Trekking the Educator Track at a Research-Intensive University: Five Accounts of Different Career Levels

Abstract

In this paper, we offer personal accounts along the Educator Track from Instructor to Associate Professor as members of an English Language Centre at a leading research-intensive university in Asia. The Educator Track is a career pathway growing in significance and status and now boasts a full professorial grade. Our narratives provide an overview of what we and our institution deem as excellence in scholarly teaching leading to our recent promotions along the track. We also detail some of our identity construction processes as practitioners and how our Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has progressed over our careers. We draw on three frameworks. The first, Kern et al.’s (2015) Dimensions of Activities Related to Teaching, enables us to map what we do. The second, Shulman’s (2005) Habits of Mind, Hand, and Heart, is used to present important elements of how we teach our content and rationalize why we teach it. The last, Quinlan’s (2014) concept of Leadership of Teaching for Student Learning links the Associate Professor role to engagement in the wider community beyond the classroom. We hope that these accounts might help further understanding of what it means to be on the Educator Track at a research-intensive university.