Part-time instructors bring extensive practical experience into the classroom. Pictured are Marlene Bonneau (religion) Ashley Miller (studio arts), David Moscovitz (marketing) and Chellaiyah Rajalingham (mechanical engineering).
We all know the old joke, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t,
teach.” But what about those who do and teach? They can bring the best of both worlds to the
classroom. Part-time instructors — teachers hired on a course-by-course basis and not on the
“tenure track” — bring to their students “real world” experience as
musicians, journalists, chartered accountants, engineers and a myriad of other professions.
Despite these assets, Maria Peluso, GrDip 81, MA 87, relates that the value of part-timers is not always
appreciated. “There are a lot of myths attached to part-time faculty,” she says.
“There’s the idea that someone who is working part-time is only half as good. There’s
also a myth that we’re not available for students to consult with.” Yet she contends part-time
instructors are an invaluable component of the university community. “We are committed to Concordia;
we want it to do well. We love this university.”
Peluso has taught political science part-time at Concordia for 24 years and is president of the Concordia
University Part-time Faculty Association (CUPFA), whose 900 members teach close to half of the
university’s undergraduate courses. Her impressive résumé includes extensive work in human
rights and social justice, women’s equality and employment equity, interracial and intercultural
relations, consumer advocacy and community heritage projects. Peluso has even dabbled in politics, as a
one-time candidate for the NDP in 1988 and a founding member of the Democratic Coalition of Montreal.
So she’s as well suited as anyone to teach political science, or to champion the underdog.
The necessary balance
Maria Peluso, president of the Concordia University Part-time Faculty Association, was awarded the Prix Simonne Monet-Chartrand by the Montreal Women’s Centre in 1998 for her social activism. Part-time instructors have a strong commitment to Concordia, she says, as demonstrated by the creation of the Concordia Part-Time Endowment Award.
Prejudices against part-time instructors remain pervasive.
For example, Maclean’s magazine’s annual ranking
of universities evaluates undergraduate programs in part by the number
of tenured and tenuretrack professors and faculty with PhDs. A 2003
report by Research Infosource, “Canada’s Top Research
Universities,” also put a heavy emphasis on the number of full-time
faculty. But Peluso counters, “Thirty per cent of our members
have PhDs or are otherwise as qualified as full-time faculty. It is
a myth that we don’t do research, for example.”
The implication is that courses taught by untenured or part-time instructors
are somehow sub-optimal. But that’s clearly not the interpretation
of Christopher Jackson, dean of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine
Arts. “We have 3,000 students and 106 full-time professors in
Fine Arts, so we have a lot of part-time faculty. We rely on them
to teach more than half our courses. Many are more productive as artists
than a lot of those who work full-time in academia,” he says.
He notes that Françoise Sullivan, of the “refus global”
movement in the ’50s and ’60s, teaches drawing and painting
part-time in the faculty. Sullivan was named a member of the Order
of Canada in 2001 and was just awarded the Governor General’s
Award in Visual and Media Arts. “Concordia is very lucky to
have so many practicing artists working with our students, and our
students are fortunate to benefit from their attention.”
Jackson points out that many instructors in his faculty have chosen
not to work fulltime as academics because they want to devote as much
of themselves as possible to their art. “Professors must sit
on academic committees, coordinate their areas, develop curriculum,
and live under strong pressure to write grant proposals,” he
notes. All this takes time, and it’s not only artists who would
rather use this precious resource differently.
Part-timers nurture excellence because they are distinctly close to
the knowledge base. Peluso states, “It is of great value to
our students to be taught by real journalists in the journalism department,
performing musicians in the music department, or practicing accountants;
the same goes for engineering or political science. We provide the
necessary balance between the world of practical application and the
pedagogical one.” She adds, “Before becoming premier,
Jean Charest taught our students environmental policy here. Imagine
the effect of having someone like that teaching our students.”
(Charest was Canada’s Minister of the Environment from 1991
to 1993.)
Beyond the call
Peluso feels part-time faculty also provide great value from a bean-counting point of
view, since they are paid less than full-time professors. However, she points out that other Quebec
universities have higher salary scales for part-time instructors. Her association is in negotiations to
renew their collective agreement with the university; the prorating of benefits like sabbatical leave is
one of the subjects under discussion.
The added value Concordia’s part-time instructors bring to the university sometimes extends beyond
the call of duty. Their dedication to the success of the university and its students was made clear most
recently with the creation of the Concordia Part-Time Endowment Award. CUPFA members pledged $40,000 to
kick off the annual Concordia Community Campaign fundraiser, an amount matched by the university’s
Office of the Vice-President, External Relations and Secretary General. The award will provide $2,000 a
year for two years for an undergraduate, or $1,000 a year for two years for a part-time student. It will
be available based on financial need to students who demonstrate solid achievement and a strong commitment
to community work.
In other words, to students who emulate their part-time professors.
Concordia’s 900 part-time faculty members each bring their
own brand of experience to their students. But what they share, as seen
in these profiles of part-time instructors from each faculty, is a certain
expertise and commitment.
Marlene Bonneau
Department of Religion, Faculty of Arts and Science
A home-grown Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Marlene Bonneau, MA 96, PhD (rel.) 03, works to ease death in hospital for patients “from neonatal intensive care to palliative care.” Rites of passage were the subject of her PhD dissertation.
Bonneau, who’s been a part-time instructor at Concordia since 1997, says, “Working in the community is the most enriching part of what I do. It allows me to focus on what I teach, and to provide the kind of learning and experience that is unique to Concordia.” As a full-time academic, she is sure she could never accomplish as much.
An intern chaplain at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Bonneau also served as a funeral celebrant at an AIDS hospice and counselled families dealing with suicide or the loss of a child. Her own rich background — Jewish, Catholic, Montagnais and Iroquois — parallels her special interest in burial practices among Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim communities. She also has a keen interest in South and Southeast Asian cultures. “Ritual becomes much more real in the classroom because I can bring in my actual experiences of death and dying in living cultures and religions,” says Bonneau.
Most of the students in her course Death and Dying come from outside her department. Some enrol because of personal experience with recent or approaching loss. “This gives me the opportunity, if I am the good listener/teacher I should be, to pick up cues and approach them, based on what they hand in,” she says.
Bonneau is also a practitioner of what she preaches: loving relationships, spiritual direction and solitary reflection form her basic prescription for balance, in living as well as dying. To balance the demands in her life, she recharges through solitude, guided contemplation and the creative arts.
Ashley Miller
Department of Studio Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts
Describing herself as “a sculptor who crosses over various
media,” Ashley Miller’s art these days explores how objects
carry memories. Her latest piece, a quilt titled In order to remember,
was originally a rug inherited from her grandmother, which Miller
deconstructed and recreated as a display, with a running text about
her grandparents.
“I was investigating the different ways in which we remember,”
Miller says. “We can consciously call up a memory or it can
visit us suddenly, perhaps via objects that belonged to someone who
was important to us. The focus of my work over the last 10 years has
become one generation to another, how we live on in others, what we
are passing on to the world.”
Having twin daughters nine years ago changed the focus of Miller’s
art. Where it was once directed outward, about nature, “now
I find myself looking inward more, toward family,” she says.
With an MFA from Louisiana State University, Miller has taught papermaking
at Concordia for 19 years. She also works at a CEGEP, where “it
is more about teaching students how to learn, including honing their
time-management skills.” Teaching at the university level is
gratifying because students are more “decided,” she says.
“You can have wonderfully rewarding conversations with them.
It really is more like mentoring than teaching. You don’t have
to ‘lead them to water’; they’re already there.”
David Moscovitz
Department of Marketing, John Molson School of Business
“When I registered as an undergrad, I was
forced to choose my major immediately,” says David Moscovitz,
MBA 84, who has been teaching in the JMSB marketing department for
21 years. “I chose biology, for no real reason, and I was miserable.
Things didn’t improve until one of my professors took me under
his wing and taught me how to learn. He instilled something in me
no one else did. If I can do the same for my own students, mentor
them, I would be accomplishing my goal,” Moscovitz says. Teaching
a full course load, he has covered advertising, introduction to marketing,
retailing, consumer behaviour and product management. Moscovitz pauses
to do the math, and smiles broadly as he says he’s taught nearly
6,000 students over the years.
“Part-timers complement full-time faculty. Many of us have industry
and business experience that an academic doesn’t have,”
he says. After completing a BSc from McGill in 1979, Moscovitz obtained
an MBA from Concordia in 1984. One month later, he was invited back,
this time to teach. “In 1981, I had a family business in men’s
sportswear. Being in business myself made my teaching better. Being
in class was like doing market research; it made my business better,”
he says.
Nominated six times for distinguished teaching awards, Moscovitz is
delighted when former students working at companies like Pfizer or
the TD Bank keep in touch. “It can take a long time to figure
out what you want to do in life,” he says. “I think Concordia’s
mission is to inspire this motivation. The JMSB is very application-oriented;
students do research in companies, they network from the start. We
are proud of the high quality of education here.”
Chellaiyah Rajalingham
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Computer
Science
“Part-time job postings normally require a master’s
degree with necessary experiencein the field. In engineering, most
part-timers have a PhD in addition to research experience,”
says Chellaiyah Rajalingham, himself a PhD recipient.
Born and educated in Sri Lanka, Rajalingham’s parents were teachers,
too. He came to Canada in 1989 as a post-doctoral fellow in Concordia’s
department of mechanical engineering. He has been working as an instructor
and researcher in the department ever since.
Rajalingham takes his membership in CUPFA to heart, sitting as its
representative on the mechanical engineering’s departmental
council and serving on the hiring committee, where he participated
in the selection of three department heads.
With 65 first-author academic publications in refereed journals, Rajalingham
is proof that part-timers can be as committed to top-level research
and activities as their full-time colleagues. His research explores
aspects of dynamics, acoustics and vibration, and his specialties
are tribology, rheology and rotor-dynamic, branches of engineering
that deal with interacting surfaces in motion (gears are an obvious
example). The great evaluations from his students reflect his talent
at explaining these complex mechanisms. Rajalingham says he hopes
to parlay his teaching and research experience into a textbook, which
would allow him to make “a great contribution to the university.”
In fact, like all part-time instructors at Concordia, he already does.
Beverly Akerman is a Montreal freelance writer.
If you have any comments about this article, contact
Howard Bokser, (514) 848-2424 ext. 3826, Howard.Bokser@concordia.ca
