Abstract:
All over the world, there are growing concerns about the significant impact played by faculty members
in their quest to actively involve their students in the teaching and learning process coupled with
administrative processes. Relating to universities in Ghana and in most of the world’s universities, the
major criteria for faculty promotion are the quantity and quality of research papers in reputable
journals. This has triggered the popular dictum “publish or perish”. Therefore, most faculty members,
desirous not to perish (stagnate in their career) and in their quest to be elevated higher on the academic
ladder, spend substantial amount of their time working on their research interests to the neglect of
integrating these researches into their teaching and administrative practices. This has been attributed
to several confounding factors of which this study seeks to unearth. Using the sequential explanatory
research design of the mixed methods, the study sought to espouse the determinants of faculty’s ability
to effectively integrate research into teaching and administrative practices for purposes of
corroboration and expansion. By adopting the census method, all 162 Business Education faculty
members were engaged from the public universities in Ghana that offered Business Education.
Questionnaires and interview protocols were used for data collection. The questionnaires were
validated through the conduct of Principal Component Analysis (PCA). It was, therefore, concluded
that the determinants of the research-teaching nexus are more curriculum-related. Thus, the nexus
highly affects the curriculum more than any other aspect of university processes and administrative practices. Nevertheless, it is worthy of note to acknowledge that it does not mean that any research active faculty member would automatically integrate their research experience into teaching and
administrative practices because such activities require conscious, intentional and intensive efforts. It
emanated from the study that the determinants of the research-teaching integration include research
productivity stimulation factor, empirically-based teaching factor, research active curriculum factor,
time-oriented factor, and responsive curriculum factors. Responsive curriculum is the dominant factor
among all the factors affecting the compatibility between research and teaching. It is therefore
recommended that universities should draft discipline-specific research-teaching nexus policy
documents to cater for subject-specific differences in terms of implementing the nexus. Faculty
members should also be sensitised on how to balance their limited time between research and teaching
in order to optimise the benefits associated with the research-teaching-administrative nexus to inform
both their teaching and administrative practices.
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Keywords:
Research-teaching-administrative nexus, faculty members, business education,
responsive curriculum, research productivity, empirically-based teaching |
