Award Date

1-1-2007

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Leadership

First Committee Member

Mimi Wolverton

Number of Pages

161

Abstract

Occupations for women in the academy have been changing over the last century. Contemporary studies that have looked at women faculty work have been mixed in their findings about the relationship between gender and job satisfaction. Few studies have focused on two-year-college models of women's experiences as faculty; Set in the context of occupational science theories, this qualitative study explored the daily work of women faculty in one community college. The concept of faculty work was viewed through Kielhofner's Model of Human Occupation, which suggests that occupations are made up of three subsystems of human action or doing: volition, habituation, and performance. Volition is an individual's intrinsic drive to act on the world and experience a sense of cause and effect with others. Habituation is behavior that is routine for individuals and includes the roles they play at home and in the workplace. Performance is the actual motor and cognitive skills individuals need to perform; Six full-time women faculty from the Community College of Southern Nevada were observed and interviewed in-depth over the course of one academic semester using ethnographic data collection techniques. Five of the women represented diverse academic divisions within CCSN, and the sixth participant was a full-time distance educator. The data were analyzed using content and domain analyses. The report of the study is written in narrative form from the perspective of the Model of Human Occupation that is inclusive of faculty role-type behavior; The results indicate that the women faculty valued the act of teaching above all other academic activities and purposefully chose not to engage in leadership activities other than at the departmental level. The women made choices that were shaped predominantly by the volitional aspects of teaching students, rather than attaching meaning to their own habits, routines, and actual performance skills that would set them apart from other faculty. For these women, the community college environment and culture, including the physical resources and perceptions of supervisory support, favor the act of teaching only; It is this researcher's recommendation that community college administrators view the recruitment of women faculty as a qualitative process. By focusing on women's motivations, habits, and performances during the hiring process, administrators should be able to retain more women faculty who succeed in the broader community college environment.

Keywords

College; Community; Community Colleges; Examining; Experiences; Faculty; Human; Model; Model Of Human Occupation; Occupation; Occupational Science; Perspective; Qualitative; Women; Women Faculty

Controlled Subject

Education, Higher; Community colleges; Women's studies

File Format

pdf

File Size

4577.28 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

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Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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