Faculty Workload

June 2, 2023

Our Know Your Rights segments highlight different aspects that impact your employment at Carleton University, including highlights from the Collective Agreement in small, easy to understand bits.

In previous segments, we covered Tenure, Confirmation, and Promotion; Academic Freedom; Intellectual Property; and outlined what the union can do for you. This update, we’ll be focusing on workload. The Collective Agreement has a number of provisions regarding the workload of CUASA members: faculty, librarians, and instructors alike (Articles 13.2, 13.3, and 13.4 respectively). While it would be difficult to go over each particular detail here, over the next few weeks we’ll share some of the main highlights to keep in mind. We’ll be breaking it up by category, so this week will focus on faculty, and subsequent communications will outline workload information for instructors and librarians. Each member is encouraged to read the workload articles that pertain to them thoroughly.

Faculty:

Article 13.2(b) discusses the fact that faculty members should be notified and consulted when assigned their teaching duties. Full text as follows:

“Subject to approval by the appropriate Dean, the appropriate Chair/Director or equivalent shall, with due notice and consultation, assign teaching duties to individual faculty members in accordance with the provisions of Article 24 of the Collective Agreement in the light of the individual’s discipline, abilities and specialties, and consistent with the normal teaching load of the faculty and department in question.”

Article 13.2(f) outlines the factors which should be taken into consideration when Chairs/Directors assign workload:

“The Chair/Director shall give consideration to the factors affecting faculty teaching workload which include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:

(i) the number of separate courses taught by each faculty employee;
(ii) the number of scheduled contact hours per course;
(iii) the number of hours of preparation, grading, and administration per course;
(iv) the number of students enrolled, on average, per course;
(v) the number of hours of student counselling per course;
(vi) the level (introductory, upper year, graduate, etc.) of each course;
(vii) the type (lecture, seminar, etc.) of each course;
(viii) assistance of graduate students or colleagues in the teaching of courses;
(ix) additional hours of preparation required for a new course;
(x) the relation of thesis and special project supervision to classroom teaching;
(xi) the relation of the individual faculty employee’s teaching responsibilities to their research and scholarship;
(xii) comparison of faculty workload at Carleton with that of other universities in Ontario;
(xiii) the relationship between workload policy and other aspects of long-range academic planning;
(xiv) whether the course is filmed or videotaped;
(xv) the deployment and supervision of teaching assistants;
(xvi) the number of undergraduate theses supervised;
(xvii) the number of directed studies and tutorials offered;
(xviii) the number of graduate students supervised.”

The biggest takeaway here is that workload allocation should be done through a series of open conversations with your Chair/Director, and that you have a voice in decisions that impact your workload.

Please write to [email protected] if you have further questions or would like to request a topic for an upcoming segment.