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           Jocelyn Jones Evans, University of West Florida
           Clodagh Harris, University College Cork, Ireland
           Christine Marie Sierra, University of New Mexico

Graduate education is the starting point for professional careers in political science; hence, what occurs in graduate education affects both the scholarly advancement and professional development of faculty.  The TLC did well to combine these two topics in one track.  The track presentations were complementary, and the resulting discussion was highly productive.

Graduate Education and Professional Development: A Critical Linkage
There is a symbiotic relationship between graduate education and professional development.  They are intertwined dimensions of political science as a discipline and as a career.  Programs could do more to prepare faculty to face issues concerning academic integrity, promotion and tenure, student and faculty mentoring, and opportunities for publication. 

Learning Norms and Meeting Expectations
Track participants agreed that the discipline needs to devote more attention to transmitting professional norms and expectations – a key to faculty career advancement.  Formal, targeted mentoring is an effective means for conveying these norms and can open significant pathways of professional teaching and research development (McCormick et al.  2009).  Successful programs require institutional recognition of the benefits of mentorship and resource support.

Participants highlighted the critical role of “champions” in successful professional development and teaching programs.  Individual faculty members (such as department chairs) committed to working on institutional design, implementing key components, and championing the professional value of mentorship programs are also fundamental to program success.  A major consideration for new graduate programs concerns the balance between flexibility in meeting unique student needs and dedication to maintaining academic rigor.  The new PhD program at the University of South Dakota, for example, which is structured for practitioners and provides a three-fold specialization in public administration, public policy, and American political institutions (Nordyke and Anderson 2009) is mindful of this important balance.  

The track also focused on the importance of academic norms of conduct both inside and outside of the classroom.  Graduate programs should socialize future faculty into the profession, exposing doctoral students to disciplinary norms and clarifying institutional procedures and pathways for meeting expectations for career advancement.  Our sessions included discussions of academic integrity, tenure and promotion, mentorship, and publication.

In terms of academic integrity, plagiarism is a central challenge to academic integrity and must figure prominently for student and faculty development (Roberts 2009).  Professional development also includes socializing faculty to the expectations and procedures of the tenure and promotion process.    While junior faculty need formalized and systematic attention to meet expectations for tenure and promotion, senior faculty may also benefit from active mentorship to enhance their career trajectories, such as moving from the associate to full professor ranks. 

Institutional support for formalized programs and workshops provide a valuable opportunity to learn best practices and prepare for an evolving and competitive job market.  Unfortunately, such institutional opportunities are rare.  They should be much more widespread and available across various types of colleges and universities.  In addition, these development opportunities should be geared to meeting the distinct needs of the student communities they serve.  The program at Baylor, for example, uses an apprenticeship model, pairing advanced graduate students with teaching faculty in course development.  At Miami University, graduate students participate in the College Professor Training Program as a prerequisite for teaching an independent course – a crucial component of graduate education geared to fulfil the department’s mission to train teachers (Ishiyama et al. 2009). 

Finally, professional development includes learning the norms and expectations for publication.  Programs to promote faculty development should identify various opportunities for publication, including the scholarship on teaching and learning (SoTL).  The increase in SoTL publications has developed “from the bottom up.”  That is, junior cohorts are showing increased interest in conducting and publishing SoTL research (Hamann, Pollock, and Wilson 2009).  Nevertheless, there is a glaring paucity in scholarship devoted to graduate education.  APSA and the discipline should recognize SoTL as a distinct field, signal its importance to academic departments and institutions, and encourage more scholarship specifically dedicated to graduate education and professional development.

Looking to the Future
Additional meetings of this track should consider issues related to the appropriate design of graduate education programs.  They could address proper mechanisms for effective graduate student assessment, promotion of service learning in postgraduate studies (Harris 2009), and changing needs and demographics of students pursuing graduate education in political science. Finally, issues of graduate education and professional development should remain central to discussions of political science teaching and learning and should be more thoroughly investigated in our scholarship.

References

Hamann, Kerstin, Pollock, Philip H., and Bruce M. Wilson. 2009.  “Publishing SoTL in Political Science: Issues of Professional Development.”

Harris, Clodagh. 2009.  Teaching and Learning Active Citizenship – An Investigation of Service Learning in the Postgraduate Classroom.” 

Ishiyama, John, Miles, Tom, and Christine Balarezo. 2009.  “Training the Next Generation of Teaching Professors.” 

McCormick, Joseph P., Avalos, Manuel, Miller Cheryl M., and Dianne M. Pinderhughes. 2009.  “The Promotion and Tenure Process as an Exercise in Strategic Thinking.”

Nordyke, Shane and William D. Anderson.  2009.  “A Non-traditional PhD Program in a Traditional World:  A Story of Blended Strategies and Students.”
 
Roberts, Darryl. 2009.  “Scientific Fraud:  Plagiarism as a Challenge to Institutional Assessment in Political Science.”