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Does your departmental administration support a SoTL-focused research agenda for your faculty? When I accepted my current position, there were very few tenure-track faculty, all of whom were doing SoTL and DBER research. There was little institutional support to overcome the barriers to traditional research that they faced. For example, there was little support for gaining access to laboratory space or equipment either at our own campuses or other institutions. The distance faculty were also very siloed from residential faculty and there was no leadership push to form partnerships between faculty across our campuses. We got a new Dean the next year and there was a push to get us TT folks to do disciplinary research. That didn't last, though, since the supports were not improved. The Dean split the department in two and all new hires in the new department will be disciplinary researchers and all new hires in the department I remained within will be SoTL/DBER researchers.
The administrative policies all fully support SoTL/DBER and disciplinary research as equivalent. (Even though equivalence is not expressly stated, it is not disallowed and several places in the policy support faculty freedom in their research agenda.)
How else are folks experiencing the SoTL paradox?
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