Sage Sociology Exchange Navigate the Tenure Track

Question:

How do you integrate your teaching, research, and service? What advice would you give to early career scholars trying to navigate the tenure track at an R1 institution?

Answer:

Provided by Sage Author: Maxine Atkinson, North Carolina State University, USA

R1 Institutions are indeed greedy institutions, and there are many interesting and alluring opportunities! It is easy to become overwhelmed.

One of the most effective ways to manage the multiple demands of an R1 position is to blend teaching, research, and service. Teaching at the graduate level encourages us to integrate research into our classes, but not so much with our undergraduates.  Fortunately, many Sage texts include active learning activities that help us teach our students to analyze our social world. ASA also provides us with resources to integrate research into teaching with TRAILS.

Our choice of classes can make a big difference to our success. You were probably hired to teach specific courses in a department’s curriculum that are related to your research interests, but we are usually expected to teach more than one course. The most often taught courses outside our research areas are the commonly required courses like introductory courses, methods, and theory. It is to your advantage to choose to teach a core course because it will have to be taught repeatedly and thus it will cut down on your course preparations. While teaching special topics is alluring, you will often not have the opportunity to teach those courses. Be careful with developing new courses of any kind. Instead, hone and update relatively few.

Integrating research and service is perhaps the biggest challenge. Here, the best strategy may be making sure you develop a relationship with a senior colleague who can advise you on your service choices and focus on those closest to your substantive interests.