This post is the first in a series. Part 1 considers doing sessional teaching for financial reasons. Part 3 looks at what to do if you decide it’s not worth it. Part 4 helps you approach sessional teaching strategically so you get the skills you need. The introduction is the same so you can start anywhere.
As term time approaches, those of you who don’t have tenure track or tenured positions in universities may be considering various options for sessional teaching (sometimes called adjunct professors, or part-time lecturers). I’m not talking about Teaching Assistantships, but rather opportunities to teach one or more courses, usually for a flat fee (albeit paid biweekly or semi-monthly or whatever). I’m also not really talking about limited term full-time appointments (teaching only or teaching & research) though some of the same considerations may apply.
Sometimes these offers come in very late in the game (even the week before term starts). We all know that the pay is low for the work involved, and that it will not reflect your experience or training. It is never a good idea to act as if you are desperate. So what kinds of things might you consider before taking that sessional teaching?
An excellent reason to do sessional teaching…
You need the experience
If you are going to make a career as a scholar in higher education, you are going to need to demonstrate that you can teach courses in your field. This is also where the difference between being a TA on a course and actually teaching a course makes a difference.
The amount and kind of teaching experience you will need will vary depending on what kind of academic career you are looking for. It matters what course you have the opportunity to teach. Teaching for experience needs to be part of a career plan. Don’t worry if your plan is still vague. The more decisions you make about where you might like your career to go, the easier these decisions are going to be.
What counts as “in your field”?
It will be helpful to do a bit of research (or at least thinking) about the kinds of more permanent positions you might apply for.
- What kinds of departments would you like to work in?
- Are there many of those? If not, what other kinds might work if they had a particular approach to that discipline?
- Are there 100% appointments in your field or are people mostly joint-appointed? If the latter, what would be the most likely joint-appointment for you?
- What courses are commonly provided to undergraduate students in those kinds of departments/programs?
- What courses are often considered a compulsory core for undergraduate students in those kinds of departments/programs?
Using what you know about those questions, you can look at your own CV and figure out where the holes in your experience are. Are there opportunities to do sessional teaching that would fill one of those holes.
An example for interdisciplinary scholars
I had a client who was finishing a PhD in Cultural Studies. She had some background in English Literature and her Cultural Studies interests overlap somewhat with English Literature. However, her CV doesn’t really have anything on it that says she can teach mainstream English courses. Since a lot of Cultural Studies research is happening within disciplinary departments or, even where stand-alone programs exist, many of the faculty are joint-appointed with disciplinary departments, it made sense for her to get some experience teaching an English class.
English departments typically structure things in terms of types of writing (prose, poetry, drama), time periods (contemporary, 19th century, 18th century, etc), and geography (British, American, post-colonial literature in English, etc). So she looked at the closest fit for her and then kept an eye out for opportunities to teach a relevant undergraduate survey course.
Disciplinary scholars
The same basic principles apply for those trained within a discipline. The drive to specialization in research makes a lot of scholars feel unprepared to deliver more general courses. And yet general courses are very important components of undergraduate education.
North American scholars should not assume that having done a comprehensive exam in a particular area is sufficient evidence. Teaching something like a 2nd year undergraduate course in the area of your comprehensive exam will strengthen your CV, and your preparation will largely focus on pedagogical issues rather than learning new material. If you haven’t done a relevant comprehensive exams (or have PhD from somewhere that doesn’t do them), don’t worry. If you consider yourself a scholar within a particular discipline, you should have enough knowledge to teach undergraduate courses in the field.
You might also consider the reverse of the previous example. If you end up in a department that is involved in interdisciplinary programs or contributes to general humanities requirements (e.g. in a liberal arts college), what might you contribute? Do you have any opportunities to teach that type of course now?
Is it worth it?
I faced this kind of choice in the 3rd year of my doctorate. My supervisor had advised me that it would be better not to teach and focus on getting the dissertation written. Her advice was based on the assumption that the teaching available to me would likely be teaching assistantships running seminars on introduction to sociology courses, something I’d done for a couple of years already. Doing that again wasn’t going to add anything to my CV and would take time away from my dissertation. Finishing the dissertation was going to be more valuable to my career than another year of seminar teaching.
However, a part-time position came up at another university teaching a final year undergraduate course directly in my field (sociology of the family). It was a maternity cover. The employment conditions weren’t bad and it was within commuting distance. That particular teaching experience would be valuable to my future career, and as such I decided to take it even though it would likely delay finishing the dissertation.
If you decide to do sessional teaching and experience is one of your main reasons, make sure you actually get the experience you need. In the next post, I’ll talk about how to get the most out of your sessional teaching.
This post was edited 8 November 2018.
Hi Jo, I’d like to send a cautionary note to those hoping to land a tenure-track job one day. I speak from my experience not only as a current PhD supervisor and member of several academic search committees over the past 7 years, but more importantly as a former PhD student myself. I did my PhD during a very tough time in the academic job market, the late 90s, which is not unlike the market PhD students are facing now–a market in which there were few tenure-track jobs available.
I was one of the lucky ones: I finished my PhD in 2000, just as the tenure-track market was beginning to open up again; I did not have to teach any courses as a PhD student, though I did a lot of TAing; I had a postdoc to buy me a couple of years of job search time; and during my postdoc, my PhD-granting department gave me the chance to teach one course that was right in my subject area. But many of my colleagues a year or two ahead of me in the PhD program got on the sessional treadmill and never get off. They started out thinking the experience would be good for their careers, they were desperate for money, or they wanted to buy themselves some time until the market opened up again. But they didn’t get their dissertations done, ran out of any scholarship funding they had left, and had to continue doing poorly-paid sessional work ad nauseum because it was the only way they could pay their ever-increasing tuition fees and keep body and soul together. When they did apply for permanent jobs, the quality of these excellent scholars wasn’t recognized because they had done “too much” sessional teaching. There was a bias against those folks that I still hear during academic search committee meetings: “they don’t publish, so they won’t get tenure.” This is not to say, of course, that those who took sessional positions *wouldn’t* publish if they had the research time, limited teaching, and higher pay that a tenure-track job affords; they just didn’t publish because they were teaching 6 or 7 courses to make a living wage and had no time. But the perception was that they *couldn’t* publish and thus were poor bets. The tenure-track jobs that did exist went to the publishing stars who didn’t get stuck in the sessional ghetto. Even after the market opened up again, they tended not to get hired–they had been doing the sessional bit for too long by then, and were stigmatized by it.
My sense is that, in Canada, there really are very few universities that, when it comes to *permanent hirings*–those with stability, benefits and living wages–prefer teachers to publishers. At least this is true in my discipline, sociology. And in spite of all the administrative talk these days about improving teaching, this is still true. Good publishers get rewarded with job offers, contract renewals, research grants, tenure, promotion, teaching releases (notice how this is seen as a reward, but no one requests a release from research time!), sometimes even merit pay; good teachers do not. You may get punished if you’re a *bad* teacher, but you don’t get rewarded if you’re a good one.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that a teaching experience might help you get a job (and I think this is more true now), but *good publications will get you a job*; without your PhD, you’re usually not even in the running. True, ABDs sometimes get hired–because of their exceptional promise as a researcher and publisher. I don’t know of a single ABD who got a tenure-track job because of her/his exceptional promise as a teacher or extensive sessional experience–this is not to say none exist, but I don’t know of any. What’s more, finishing a PhD gets pretty difficult once you have a full teaching load, and I know of a couple of ABDs who lost their tenure-track jobs because they never finished.
Thoughtful departments will provide teaching opportunities for their senior PhD students in the last year of their programs, opportunities that are not so demanding that they will interfere with the production of the dissertation, and they will encourage students who need a beefier CV before they go on the job market to apply for postdocs. Others may have different experiences, but my spidey senses tell me that, if they want a permanent academic job, current PhD students *still* should be advised to write their dissertations and publish first, and teach second–especially in a market in which, once again, tenure-track jobs are becoming a scarce commodity.
Thanks, as always, for the thoughtful posts.