| Career and technical education is an important part of the mission of the comprehensive community college, yet the work and perspectives of career education faculty are not well understood. This study examines what the career education faculty come to understand as their roles within the community college. It specifically focuses on how these faculty develop their understanding of their roles as teachers, what events, actions, and interactions influence the sense-making process as they find their places within their colleges, and what particular issues and challenges the faculty face in understanding and enacting their roles.;The study utilizes a phenomenological approach. Data was collected from extended, unstructured interviews with ten career education faculty. The participants, who were drawn from two midwestern community colleges, had been full-time faculty at their schools for two to six years and represented a variety of disciplines. Socialization theory and Gidden's structuration theory serve as theoretical lenses with which to interpret the results.;The image that emerges from this study is of a group of career education faculty who are engaged in multiple activities---curriculum development and revision, student recruiting and advising, clinical or lab maintenance and supervision, cultivating and sustaining links to the workplace, and, of course, teaching. These activities are performed against a backdrop of changing technologies and externally mandated directives. The career education faculty have been thrust into an academic setting with little or no preparation for the role and of necessity maintain a pragmatic and outwardly directed perspective on their work.;The structural organization issues faced by the faculty in this study---external curricular demands, limited formal educational background, multiple responsibilities, and potential isolation as a group---suggest a variety of institutional responses that would support the career education faculty in their work and strengthen the education offered at community colleges. Orientation programs and formal mentoring would assist new teachers with their initial adjustment to their colleges, and on-going professional development programs that introduce faculty to different pedagogical strategies and promote reflection about matters of teaching and learning would help to reshape instructional paradigms. Institutional inducements, such as incentives built into the reward system, appear to be important if the faculty are to view continued professional development and organizational involvement as part of their role definition. Finally, most of the participants initially worked as adjunct instructors. Better support and integration of adjunct faculty would not only bolster the instruction offered by these teachers, but also help to prepare future full-time faculty.;Understanding the challenges that the career education faculty face and the perspectives they hold can help institutions support their work and thereby strengthen this crucial aspect of the community college mission. |
