Ufast – Practical Advice For Accelerating New Faculty Scholarship

The issue of accelerating faculty scholarship is a key item especially for new/untenured faculty. New faculty future career success depends on developing scholarship productivity quickly. Previous research has shown how mentoring new faculty at the early stages of their career has had significant impact on new faculty success. Mentorship is especially important at institutions that have an increasing demand for faculty scholarship. The new untenured faculty must also learn and balance teaching and service responsibilities. In addition to essential mentoring of untenured faculty by senior faculty, untenured faculty can also benefit from peer mentoring by other untenured faculty. This paper reviews practical advice for creating a collaborative, untenured faculty peer scholarship team, in our case called Untenured Faculty Accelerated Scholarship Team (UFAST). In this paper, the authors will discuss what drove the need to form UFAST and the practical advice which has been developed by the UFAST team. This paper will also provide an account of individual experiences in developing scholarship agendas as new faculty. The authors conclude with the advice that operating as a collegial and collaborative scholarship team, especially one whose members’ existence depends on the team’s success, allows the untenured faculty members to quickly share, support, and achieve individual scholarship success.