Standard 5: Faculty Qualifications, Performance, and Development
This section describes all aspects of faculty qualifications, performance, and development required for Standard 5. Because many individuals have been involved in delivering the extensive array of educator preparation programs at the University of Kentucky during 2000-2007, the sets and subsets of faculty members described within each metric and table in this section will be clearly defined.
The professional education faculty at UK is defined as including the following:
1. All full-time faculty members in the College of Education (COE). While not all programs in the COE prepare P-12 educators, faculty members across the college participate in educator preparation in a variety of ways including teaching required and elective courses, serving as members of program faculties, and participating in faculty governance as committee members and voting members of the COE faculty.
2. Full-time faculty members from schools and colleges other than the COE who contribute in significant ways to educator preparation programs. For these faculty members, “significant” is defined as activities beyond teaching a course in which educator preparation candidates enroll; it includes involvement in programmatic governance, continuous assessment, field experience supervision, and other activities specific to educator preparation. Faculty members in this group are from the colleges of Agriculture (including the School of Human Environmental Sciences), Arts and Sciences, Communication and Information Studies, Fine Arts, Health Sciences, and Social Work.
UK faculty positions are categorized in a variety of ways described in the UK Administrative Regulations. Individuals within the professional education unit who are in tenure-track faculty positions are typically either regular title, a designation held by the majority of faculty involved in educator preparation, or special title. Regular title faculty members are expected to accomplish excellence in teaching, research, and service; because UK is a research-extensive university, the majority of faculty in the professional education unit are appointed in regular title lines. Special title faculty positions are individually defined, and for the most part, these positions are teaching-intensive positions with a relatively modest research allocation. Some special title faculty positions are designed to focus on supervision of field experiences, in recognition of the labor-intensive nature of such work. Members of the professional education faculty are also appointed to lecturer and adjunct faculty positions.
Data describing faculty qualifications are based on faculty members’ curricula vitae; for this report, 115 of the 120 faculty members in the professional education unit provided current vitae to the Office of the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies by September 24, 2007. Members of the College of Education Instructional Technology Center website team entered these documents into the College of Education Online Tools section of the college’s website which allowed access to electronic listings of some categories of scholarly activities. This electronic database also includes vitae from individuals who were members of the faculty at any point during 2000-2007 but have left UK due to retirements or resignations. Descriptions of contemporary school experiences and service to schools and education agencies were accomplished by hand searches of the online vita collection and are maintained as a set of electronic spreadsheets by the Office of the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies.
Collectively, the professionals involved in educator preparation at UK strive to offer candidates the rigorous and high quality experiences that prepare them to be educators who have positive impacts on their P-12 students.