14 (Re-)Envisioning Instructor Leadership Strengthened through a Decolonizing and Culturally Responsive Lens
Erin Keith
There is a strengthening view of adjunct instructors’ ongoing learning in higher education, specifically in their professional capacities as knowledge keepers and course facilitators, by which educators are encouraged to take the step forward to self-determine what they need for their own growth and learning (Donohoo & Katz, 2020). It is a decolonizing and culturally responsive view by which higher education administration and tenured faculty members see adjuncts for their strengths, capacities, and value. No longer should instructors be considered empty vessels to be filled or passive recipients of knowledge; rather, they are “analysts and synthesizers” (Blaschke & Hase, 2015, as cited in Akyildiz, 2019, p. 164) of their own learning through a variety of different modes, often beyond colonial institutional walls. However, obstacles to learning and growth still exist for many instructors, particularly distance education adjunct faculty like me, especially those who identify as women (Smith-Carrier et al., 2021). Adjunct instructor precarity and inequity have long been noted in research from the early 2000s (Dawson et al., 2019), yet hiring trends are increasing (Eidinger, 2021), leaving adjuncts without a sense of community, belonging, or leadership.
Leading with Capacity and Critical Consciousness
In education and other social science related fields, a focus on decolonizing and decentring whiteness tied to infusing culturally responsive and relevant contents and epistemologies into distance education courses is now evolving rapidly in teaching and learning (Khalifa, 2018; Lopez, 2022). Faculties now expect instructors to be leaders in diverse and critical ways of knowing and to include this knowledge in their course syllabuses, facilitations, and interactions with students, colleagues, and administrative staff (Hudley & Mallinson, 2017). However, much of this learning falls to the instructors to seek out, with little support or financial contribution from the very institutions demanding it (Rose, 2020). Within this chapter, grounded in critical race theory, instructor leadership is centred on a continuum of learning that views instructors’ learning leadership as a strength—an ever-growing strength reinforced by colleagues who share their cultures and lived experiences, offering constructive feedback, storytelling/counternarratives, and equity-literate, compassionate dialogue.
My Journey of Instructional Leadership
Guided and heartened by Ladson-Billings’ (1995) transformative article “But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally-Relevant Pedagogy,” I have sought to embed culturally relevant teaching into my pedagogical praxis since the onset of my K–12 teaching career in 1995. This article was a course reading during my Master of Education degree, and it changed my teaching trajectory. After years in the Canadian school system in various teaching capacities, and then becoming a university adjunct instructor in 2016, with most of my experience in distance education, I have witnessed firsthand the power of student learning when instructors embody Ladson-Billings’ epistemology of “critical consciousness” (p. 162). As a white cis-gender woman and settler, I aim to deepen my critical consciousness while learning and unlearning about the ever-present oppressive hegemony and injustice in education that harm and retraumatize Indigenous, Black, and racialized students.
I continually endeavour to create opportunities for students to engage critically with content, invite multiple perspectives and cultural understandings, and become community problem solvers and social advocates, and I always expect high achievement outcomes (Ladson-Billings, 2021a). I recognize that not all instructors have had a learning path similar to mine; I also acknowledge the privilege of my intersectionality in being harboured and guided by willing tenured colleagues with access to rich professional learning and library resources. In reality, though, most adjunct instructors are pressured to work in a “system that is ready to get rid of [them] as soon as the working contract has finished, offering nothing other than ‘unemployed excellence’—including stress, isolation, invisibility, constant movement, and mental health issues” (Stoica et al., 2019, p. 79). I have experienced this innumerable times throughout my sessional career. There is a culture of devaluing adjunct instructors that needs to change. Institutions must acknowledge that their adjunct scholars matter and begin to disrupt the second-class status that they have long held compared with their faculty colleagues.
The Erosion of Academic Humanity
Unfortunately, the number of adjunct instructors in higher education continues to rise, particularly in distance education (Rose, 2020). According to the Canadian Union of Public Employees (2018), 54% of faculty appointments in Canadian universities are short-term adjunct stints rather than permanent positions. At the college level, this statistic rises to over 70% (Zitko & Schultz, 2020) with women, who are often minoritized and racialized, making up more than two-thirds of the academic profession. The reason for this high rate of adjunct workers is primarily cost savings along with an increase in casualized labour (Mason & Megoran, 2021). Casual, contract staff are easy to forget about once they have fulfilled their contractual duties. They are mistreated because of their invisibility and rarely seen as equal academics by faculty colleagues (Mason & Megoran, 2021).
Racialized and minority adjuncts such as women also face more vulnerabilities than their male counterparts because of work exploitation, unfair demands to work beyond their contract obligations (e.g., grant writing, creating conference materials without being invited to present), and debriefing meetings to keep faculty administrators up to date on course progression (Caretta et al., 2018). This pink-collar workforce faces much dehumanization that slowly extinguishes the adjunct’s flame of creativity, teaching, and scholarship. This results in a faculty’s casualized workforce as mere empty shells of their former selves (Eidinger, 2021). I have felt this dehumanization as I became what felt like a cog on a wheel that could not slow down, and I could not say no to a course offering for fear that I might be sidelined in future terms. It is a long, painful, and debilitating erosion perpetuated by an unending lineup of new PhD and EdD graduates hopeful for a rewarding teaching career in higher education.
Culturally Responsive Instructional Leadership
As I return to Ladson-Billings’ (1995, p. 159) urging that being culturally responsive in praxis is “just good teaching,” I wonder whether its framework could disrupt the cog-on-a-wheel reality of adjunct teaching in higher education. According to Shah (n.d., para. 3), “culturally responsive and relevant leaders acknowledge and disrupt oppressive systems” by engaging in social activism that upholds equity and emphasizes that leaders unlearn as a part of their learning, centre self-agency and action, and create sustainable spaces of support and sustenance for themselves (Lopez, 2016). Since higher education institutions are predestined as “white spaces” (Joseph-Salisbury, 2018), I wonder whether adopting knowledge principles of culturally responsive instructional leadership that spotlight whiteness could help in restructuring the disparities and inequities of the adjunct system.
These instructional leaders are pervasive in higher education yet invisible because of their adjunct status. In addition, trends in cultural representation indicate that under-represented minorities who are racialized are eight times more likely to be sessional instructors versus white colleagues (Flaherty, 2016). Could this long-standing advice from Ladson-Billings grounded in critical race theory, among many other racialized scholars (Khalifa, 2018; Lopez, 2016, 2022; Shah, n.d.), disrupt the enduring hegemony in distance education that both white and racialized adjunct instructors face and shift their leadership dial toward liberation and freedom (Shah, 2018)? By leveraging culturally responsive principles of reflexive practice, counternarratives, and high expectations, adjuncts could collectively and relationally unite to embody actions that mitigate, disrupt, and dismantle the systemic oppression that they face as precarious instructors.
The Knowledge Principle of Reflexive Practice
By its nature, reflexivity interrupts normalized institutional traditions and allows questions to surface about capacities as adjunct instructors. It is a cerebral act with creative outputs such as journalling or storytelling guided by the individual’s lived experiences. As Lyle and Caissie (2021, p. 221) purport, “reflexivity is not to be engaged casually. To be reflexive is to live with an empathic heart and redirect the onus of responsibility from I to we with the intent of fostering deeper debate and critical questioning.” If adjunct instructors engaged collectively in reflexive practice and then shared their new insights and actions as a form of resistance, Alemán (2017) suggests, then previously invisible and silenced scholars could be heard. Collective reflexive practice could look like sharing artistic representations of the instructional work through media such as poems, sketches, sculptures, paintings, et cetera. It could be infused into monthly synchronous sessions during which fellow adjunct colleagues share their experiences through their artworks to create an anthology of reflexivity. Such actions serve as sources of “fulfilment and communal empowerment” (Alemán, 2017, p. 75) that could create brighter pathways for all that fracture the hegemonic system of casualized labour and perhaps foster and re-story a new space of professional equity and humanity. Following is a poem that I wrote about envisioning “a new story of humanity” as I explored my reflexive voice as an adjunct instructor.
A New Story of Humanity
Take all the worn-down educators
and rally them
together.
Wrap them in empathy,
shared understanding,
and a sense of belonging
that awakens and revitalizes
a new space of capacity.
Woke once more,
polish each other to a shine
that illuminates
a united, powerful voice
so that they cannot
help but to listen.
—Unity (Keith, 2022)
The Knowledge Principle of Counternarratives
A powerful tenet of critical race theory is the centring of counternarratives to unsettle majoritarian narratives (Ladson-Billings, 1998) about adjuncting, such as being invisible to tenured faculty members, preparation and meeting time as free labour, and instructors not considered researchers, among others (Truong, 2021). According to Blaisdell (2021, p. 4), there are four tenets of counternarratives in critical race theory: providing new (often untold) narratives to understand power, deconstructing majoritarian narratives, serving as a cure for silencing, and fostering activism. How could these tenets shift the inequitable and unjust conditions that adjunct distance instructors face? In the case of instructor leadership, this could be meeting regularly in a shared “affinity space” (Gee, 2004), whether face to face or online, to share views and experiences as sources of strength in supporting one another.
These spaces could serve as an empathetic, capacity-rich, communal area that invites women instructors to share their lived experiences, co-construct and advocate for new policies, highlight their unique leadership qualities, and help to restore a sense of professional harmony. Counternarratives are powerful stories reaffirming that “those who lack material wealth or political power still have access to thought and language, and their development of those tools … differs from that of the most privileged” (Matsuda, 1995, p. 65), such as tenured faculty members. Counternarratives can serve as efficacious disruptors that shed light on the colonial advantage of growing adjunct dependence, particularly for under-represented instructors, including women, racialized, and minoritized scholars, and the normalization of this polarizing trend in white-dominant higher education institutions (Blaisdell, 2021; Flaherty, 2016).
The Knowledge Principle of High Expectations
For the most part, adjunct instructors are assigned specific course-based teaching duties and teach in relative isolation from the academic faculty of the university (Webb et al., 2013). Although most universities have teaching and learning centres and professional development initiatives available for faculty members, there is little opportunity for distance adjunct instructors to share their experiences, collaborate, and embrace culturally responsive approaches to curriculum and pedagogy with fellow colleagues (Webb et al., 2013). Even if opportunities to do so arise, faculty members are financially remunerated for this learning, whereas adjunct instructors are not. Two considerations in support of adjuncts’ professional learning to enhance the development of their critical consciousness are flexible communities of practice and high expectations of scholarly teaching and learning (Norman et al., 2020).
Flexible Communities of Practice
Given the multi-faceted teaching and professional lives of adjunct instructors, traditional communities of practice need to be re-envisioned (Luo et al., 2020). Gone are the days of after-class professional learning meetings at which educators are trained by subject experts who facilitate a one-and-done presentation. Current distance education instructors have varied amounts of knowledge pertaining to new pedagogies and equity understanding related to decolonization, critical engagement, and culturally and linguistically relevant teaching. Faculties are demanding this understanding and praxis from their adjunct instructors yet offer a one-size-fits-all approach to professional learning (e.g., a workshop facilitated by an external consultant) or none at all (Hudley & Mallinson, 2017). A re-envisioning of adjunct professional learning is possible through flexible communities of practice.
A flexible community of practice caters to the strengths of adjunct distance instructors since it is responsive to their professional development needs and circumstances. Specifically, it is grounded in sharing one’s intersectional lived experiences and recognizes the unique expertise and skills of each community member (Webb et al., 2013). Flexible communities of practice are solidified through scholarly and professional interactions of both adjunct and permanent faculty to develop a deeper shared understanding and sense of cohesion. This could look like mentoring or active coaching partnerships by which the expertise of each group member, regardless of adjunct or faculty, is equally illuminated. Learning modalities are carefully considered for the community and can include blended or distance professional development opportunities with the strategic use of educational technology such as podcasts, webinars, online discussion posts, PDF readings, and other learning activities. Faculties should also reward adjunct members with incentives for their attendance, participation, and completion of various learning modules.
High Expectations of Scholarly Teaching and Learning
Adjunct instructors often carry the weight of program course loads across faculties, particularly teaching courses with larger enrolments (Dawson et al., 2019). In fact, the strength, or lack thereof, of their teaching skills becomes the fabric of the institutional culture of teaching simply because of the sheer number of adjunct scholars compared with tenured faculty members. An example from my adjunct experience is that, in some Canadian graduate programs, students may complete their entire two- or three-year degrees (e.g., MEd, EdD, PhD) without ever being taught by a tenured faculty member. This aligns with the Canadian trends mentioned earlier that 54% of all Ontario faculty appointments are sessional, with other provinces higher such as Quebec at 61% and British Columbia at 55% (CCPA, 2018, p. 6). Therefore, it is in the interest of a university to ensure that its adjuncts’ teaching and learning praxis firmly aligns with its beliefs, policies, and practices and that they support scholarly, high-quality education (Dawson et al., 2019).
Recent shifts in higher education teaching philosophies and pedagogies include the use of a flipped classroom model by which students engage in generative dialogue and in-class activities based on the class readings of the day. Students are active learners engaged in critical thinking and discourse versus being passive listeners to instructor-led lectures. Other shifts include centring student learning in intersectional community spaces in face-to-face, hybrid, or online formats, which are relational and courageous, fostering pedagogies of care and wellness, ensuring culturally relevant and representative class resources, implementing equity audits, and decolonizing assessment practices (Dawson et al., 2019; Lopez, 2022; Ortiz et al., 2021). Learning these advancing scholarly teaching approaches will take time and commitment by the institution, faculty members, and adjunct instructors.
A greater emphasis on the value of teaching is also needed since most institutions are research driven and favour publications and grants over teaching competencies as evidence of effective scholarship (Dawson et al., 2019). Finding ways to celebrate and learn from one another regardless of rank is supported by Darling-Hammond’s (2006, p. 305) argument that learning from each other is essential, especially since “the range of knowledge for teaching has grown so expansive that it cannot be mastered by any individual.” Only when this culture of engaged vulnerability and collaboration is fostered and prioritized between distance education adjuncts and tenured faculty members will further scholarly teaching and learning innovation occur.
My Hope for Unity
As I continue to engross myself in Ladson-Billings’ (2021b) enduring research, I am reminded that instructional leadership requires educators to “swim against the tide” and be vigilant about disrupting whiteness in distance education praxis that serves to fragment rather than unite faculty members. Ladson-Billings urges leaders in education to reimagine models of teaching that foster student curiosity and are driven by norms of intellectual capacity and excellence. Distance education instructors historically have been poorly served by higher education institutions (Dawson et al., 2019). By infusing decolonizing and culturally responsive and relevant pedagogies into distance education programs, not only students’ voices and spirits but also those of adjunct instructors are celebrated. Transcendence, transformation, and humanity are possible when Ladson-Billings’ frameworks of culturally relevant, sustaining, revitalizing, and reality pedagogies are embodied by all interconnected and valued members of distance education programs.
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