Developmental and Full-Time Faculty

It is essential that the developmental faculty in the Reading/Academic Success division have the skill and areas of expertise to teach underprepared adult learners. There are no graduate programs in developmental education in Kentucky. It generally takes years of professional development to train a developmental educator. If the Reading/Academic Success division loses a developmental faculty member, it takes years of professional development to develop the range of skills and areas of expertise required to teach underprepared adult students. Maintaining a developmental program is expertise dependent or as Robert McCabe puts it, “…, the majority of the faculty workload should be assigned to full-time faculty.” In other areas or disciplines, future hires are trained in their discipline, but that is not the case for most hires in developmental education.

Hunter Boylan argues (and this is true for the pool of potential new hires in our area) that "many developmental education teachers are not qualified to teach in any classroom, particularly in one with underprepared students, because they are often ignorant of any methodology for teaching these students." Boylan believes that many teachers do not know how to teach developmental courses and that more training is essential to achieve better results.” That sums up the position the division has found itself in repeatedly when hiring. The division has spent four years of intense professional development on the full-time temporary faculty in the division and the loose of any one of them would be loose of the expertise they have developed and the energy and expense that has been put into their training. Lack of benefits for full-time temporary increases the likelihood of future replacement and beginning the training all over again.