professional experience in relation to an ethos of adult education practice.
Participant selection is one of the most invisible and least critiqued methods in qualitative circles. Researchers do not just collect and analyze neutral data; they decide who matters as data. Each choice repositions inquiry, closing down some opportunities while creating others. After reviewing the selection literature, we present critical vignettes of our selection choices in three separate studies, examining how those choices directed meaning making within and beyond the studies. Our analysis across these vignettes uncovered a constant interface-and often a struggle-between our personal situations and social agendas as qualitative researchers. Four aspects of this Reporting In/Reporting Out tension are discussed: trusting qualitative research, building the story, dealing with powerful others, and accepting unintended consequences. We encourage qualitative researchers to critically think forward their selection choices before and during the research process, to be mindful that selection is a constitutive method of the data collection and analysis process.
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