The Perceptions of Community-College Faculty Teaching in Learning Communities

Faculty attitudes toward technology-driven instruction in developmental mathematics

“…We transcribed all interviews with administrators and faculty and used qualitative software, Dedoose, for analysis. Based on our conceptual framework and the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology, we first identified every statement in which participants discussed their experiences and perspectives on the implementation of the new instructional policy (Creswell, 2014;Patton, 2002;Ravitch & Riggan, 2012). We began with data horizontalization to understand how faculty experienced the mandated change in curriculum (Maxwell, 2013;Patton, 2002;Saldaña, 2015).…”

“…Phenomenology describes the meaning several individuals give to a particular lived experience, or a phenomenon, and identifies the commonalities of this experience (Patton, 2002). Since we were interested in exploring how faculty experienced a mandated change to their curriculum and pedagogy, which in this case is the phenomenon in question, this approach is well suited to our analysis; it aligns with our conceptual framework (Creswell, 2014;Patton, 2002;Ravitch & Riggan, 2012). Thus, for this analysis, we specifically examine the experiences of faculty at four institutions with the aim of achieving maximum variation along two dimensions: implementation level and institutional type (Patton, 2002).…”

“…Top-down policy mandates fail to leverage instructor expertise regarding pedagogy and how best to serve the students at their particular institutions. Community college faculty report that extrinsic factors, such as mandates perceived to originate outside the institution, influence both their job dissatisfaction and their ability to form social connections with students and fellow faculty (Rodriguez & Rima, 2020).…”

The urban community college: An overview

“…Case study research on these urban faculty includes perceptions of teaching and learning strategies, such as reading across the curriculum (Schnee, 2018), learning communities (Rodriguez & Rima, 2020), teaching techniques such as gaming (Nizar-Moses, 2022), mentoring students (Hordge, 2022), and teaching workload (Jones, 1998). The wide range of topics also includes their own professional development (Baker, 2021), their job satisfaction (Isaac & Boyer, 2007), and, very recently, satisfaction with institutional responses to the Covid-19 pandemic (D'Amico, Atwell, Spriggs, & Cox, 2022).…”