Leveraging Wisdom and Commitment to Inspire the Next Generation of Teacher Scholars

The higher education teaching force is aging. The median age of tenure-track faculty is 49, as compared to the median U.S. work force age of 42 (McChesney & Bichsel, 2020). Mendez (2019) suggests that retired faculty often possess wisdom grounded in lived experiences that can be beneficial to current or new faculty members. Mooney and Miller-Young (2021) discuss the benefits of a storying interview in exploring teaching experiences, suggesting that meaning can be co-created through shared exploration of a story. Limited research exists regarding the topic of learning from retiring or retired faculty in higher education. The purpose of this project is to create a short documentary comprised of interviews with retiring/retired faculty in higher education in order to provide current and new faculty with valuable insights.

This project followed the qualitative method, particularly narrative inquiry design which is inductive and constructive in nature and fits best for studying the identities of transformative educators (Guba & Lincoln, 2018; Schutz et al., 2018; Clandinin, 2007). Three faculty were recruited for the featured faculty group and 10 participants were recruited for the group that can speak to the faculty’s contributions. We used face-to-face qualitative in-depth interviews as the main instrumentation, as well as observations during the interview, documents and artefacts, and aesthetic portrayals with the participants’ narrations and comments. The interview questions were based on the McAdams' framework (2013) which includes the main chapters of the educators’ life and revolves around the dispositional traits (behavior, thought, and feeling in various situations over time), goals and values, and narrative identity (Coulter, Mallett & Singer, 2017). The expected results of this project include the emergence of rich narrative portrayals that highlight the professional identity formation of transformative educators in higher education.