Professors will take on the role of students during a 12-week faculty course geared toward helping early-career faculty members with writing and submitting articles for publication.

Faculty Development and the School of Continuing Education collaborated to form the course, which will occur on Tuesdays from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the Blair Hall Seminar Room 2116.

Gene Deerman, an assistant professor of sociology, will teach the faculty course titled “Supporting Scholarly Writing.”

Deerman said one reason she was motivated to teach the course was when she discovered a national study that stated 85 percent of published faculty research is submitted by 15 percent of university professors.

“Another important reason is that faculty at Eastern have heavy teaching loads and it can be difficult to balance all of their demands and then be productive in publishing their research, especially for early-career faculty,” Deerman said. “It is very important for faculty, especially at that early stage, to know they have outlets of support.”

Faculty members must register for a place in the course, and those interested can contact the Faculty Development Office at 581-7051.

William Hine, dean of the School of Continuing Education, said they made a joint effort with Faculty Development to secure a location and to finance the course.

“We thought this would be a great initiative to support obtaining writing skills and other research practices for faculty to develop proposals and articles that could be published,” Hine said. “This will also generate an opportunity for newer faculty to interact with one another and share their goals.”

Deerman said each faculty participant will receive a workbook titled “Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success” by Wendy Belcher, a literature professor at Princeton University.

“I think a big gain of this course will be to demystify research publication to faculty members, and it is my hope that faculty will have revised research papers and will be ready to publish them,” Deerman said. “I have used the workbook twice and it helped me to produce two journal articles.”

Hine said the course is at no cost to faculty and Faculty Development and the School of Continuing Education subsidized the expenses.

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].