There has been extensive research conducted into the plight of casual academic staff, the precarious nature of their work, their limited academic development opportunities, and their heightened risk of being positioned on the periphery of the workforce in academia. Institutions have attempted to mitigate this risk through the provision of academic…

Sessional teachers in universities are often marginalised by their part-time status, availability for training, and invisibility within the institution's infrastructure. Nevertheless, tutors as a subset of this group, regularly have access to some training and development. This paper presents a methodological approach for implementing the BLASST…

Despite decades of dependence on sessional teaching staff, universities in Australia and internationally still find it difficult to support the teaching work of this large, casual workforce. A significant consequence of casually-employed teaching staff is risk; sessional academics' professional identity is compromised, quality assurance of…

Consistent with quality enhancement, we report on how we used a continuous improvement cycle to formalise and embed an academic development and support programme for our School's sessional staff. Key factors in establishing and maintaining the programme included: local change agents supported initially by institutional project funding; School…

Academic work has become increasingly fragmented. The horizontal fragmentation of the profession into disciplinary tribes has been accompanied by the increasing participation of student affairs and educational development professionals located outside the academic units but are actively engaged in academic work, such as supporting teaching and…

Much of what is regarded as effective professional learning is that which is situated, incorporates a social dimension and enables practitioners to converge in and around authentic practice. This article describes an inter-university online learning resource for tutors which is underpinned by a practice based approach to professional learning. The…

School music education in Japan is in a less than ideal situation. In April 2002, the new course of study was implemented by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The total number of music classes in the new curriculum was reduced to 33% of what it had been by the end of 2002. The reduction went from two hours…

Part-time faculty has become an important labor force in Chinese colleges and universities. The number of them has risen rapidly and its structure varies in different types of higher education institutes (HEIs), which results from integration of the social motivation and the inner motivation of schools' reform. From the institutional point of…

A further education college for adults used Britain's Investors in People program to improve staff development opportunities for part-time staff. The process necessitated balancing the tension between academic culture and the language of adult education on the one hand and the business/enterprise ethos of the IP program on the other. (SK)

Describes the planning and implementation of a program that uses microteaching to train part-time adult education tutors in Guernsey. (JOW)

Describes ongoing research on part-time teaching in selected Alberta (Canada) school districts. Themes include benefits and drawbacks of part-time teaching for individuals, students, and schools; incentives to attract part-time teachers; effects on principals in small schools; rural-urban differences; driving forces; and implications for the…

Includes "Part-time Teachers of Adults: Some Professional Issues" (Summers); "The Competence Approach" (Sims); and "Training the Trainers" (Daines, Graham). (SK)

A short-term training course for part-time adult instructors (a program of the Strathcona, Alberta, Further Education Council) has been offered eight times. Findings from questionnaires completed by respondents indicated that over 97 percent want to take the course. The most obviously desired topics are adult learners' needs and characteristics.…

Examines research on preparation and support of part-time faculty, analyzing four areas of support: institutional policies and practices, formal preparation programs, monitoring and evaluation systems, and formal and informal support measures in academic departments. Key processes and problems in each area are discussed, examining issues that must…

Teaching assistants are unionized at most large Ontario and British Columbia universities. The institutions tend to be urban, have large graduate enrollments, and have faced greater budgetary concerns at the time of unionization. Canada's public policy and labor relations decisions have favored unionization more than the United States's have. (MSE)