NUR6013 Module 4 service and advising analysis example

Twenty Advisees, Two Committees and a Pinning Ceremony: Auditing a Year of Service and Citizenship, Who Carries It, and Which Commitments a New Faculty Member Should Keep

Student Name

American College of Education

NUR6013: Multi-Dimensional Professorial Role in Nursing Education

Module 4 Assignment

Instructor Name

March 25, 2030

Why Measure Service

Service is the part of a faculty member's role that is easiest to accept and hardest to see. My appointment letter says that service is ten percent of my effort, which on a forty-five-hour week would be about four and a half hours. Last semester I suspected the real figure was higher, so I logged every hour spent on service, advising and what my university calls citizenship, the informal work that keeps a department running, for fifteen weeks. This paper reports the result, interprets it with evidence and decides what to do about it.

What the Log Showed

Over fifteen weeks, I logged 142 hours of service and advising, an average of 9.5 hours a week, about twice my appointment's share. The hours fell into five groups. Advising my twenty students took 38 hours, including scheduled meetings, emails and three long conversations with students considering leaving the program. The admissions committee took 31 hours, most of them in four weeks of file review and interviews. The student affairs committee, which I joined when a colleague went on leave, took 17 hours. Coordinating the spring pinning ceremony, which I agreed to in the first week of the semester, took 29 hours. And citizenship, covering colleagues' clinical days, orienting a new part-time instructor and writing reference letters, took 27 hours.

The criteria my university applies when clinical-track faculty seek promotion give service credit for committee membership and leadership and for advising, but ask the candidate to show impact rather than hours. The pinning ceremony and most citizenship work do not appear in any category. Almost half of my service hours went to work that my promotion file has no place to record.

Advising Is Not Like the Rest

The five groups do not deserve equal weight. Advising is different from committee work because its effects fall directly on students. A systematic review of 37 empirical studies of undergraduate academic advising, including studies in nursing, described the components of advising schemes, the experiences and preferences of students and advisers, the benefits students gained and the barriers that kept them from seeking help (Chan et al., 2019). The barriers matter for my advisees. Several of the students I advise work long hours and commute, and two of the three who considered leaving did not contact me until they had already decided; I learned of their plans from a clinical instructor. My advising has been reactive: I meet students who ask and answer the questions they bring. The review's findings suggest that advising works best when it is more than course scheduling and when advisers reach out rather than wait. That points to changing how I advise, not doing less of it.

Who Carries the Service Load

The log also raised a question about fairness. In my department, the pinning ceremony has been coordinated by a new faculty member for five years running, and three of the four members of the student affairs committee are women in their first three years. Research on faculty service suggests this pattern is not unusual. Using national survey data and data from one institution, Guarino and Borden (2017) found that women faculty perform significantly more service than men, controlling for rank, race and ethnicity and field, and that the difference is driven by service inside the institution rather than external service. Nursing faculty are mostly women, so the gender gap matters less within a nursing department than across a university, but the same pattern may operate by rank and by track, with junior, non-tenure-track faculty asked to take on the internal work that others decline. Padilla (1994) described a related burden, which he called cultural taxation, when faculty from ethnic minority groups are asked to serve on committees or advise students because of their background, in addition to their other duties. Two colleagues from underrepresented groups in my department told me they are asked to serve on every diversity-related committee and search, which suggests the pattern exists here too.

The Case for Citizenship

It would be easy to conclude from the log that citizenship work should simply be cut, since it is uncounted. That would be a mistake. The 27 hours I spent covering clinical days, orienting a new part-time instructor and writing references were among the most useful I spent. When a colleague's child was hospitalized in October, my covering two of her clinical days meant that her students did not lose a week of intensive care experience before their examination. The part-time instructor I oriented, a staff nurse teaching her first clinical group, told me at the end of the semester that she would not have returned without that help, and the program is chronically short of clinical instructors. And reference letters are often the last thing a faculty member does for students and one of the most consequential for their first jobs. A department runs on this kind of reciprocity, and a faculty member who does none of it will soon find that no one covers for them either.

The problem is not that citizenship exists but that it is invisible and unevenly shared. Making it visible is within my control; I can record it in my annual review with a sentence on its effect, as I have done above. Sharing it more evenly is a department decision. The two together would let citizenship be valued without being quietly assigned to whoever says yes most readily, which, on my log, has usually been me.

Decisions

I will keep advising and change how I do it. At the start of each semester I will meet every advisee for twenty minutes, whether or not they request it, ask about work and family demands as well as courses, and contact any advisee whose midterm grades fall below the progression threshold within a week. I expect this to take about the same number of hours as reactive advising, spent earlier. I will keep the admissions committee, because it counts for promotion and because I value having a voice in which students we admit. I will leave the student affairs committee when my colleague returns from leave, as agreed. I will not coordinate the pinning ceremony again. Instead I will propose that it rotate among all faculty ranks, with a written guide I will prepare from this year's experience, so that the work is shared and documented. And I will keep a running record of citizenship work in my annual review, so that it is visible even when it is not counted.

For future requests, I will use one question: does this commitment serve students directly, or build something my promotion file can show? A request that does neither should be declined politely, however small it seems, because small requests are how service reached twice its share. I will also raise the distribution of service with my chair, using the log as evidence, and suggest that the department track committee and event assignments by rank and track each year.

References

Chan, Z. C. Y., Chan, H. Y., Chow, H. C. J., Choy, S. N., Ng, K. Y., Wong, K. Y., & Yu, P. K. (2019). Academic advising in undergraduate education: A systematic review. Nurse Education Today, 75, 58-74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2019.01.009

Guarino, C. M., & Borden, V. M. H. (2017). Faculty service loads and gender: Are women taking care of the academic family? Research in Higher Education, 58(6), 672-694. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-017-9454-2

Padilla, A. M. (1994). Ethnic minority scholars, research, and mentoring: Current and future issues. Educational Researcher, 23(4), 24-27. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X023004024