Open educational practices (OEP) offer many benefits, including increased faculty teaching flexibility and opportunities for students to contribute their own perspectives to course material. However, instructors in higher education face barriers to work that isn’t explicitly valued in the promotion and tenure process, including OEP. Faculty agency, as defined by O'Meara et al. (2011), is the capacity of faculty members to actively shape and influence their work environments, professional identities, and career trajectories. OEP is often pursued because of instructors’ personal interest in open values, and while OEP benefits the university, it’s not often valued in the promotion and tenure process. In this lightning talk, the presenters will describe the preliminary data for a qualitative study they are conducting to explore faculty agency, particularly for first-year-writing and composition instructors, and how it influences instructors’ ability to pursue open educational practices.
Attendees of this session will be able to:- Define faculty agency and describe its relationship to open educational practices.
- Evaluate the institutional and societal factors that might influence faculty agency at their own institution.
