I’m starting a side project where I’m conducting short interviews with games professionals who also teach as adjunct faculty, in order to hear about people’s different experiences and learn from their work. I’ll be publishing those interviews here.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about adjuncting since I started doing work for my union, ACT-UAW 7902, which represents adjunct faculty at the New School and NYU (and TNS student workers). It’s a pretty amazing professional community to be apart of because of its diversity. What we all have in common is sufficient professional expertise to teach at the university level, but who don’t do so as fulltime academics. So our committees are staffed by playwrights, musicians, artists, lawyers, psychologists, nurses, writers and even the occasional game designer.
I get so impressed thinking about the work my colleagues do, both as educators and professionals, but I think that work is often overlooked.
Higher education has been undergoing a process of “adjunctification” over the past few decades, where fulltime positions are replaced with precarious part-time positions. While it’s a complex issue (and I recommend reading more about the details), on the whole… it’s bad. At a systemic level, the practice of relying on precarious contract labor is something to resist and dismantle. But for an individual worker, not everyone’s experience adjuncting is a bad one, and there are benefits to part-time work as well.
The couple of times that I’ve spoken at the GDC Educator’s Summit, I’ve mentioned that I’m an adjunct professor, that I teach part-time. And I’ve been surprised to have conversations with people afterwards who didn’t realize you could teach part-time, let alone how to go about it. That surprised me at first, but it makes sense. Most all the information out there about working in academia is focused on working as a fulltime professor. But those positions are so different as to be virtually an entirely different field. There isn’t a lot of information about adjunct faculty, or for them, so anyone who does it is often starting from scratch on their own.
So I thought someone ought to put together some information on adjuncting, how and why to do it, at least within the narrow field of game development and game design. That’s something I can speak to from my own experience, and I’ve been teaching a fair number of years now, but that doesn’t scratch the surface of the breadth of different experiences people have had. So I’ve started interviewing games adjunct professors, and asking them about how they got started, what they like about part-time teaching, and what advice they have for anyone starting out.
This is a bit outside my wheelhouse (I’m not a journalist, and I recognize the expertise that I lack- Conducting an interview is hard!), but I’m hoping putting these together can provide something useful.