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Deciding to apply for — and maybe even accept — a faculty position at a teaching-centered liberal arts college will have a significant impact on your future as a researcher. Prioritizing teaching means that you create more time and space to grab a coffee with an advisee to discuss course selection or an internship opportunity, attend a theatre production starring your students, and have animated conversations with your faculty peers about what constitutes a good group project. Joining the faculty at a liberal arts college affords you the opportunity to rethink your approach to doing scholarly research — both what you study and how you study it.
Research That Contributes to the Student Experience
First, let us offer some reassurance right from the beginning: working at a college that prioritizes educating undergraduates most likely does not mean giving up your research. The majority of small colleges still include research/scholarship/creative activity expectations in their tenure and promotion criteria.
However, research activity will look different at a small liberal arts college. For example, research expectations can often be met with outputs other than peer-reviewed journal articles, edited collections, or monographs.
This is in part because the role of research is often more broadly defined at a teaching institution. While research at an R1 may best be characterized as seeking new knowledge that advances the field, other institutions also value research that seeks ways to apply that knowledge and extend it to broader audiences, beginning with first-year undergraduates and non-majors. Liberal arts colleges will often value research for how it involves or directly benefits students, including giving students opportunities to publicly present work they’ve accomplished under your mentorship.
Contributions to the Field
Faculty at small colleges often invest time in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), which explores how students learn and seeks to develop evidence-based methodologies to support student learning. Many discipline-specific foci to SoTL can serve to improve your teaching as well as allow you to advance conversations about pedagogy in your field.
Editing a journal or serving as a conference organizer may also be valued for the ways these activities allow you to shape scholarly conversations, and therefore what counts as knowledge, in your field.
Some institutions may include as a form of scholarship leading workshops where you provide hands-on practice to increase your audiences’ capacity as teachers. Assignment design, pedagogies, and assessment are often areas of need and may give you a role to support your campus colleagues or peers elsewhere.
Contributions to Your College
You may find that your graduate school training has given you expertise with new technologies or generative A.I. that your new institution can benefit from. Consider how you can work with staff in your center for teaching and learning and other offices to develop these opportunities.
Nearly every institution needs and benefits from faculty who can design and guide assessment projects from the scale of a single course to the major or degree program. If you want to know if your teaching results in students learning, seek out those on campus who are measuring student learning outcomes, starting with your center for teaching and learning and your office for institutional effectiveness. There will be opportunities to present and publish those results and/or use them to apply for grant funding.
Grant writing is evidence-based and argument-driven writing. It often requires knowledge of current literature in the field and builds on initial research you believe is worthy of additional support. Institutions may count grant writing work towards research and scholarship expectations in their tenure decisions. Connect with your campus’s Institutional Review Board and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (if applicable), as well as Office of Sponsored Research or equivalent, to help you identify opportunities and ensure there is support for your idea. At smaller institutions, it is particularly important that grant writing activity aligns with institutional strategic goals.
Contributions to Your Community
If your research interests include questions or issues that you can make relevant to a non-academic audience, consider the possibilities of public scholarship that reaches a larger audience, including online publications, podcasts, and open-source venues. Don’t overlook academic conferences and general audience talks at public libraries and community organizations.
While the types, genres, and venues for research and scholarship that count for tenure and promotion continue to broaden at many institutions, be sure and clarify tenure expectations early on.
Contributions to a Small, Collaborative Team
Finally, remember that many hands make the work light. You will likely bring important relationships with you to your new institution. As you make the adjustment to perhaps being the only one in your department or campus with your areas of expertise, it will serve you well to stay connected with the mentors and colleagues you have worked with in a research lab, archive, or reading group.
One of the realities of a teaching-centered life is there is less time for research. Collaborations allow you to take advantage of physical resources that may not be available to you on the scale you enjoyed at an R1 institution as well as co-author grants, presentations, and publications that will keep you active in your field.
Even if you are not working on a co-authored project, seek out accountability partners. Ask about active writing groups, or start one yourself. Remote options abound-you may find that your professional organizations’ listservs are places to find interested colleagues.
Your research may begin to look different, but it can thrive at a small, independent college.
