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CIRTL Researcher Spotlight

Carol Colbeck

CIRTL “sounded like it was written with my name all over it,” said Carol Colbeck, Director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at The Pennsylvania State University and co-Principal Investigator for CIRTL.

Colbeck takes a compassionate and socially conscious approach to her study of faculty work environments and their effect on student learning. She brings insights from her previous work with non-profit organizations to her research on the pressures faced by faculty.

One of these insights, Colbeck said, is that faculty are sometimes blamed for “all of the ills in higher education” while the educational system continues to require that they focus on research much more than on teaching. Colbeck said she saw a parallel between these ambivalent messages and the way that some public service agencies treat parents who have problems.

Colbeck takes a global approach to looking at factors that influence the quality of faculty work and teaching. Her research follows the whole life cycle of education; from policy and climate to faculty work, and then to student learning.

Colbeck is currently conducting a study on Teaching-as-Research together with graduate student Meghan Pifer. Colbeck also studies how faculty achieve balance between research, teaching, community service and personal life, given the many demands on their time. “We're all whole people,” Colbeck said.

One of Colbeck's early research projects involved “shadowing” faculty members as a sociological observer and recording how they spent their time. She found that the faculty spent 19% of their time, on average, conducting teaching and research simultaneously. Faculty develop new research ideas as they work with students in science labs, as well as in humanities classrooms.

“Another thread throughout my faculty career has been an interest in underrepresented groups,” Colbeck said. She and graduate student Stephen Quaye are currently conducting a study of the Learning-through-Diversity aspect of CIRTL. Colbeck has also coauthored studies on women in engineering with professor Alberto Cabrera of the University of Maryland .

Colbeck's work with the project has given her ideas that may lead to international research collaborations focusing on the doctoral preparation of ethnic minorities, immigrants, and indigenous peoples.

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