Examining Faculty Barriers and Challenges in Adopting Ethical Pedagogies in Online Environments

Our project examines the challenges and barriers that faculty experience during a major undergraduate curriculum shift at a US research university. As a part of the revised curriculum, faculty are required to include ethical reasoning and/or global awareness as a portion of their program. However, a majority of the faculty involved in the program were not primarily trained in ethics or global education. As a result, many faced institutional barriers and challenges when attempting to incorporate practices and pedagogies into their classroom. With the outbreak of COVID-19 in the past year, students and faculty have had to adapt to online teaching formats which present an additional set of difficulties for faculty in developing ethics and global education pedagogies. To better understand the barriers that faculty are facing, we conducted semi-structured interviews with around 20 faculty across the university. The interviews included discussions of the pedagogies faculty used within their newly designed courses, who faculty interacted with and how they gained the ethical and intercultural competencies, and the challenges faculty faced in redesigning the courses. Preliminary results have found that some of the more common challenges that faculty are facing is the lack of institutional guidance and resources, the lack of support from other faculty, and a lack of time to implement the required changes. Moving forward, we plan to expand this study to reinterview faculty as the program progress and faculty learn more about how to teach in online settings.