To Teaching

There seems to be a widespread assumption that part-time faculty are less prepared for teaching than are full-time faculty. The reality is that neither group has been trained to teach; faculty members of all varieties have been trained in their specific fields and disciplines—history, biology, math, or business. Some full-time and part-time faculty who were fortunate enough to serve as graduate teaching assistants may have had some hands-on preparation for teaching that others have not. It is only recently that “preparing future faculty” programs have started appearing sporadically across the country. For the vast majority of faculty, their first day in the first classroom is also their first teaching experience. In that regard, full-time and part-time faculty are alike. As Gappa and Leslie point out,

Although our interviewees had little hard evidence about differences in the quality of classroom performance between full- and part-time faculty, deans and department chairs … almost uniformly agreed that they could observe no practical difference on the average. To the extent that we could get people to suggest any distinction at all, some responded that the range of teaching performance might be slightly greater among the part-timers, with some cases of outstanding teaching and perhaps a few more problem cases. ¹