Cultivating Adjunct Faculty: Strategies Beyond Orientation

Abstract

Working toward cultivation of adjunct faculty includes innovative support measures beyond simple orientation. Orientation should be comprehensive, and move to mentorship as a key component that helps establish a sustainable nurse educator career for adjunct nursing faculty. It is incumbent upon schools of nursing to cultivate their adjunct faculty, and this article includes creative approaches to doing so, with recommendations for nursing education, nursing practice, and nursing research settings. While adjunct faculty may successfully meet some of the challenges faced by nursing programs, they themselves face many challenges that may hinder their success as nurse educators.

Easing the Transition From Clinician to Nurse Educator: An Integrative Literature Review

“…Many clinicians become faculty with little preparation in how to teach, a major source of stress in the first year of teaching. This was a consistent theme reported in the literature (Cangelosi et al, 2009;Gardner, 2014;Santisteban & Egues, 2014;Schoening, 2013;White et al, 2010). To ease this transition, clinicians need formal preparation for the teaching role, which can include topics such as defining the faculty role, planning and guiding student experiences, using formative and summative evaluations, understanding ethical and legal considerations, dealing with difficult students, and incorporating simulation (Cangelosi et al, 2009;Reid et al, 2013;Schoening, 2013).…”

“…Mentors play a critical role in helping their mentees navigate the complexities of the faculty role and the individual educational institution. A structured orientation as described above lays the foundation for this process (Santisteban & Egues, 2014). However, new faculty need ongoing guidance as they encounter their institution's expectations related to teaching, scholarship, and service (Wilson et al, 2010).…”

“…A structured orientation that includes a comprehensive faculty reference manual can facilitate new faculty's socialization into the academic culture (Santisteban & Egues, 2014;Schoening, 2013). The essential content and format of the faculty reference manual go beyond a compilation of standard school policies.…”

“…Many nurse clinicians experience frustration their first year because they have limited understanding of how to navigate these differences (White et al, 2010). The literature advocates for an intentional, extended orientation process to ease their transition into the academic culture (Baker, 2010;Blauvelt & Spath, 2008;Hunt et al, 2013;Santisteban & Egues, 2014). Faculty orientations have traditionally been one to three day marathons in which new faculty are bombarded with a massive amount of information and little time for processing it.…”

“…The mentoring handbook described by Blauvelt and Spath (2008) is organized around teaching topics such as classroom management, syllabus development, test construction and analysis, and advising policies and tips. Santisteban and Egues (2014) developed an excellent list of orientation talking points from the literature. They included examples of topics for a new faculty orientation such as faculty role and responsibilities ("What is the chain of command when dealing with any administrator, course, faculty, or student issue?…”