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Full-Text Articles in Education

Invisible But Essential: The Role Of Professional Networks In Promoting Faculty Agency In Career Advancement, Elizabeth Niehaus, Kerryann O'Meara Jan 2014

Invisible But Essential: The Role Of Professional Networks In Promoting Faculty Agency In Career Advancement, Elizabeth Niehaus, Kerryann O'Meara

KerryAnn O'Meara

The benefits of professional networks are largely invisible to the people embedded in them (O’Reilly 1991), yet professional networks may provide key benefits for faculty careers. The purpose of the study reported here was to explore the role of professional networks in faculty agency in career advancement, specifically focusing on the overall relationship between the social capital gained from networks and faculty agency in career advancement. Findings suggest that off-campus networks are particularly important for faculty agency but that the benefits of networks may take time to develop.


Enabling Possibility: Women Associate Professors’ Sense Of Agency In Career Advancement, Aimee Terosky, Kerryann O'Meara, Corbin M. Campbell Jan 2014

Enabling Possibility: Women Associate Professors’ Sense Of Agency In Career Advancement, Aimee Terosky, Kerryann O'Meara, Corbin M. Campbell

KerryAnn O'Meara

In this multimethod, qualitative study we examined associate women professors’ sense of agency in career advancement from the rank of associate to full. Defining agency as strategic perspectives or actions toward goals that matter to the professor, we explore the perceptions of what helps and/or hinders a sense of agency in career advancement. Our participants consisted of 16 women associate professors at a major research university who participated in an institutional intervention program designed to enhance sense of agency in career advancement, and a subset of 12 attendees who also participated in a follow-up focus group 6 months later. Participants …


Faculty Agency: Departmental Contexts That Matter In Faculty Careers, Corbin M. Campbell, Kerryann O'Meara Jun 2013

Faculty Agency: Departmental Contexts That Matter In Faculty Careers, Corbin M. Campbell, Kerryann O'Meara

KerryAnn O'Meara

In a modern context of constrained resources and high demands, faculty exert agency to strategically navigate their careers (Baez 2000a; Neumann et al. 2006). Guided by the O’Meara et al. (2011) framework on agency in faculty professional lives, this study used Structural Equation Modeling to investigate which departmental factors (perceptions of tenure and promotion process, work-life climate, transparency, person-department fit, professional development resources, and collegiality) influenced faculty agentic perspective and agentic action. Results showed that faculty perceptions of certain departmental contexts do matter in faculty career agency, such as work-life climate, person-department fit, and professional development resources. These contexts have …


The Role Of Emotional Competencies In Faculty-Doctoral Student Relationships, Kerryann O'Meara, Katrina Knudsen, Jill Jones Jan 2013

The Role Of Emotional Competencies In Faculty-Doctoral Student Relationships, Kerryann O'Meara, Katrina Knudsen, Jill Jones

KerryAnn O'Meara

No abstract provided.


University Leaders' Use Of Episodic Power To Support Faculty Community Engagement, Kerryann O'Meara, Andrew Lounder Jan 2013

University Leaders' Use Of Episodic Power To Support Faculty Community Engagement, Kerryann O'Meara, Andrew Lounder

KerryAnn O'Meara

This study explores faculty perceptions of the actions taken by organizational leaders to support the faculty's community engagement. We draw upon Lawrence's (2008) theory of power and agency in organizations to name these strategic actions as episodic power and consider how and why each act taken by organizational leaders mattered to these community-engaged faculty.


Faculty Sense Of Agency In Decisions About Work And Family, Kerryann O'Meara, Corbin M. Campbell Jan 2011

Faculty Sense Of Agency In Decisions About Work And Family, Kerryann O'Meara, Corbin M. Campbell

KerryAnn O'Meara

No abstract provided.


The Pursuit Of Prestige: The Experience Of Institutional Striving From A Faculty Perspective, Kerryann O'Meara, Alan Bloomgarden Jan 2011

The Pursuit Of Prestige: The Experience Of Institutional Striving From A Faculty Perspective, Kerryann O'Meara, Alan Bloomgarden

KerryAnn O'Meara

Each year many colleges compete to increase their national rankings within the academic hierarchy. As institutions make decisions and take actions with external rankings in mind, their pursuit of external prestige inevitably influences institutional members and stakeholders. The faculty experience of this pursuit of prestige, or institutional “striving,” is largely unknown. Through data from 29 interviews at one self-identified striving liberal arts college, this article examines faculty experience of institutional striving with attention to how faculty perceive the origins of striving, and its influence on institutional identity and direction, their own work-lives and reward systems.


Service-Learning Is... How Faculty Explain Their Practice, Kerryann O'Meara, Elizabeth Niehaus Jan 2009

Service-Learning Is... How Faculty Explain Their Practice, Kerryann O'Meara, Elizabeth Niehaus

KerryAnn O'Meara

Many researchers have explored faculty engagement in service-learning. However, scholarship rarely considers ways in which the discourses used by faculty to describe service-learning — the stories they tell about what it is they are doing and why — construct images of subject positions, problems, and solutions that inform our beliefs about service-learning and our practice. The purpose of this study was to understand the dominant discourses used by faculty to explain service-learning. The nomination files of 109 exemplary faculty nominated for the Thomas Ehrlich Award were analyzed. Findings indicate that faculty use four dominant discourses regarding the purposes and significance …


Motivation For Faculty Community Engagement: Learning From Exemplars, Kerryann O'Meara Jan 2008

Motivation For Faculty Community Engagement: Learning From Exemplars, Kerryann O'Meara

KerryAnn O'Meara

This explorative study examines the motivations of sixty- eight faculty exemplars in community engagement. Analysis of personal narrative essays reveals a great diversity in personal and professional motivation, including but not limited to the desire to teach well, personal commitments to specific issues, neighborhoods, and people, a perceived fit between community engagement and disciplinary goals, and a desire for meaningful collaboration. This study reports the first phase in a multiphase study and finds that faculty exemplars have a rich reservoir of motivations that are both intrinsic and extrinsic, rooted in personal goals and identity as well as some organizational cultures. …


An Integrated Model For Advancing The Scholarship Of Engagement: Creating Academic Homes For The Engaged Scholar, Lorilee R. Sandmann, John Saltmarsh, Kerryann O'Meara Jan 2008

An Integrated Model For Advancing The Scholarship Of Engagement: Creating Academic Homes For The Engaged Scholar, Lorilee R. Sandmann, John Saltmarsh, Kerryann O'Meara

KerryAnn O'Meara

A new integrated model is offered for the preparation of future faculty that addresses the transformation of institutions of higher education into supportive environments for the next generation of engaged scholars. Drawing on the knowledge bases of the scholarship of engagement, institutional change, preparing future faculty, the role of disciplinary associations, and promising practice for institutional engagement, the model provides a framework for approaches that would prepare individuals (primarily doctoral students and early career faculty) as learners of engagement while instigating and catalyzing institutions as learning organizations.


Faculty Role Integration And Community Engagement: Harmony Or Cacophony?, Alan H. Bloomgarden, Kerryann O'Meara Jan 2007

Faculty Role Integration And Community Engagement: Harmony Or Cacophony?, Alan H. Bloomgarden, Kerryann O'Meara

KerryAnn O'Meara

Colleges and universities that aim to sustain or expand community partnerships and institutionalize civic engagement face important faculty challenges. Faculty adoption of community-based pedagogies and research approaches, in turn, faces important practical and conceptual barriers, as engagement activities appear in competition with expected teaching, research, and service roles. Semi-structured interviews with 29 faculty members at one private liberal arts college, all of whom engaged in teaching, research, and/or service in their local community within a broadly supportive institutional environment, explored whether and how faculty achieved integration among teaching, research achievement. Findings reveal three faculty orientations toward integration of teaching, research, …


Stepping Up: How One Faculty Learning Community Influenced Faculty Members' Understanding And Use Of Active-Learning Methods And Course Design, Kerryann O'Meara Jan 2007

Stepping Up: How One Faculty Learning Community Influenced Faculty Members' Understanding And Use Of Active-Learning Methods And Course Design, Kerryann O'Meara

KerryAnn O'Meara

The author assesses what effects the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Teacher Education Collaborative (STEMTEC) Faculty Fellows learning community program had over the course of an academic year on fellows' familiarity with and use of active-learning methods and course design. Based on surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, and analysis of portfolios, the study concludes that the program had significant positive effects on participants' familiarity with and use of active-learning methods. Evidence suggests that fellows made substantial changes to their courses to improve student learning. The author discusses how changes occurred, how they might be linked to improved student learning, and …


Preparing Future Faculty For Community Engagement: Barriers, Facilitators, Models, And Recommendations, Kerryann O'Meara, Audrey J. Jaeger Jan 2006

Preparing Future Faculty For Community Engagement: Barriers, Facilitators, Models, And Recommendations, Kerryann O'Meara, Audrey J. Jaeger

KerryAnn O'Meara

This article considers the historical and current national context for integrating community engagement into graduate education. While it might be argued that most graduate education contributes generally to society by advancing knowledge, we are referring here to community engagement that involves some reciprocal interaction between graduate education (through students and faculty) and the public, an interaction that betters both the discipline and the public or set of stakeholders for whom the work is most relevant. The authors survey and synthesize the literature on the history of graduate education in the United States and assess current barriers to and facilitators of …


Aligning Faculty Reward Systems And Development To Promote Faculty And Student Growth, Kerryann O'Meara, Larry Braskamp Jan 2005

Aligning Faculty Reward Systems And Development To Promote Faculty And Student Growth, Kerryann O'Meara, Larry Braskamp

KerryAnn O'Meara

How can higher education inspire and reinforce greater faculty involvement in the life of the “whole student” given current constraints on and expectations for faculty work? Research from two recent national surveys of chief academic officers on faculty work sheds light on this question by highlighting current faculty employment conditions and expectations. Additional recent research is reviewed to link faculty expectations with student growth. Implications for faculty development that will best serve student needs are explored.