Proceedings from the 2019 CEA Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana: The Joy Project: Helping Faculty to Find Joy in and out of the Classroom
Keywords:
administration, advising, leadership, work-life balance, happiness, joy, faculty, teachingAbstract
One of the main challenges facing colleges and universities today is student retention. To help in this effort, many institutions have looked to improve their training of faculty advisors. Research shows that the vast majority of time, students do not drop out of college because they cannot do the level of work expected of them, but rather because of “life challenges:” financial struggles, the inability to cope with stress, mental or physical health issues, or family pressures. To help many students stay in college today, faculty need to advise students in these areas as much as they need to advise them about what classes to take. But what we found in my college and in the surveys of faculty at other institutions is that faculty members themselves tend to struggle in the same areas as their students. The question then became, “How can we help our faculty members build an effective work-life balance, as that will also better train our faculty as advisors?” In search of that answer, we thereby asked, “How do we help faculty to experience joy (i.e., epiphany, transcendent revelation, breakthrough discovery, synergy) within their lives and within their classrooms, especially at an underfunded state institution where the rewards for faculty are unlikely to be financial?” This column explains the steps I have undertaken in my work for the dean’s office at the Arkansas Tech University College of Arts & Humanities to address the above questions via a college-wide endeavor called “The Joy Project.”Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.