WKU News

WKU English is proud to showcase Dr. Dawn Winters who has had a co-authored article: “Strengthening Faculty Retention and Belonging: Applying and Expanding Job Embeddedness Theory through an Onboarding Initiative in Higher Education.” The article was published in the journal Educational Renaissance.

Dr. Winters has been at the university since she started back in 2002 as a student majoring in what is now Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Dr. Winters has a long history within academia. After undergraduate school she continued her education with a master’s degree in literature and then a doctorate of Educational Leadership with WKU. Once part of the faculty at WKU, she decided to take advantage of the opportunity to further her education again and earned a criminology degree for fun.

One of Dr. Winters main interests of study is student retention. Her study in this subject is not about recruiting students but finding what it is that makes them feel like they’ve found a home and somewhere they want to stay. In her article she shifts her focus of retention from students to professors, but the connection between the two is still evident.

Dr. Winters explained some of the strong links between faculty retention and student success. She talks about something she calls ‘leakage’, which is when a professor’s negative or uncomfortable emotions are strong enough to leak into the students of their classroom. Students can feel when professors are and are not giving it their all.

“If you have somebody who is excited to come to WKU, like to campus every day, and they feel comfortable and confident in their job, then definitely the students are going to feel that,” Dr. Winters explained.

Creating safe environments for faculty to ask questions and have good foundational knowledge is imperative to a strong classroom and retention for professors. Dr. Winters believes WKU and specifically the English Department did a beautiful job of creating a safe space and community.

“The people who work for the English department are very warm and inviting,” Dr. Winters shared.

She said the English Department does a great job of making people feel at home. The onboarding process was good at keeping newly hired professors engaged and involved

with each other as well as the university. The community built within the English Department fosters a place for new professors to plant roots and make WKU their home.

The research in the article talks about sacrifice in terms of what would be lost if a professor decided not to stay with the institution they are hired to. When asked about what Dr. Winters would be sacrificing if she left WKU, her answer was home.

“I’ve been here for so long,” Dr. Winters said. “The campus is my home, you know in a lot of ways, and I kind of came into adulthood on campus.”

Dr. Winters shared that she knows at least one person in every department. She said that departing from WKU would be a sort of home-leaving from a place where she’s built many relationships with friends and colleagues. The English Department is happy to highlight Dr. Winter’s research and continue to create a strong community here at WKU.