Abstract:

An overwhelming complexity of demands reside with mid-level administrators (MLAs), particularly department chairs, within institutes of higher education (IHE). These include being able to effectively navigate the systems of the organization, develop and utilize interpersonal skills, manage power relationships and understand and enact cultural norms of the organization. However, in an era of increased emphasis on the generation and dissemination of knowledge, the role of the MLA also requires providing for faculty support, whether directly or indirectly, to engage in research and produce scholarship.

Faculty success with research, whether a novice or seasoned member (coworker), is co-dependent upon their ability to understand research. Novice faculty come to the academy with some research skills, having completed a dissertation, or comparable work. More often than not, individuals new to the academy align with a structural construct of scholarship production to help them acquire promotion and tenure (P&T). Seasoned faculty, while placing value on the number of publications, seem more secure to cultivate conceptual skills. Yet, there is little in the literature for MLAs to draw upon to mentor faculty on a particular research schema to address P&T and sustained research criteria.

In this paper, we seek to shed light on the fundamentals of researcher tendencies, particularly as they relate to MLAs’ understanding individual faculty cues that propel faculty research desires, generation of scholarship, and level of development. We contend that by understanding these cues, and the nuances attached, MLAs are more equipped to mentor all program faculty, across their professional careers. As such, we present two orientations of research, structural and conceptual, framed around two traditional schemas: learning to-research and researching to-learn, respectively. Both orientations require a researcher to move from concrete thinking and surface learning judgments to applied thinking and deep learning. Success in learning to-research is based upon matured structural research skills while researching to-learn includes the conceptual aspects based on motivation and external and/or internal gratification.

We reconfigured these two orientations with three constructs: ways of understanding, epistemic curiosity and assessment connotations to create a new schema, research as-learning. We illustrate the interplay between the orientations and constructs using a layered parallel processes model. This model reveals the cohesion of two seemingly disparate ways to learn how to perform research and why we perform it. By redefining research through four areas (scholarship of discovery, integration, application, and teaching and learning), faculty could now develop research agendas that meet their personality, scope of skills, discipline, and IHE’s culture.

Through these four venues individuals are provided more opportunities to do various kinds of research for different purposes. In many ways, our model allows for re/conceptualizing the generation of knowledge as a process that is inherent to other processes. Such processes become increasingly complex, resulting in a transformation of using research as-learning. Our layered parallel process model establishes a means for MLAs to mentor and advance faculty’s skillsets with research practices, as they move from learning to-research and researching to-learn to research as-learning.

Keywords:

Research, Learning, Mid-Level Administrators, Mentoring, Institutes of Higher Education.