Category: Professors of Teaching

Guest Blog: Educational Leadership Titles

Occasionally the bargaining team asks members for permission to share their thoughts via the bargaining blog. In September 2016, Christina Hendricks, Chair, Instructor Network Leadership Team, sent a letter to the Provosts at UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan, the President of the Faculty Association and the Chair of the Okanagan Faculty Committee discussing the need for change in the Educational Leadership titles. The correspondence follows:

As current faculty members in the Educational Leadership stream we are requesting that you advocate a change to our titles to align appropriately with our job descriptions and career trajectories, as well as to parallel our Research stream colleagues. We suggest that titles of Instructor and Senior Instructor be replaced with Assistant Professor of Teaching and Associate Professor of Teaching, respectively. Such a shift in titles would create a sensible, clear trajectory of rank that ends with the extant Professor of Teaching. The University of Toronto has just recently made a change to their instructor/educational leadership stream faculty titles.

Educational Leadership Stream

In the round of negotiations leading to the 2010-2012 Collective Agreement the University made a proposal to transform the Instructor classification into a full three-rank Educational Leadership classification. At the time the instructor classification had no ranks (Senior Instructor was simply the name given to post-probationary instructors, no actual promotion procedures were involved), the classification was regarded (and described in the Agreement) as a “teaching stream,” and several articles in the Collective Agreement implied that Senior Instructors were analogous to a rank below Assistant Professors. The University proposed to change all of that during that round.