ABSTRACT
Rapid changes are taking place within higher education in the wake of the global
economic downturn and an international shift toward marketization (Barnett 2010;
Nickolai, Hoffman, and Trautner 2012). This draws into question the role higher
education plays in society and the value teachers have within it. Teaching faculties
in many places have been devalued, compared to their researching counterparts
(Anderson et al. 2011). An increasing proportion of student education is being
shouldered by contingent faculty who focus primarily on instruction (Eurostat 2010;
Schuster 2011). At the same time resources for teaching are shrinking while class sizes
and course loads grow (Monks and Schmidt 2010).
