New Article in Georgia Journal of College Student Affairs About Faculty

A few weeks ago I published with one of my colleagues, Maria Sarmiento (Maryville University). In this article, we distill results from a study about Catholic faculty at Southern Catholic universities. In our study, we summarize a brief history of American Catholic higher education and how the loosely coupled system is currently challenged to meet the needs of increasingly diverse learners. We posit that American Catholic higher education continues to serve and educate its students based on the traditional, residential model. This causes some tensions with faculty who struggle to integrate the religious mission into the classroom with their pedagogy. In this qualitative study, several tenure-track faculty with a Catholic orientation were interviewed. It was found that they all have hold a connection with Catholic identity, but that they experienced ambiguity with their institutional mission related to teaching. Faculty also had little professional development and called on their institutions to assist them integrate Catholic mission and identity into their teaching approaches. We also provide some implications for practice to include new ways of thinking to better support connection of faculty teaching to institutional Catholic mission and identity.

A copy of a the article entitled “Experiences with Ex Corde Ecclesiae in Faculty Teaching Practices at Southern Catholic Colleges” and is available open access here.