MUN Faculty Association

Call Directions Website Contact the organization

MUN Faculty Association MUNFA is the labour union representing faculty, librarians, and counsellors at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Thanks for following along with me today! I hope this has given you a better sense of what teaching faculty do at Memori...
10/22/2026

Thanks for following along with me today! I hope this has given you a better sense of what teaching faculty do at Memorial, the role we play in our students’ education, and what it means to do that work on a contract without long-term job security.

Each day, I walk past posters in my building calling for stability for contract academic staff. Down the hall, the office of a long-serving colleague whose contract wasn't renewed now sits empty. It’s a disheartening sight, especially knowing that after this semester, my contract ends and my office will be empty, too.

The students will still be here, and the courses will still need to be taught. Students will still need support, feedback, and good teaching. The experience that teaching faculty bring to their courses and students can’t simply be replaced overnight. We are an important part of Memorial’s academic community, and our students deserve the resources and continuity they need to succeed. Our working conditions are the student's learning conditions, and if you'd like to see these conditions improved, make your voices heard!

Thanks again for spending the day with me, and for supporting fair employment at MUN.

Why do I give written quizzes to hundreds of students when online tests would be easier to mark? Because in chemistry, t...
10/22/2026

Why do I give written quizzes to hundreds of students when online tests would be easier to mark? Because in chemistry, the method matters.

Today I'm finalizing next Friday's CHEM 1050 and CHEM 1051 quizzes and sending them to Printing Services. Written quizzes let students show their thought process and demonstrate their understanding, rather than making every question an all-or-nothing exercise. They also make it harder to rely on AI-generated answers without understanding the chemistry. I want students to show how they approach a problem, earn credit for their reasoning, and get useful feedback when they go wrong. That takes more work to administer and mark (even with the help of our awesome Grad Student TAs!), so a good chunk of my Halloween weekend will be spent grading.

Having students packed shoulder to shoulder isn’t ideal for writing a quiz, either. It also makes it harder for me to get around and answer questions, especially if someone is stuck sitting in the middle of a row.

While I’m here, I also want to give a huge shout out to our General Office Staff as well as Printing Services. They’re always incredibly quick to facilitate the turnaround of hundreds of quizzes, even with multiple versions and different-coloured cover pages. There’s a lot of work behind the scenes to make these assessments happen, and I appreciate the people who help make it possible.

My teaching is done for the day, but first I’m stopping by the teaching lab, where the lab instructor will help with han...
10/22/2026

My teaching is done for the day, but first I’m stopping by the teaching lab, where the lab instructor will help with handing back the corrected first quiz. With classes this size, returning quizzes during lecture would be chaos, so the lab is the most practical way to get them into students’ hands.

This is a chance for me to give a shout out to our instructional lab staff and technicians. They’re essential to our students’ education, but they’ve felt the effects of cuts and workload pressures in recent years, too. Their work keeps our teaching labs running and gives students valuable hands-on experience.

Next up: student meetings! Rigid office hours may not work for everyone, so I keep an open door policy, but also use an online scheduler where students can book a time that suits them. With class sizes up, more students are competing for a fixed amount of time.

The Chemistry Help Centre is another key source of support, but its hours have been reduced. Before the pandemic, two separate centres (one for first-year students, one for higher-level courses) each ran Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. They were merged after the pandemic - and now this year the Help Centre's hours have been cut again, to just 17.5 per week.

With bigger classes and less support available, more students need help from teaching faculty directly. We want to help, but there are only so many hours in the day.

A bit of a breather, and then it's off to CHEM 2301! This is a second-year Physical Chemistry course that I taught for t...
10/22/2026

A bit of a breather, and then it's off to CHEM 2301! This is a second-year Physical Chemistry course that I taught for the first time last fall. It's a thermodynamics course, and today we're comparing the impacts of volume and temperature on internal energy - there's also an assignment due early next week.

One of the things I enjoy about teaching is finding ways to improve a course and the student experience. After teaching it, you start to see what works, what could be clearer, and what you'd like to try differently. I've got plenty of ideas for CHEM 2301, but with everything else on my plate, there's only so much I can do beyond minor tweaks. Finding the time to reflect, revise, and put those ideas into practice is one of the challenges of carrying such a full workload.

10/22/2026

I always tell my students that I grew up in rural NL and was educated right here at Memorial. I know what it’s like to walk into a university lecture hall and find yourself sitting in a room with as many students as an entire K–12 school. It took me a long time to adjust as a student, and I want these students to have a positive experience. I want students from communities like mine to feel that they belong here, too.

There’s always a steady stream of questions and conversations after class, which is great, but I don’t have much time for that this morning. I’m off to CHEM 1051 at 11:00, where we’re introducing acid–base theories. Luckily, my back-to-back classes are in the same building. Shout out to our Academic Program Officer, who anticipated the problem when putting together my schedule and lined up the classrooms!

Not every schedule works out that way. Back-to-back classes in different buildings can mean a sprint across campus. Scheduling details like these can make a real difference to how our teaching days go.

After a little prep and review time (and emails... oh the emails!), I'm off to CHEM 1050, our first-semester general che...
10/22/2026

After a little prep and review time (and emails... oh the emails!), I'm off to CHEM 1050, our first-semester general chemistry course. Today, we're talking about quantum numbers and orbitals. Too bad this takeover wasn't last week, when I had an ion flame test demo! But I do have some balloons with me to demonstrate orbital shapes.

Last fall, students had five timeslots to choose from for this course. This year, there are only three. I taught this same course in this same timeslot last year with 144 students. This year? 217. That's about 50% more students in a classroom that hasn't gotten any bigger.

I use an online response program to encourage interaction and get students involved. It also lets me track attendance, and there hasn't been a single class this semester with attendance below 80%. These are big classes, but they're full of students who want to be here, engage with the material, and learn chemistry. Making sure they have a good experience matters.

Time to get started!

Hi everyone! I’m Dr. Barry Power, and I’m taking over the MUNFA socials today for Fair Employment Week to give you a gli...
10/22/2026

Hi everyone! I’m Dr. Barry Power, and I’m taking over the MUNFA socials today for Fair Employment Week to give you a glimpse into my work as a Teaching Assistant Professor in Chemistry. When people hear “professor,” they often think “tenure.” Not always!

Those of us whose jobs are labelled as exclusively teaching related often do the heavy lifting in high-enrolment courses. Between myself and my teaching colleague in Chemistry, we’re responsible for every single one of the 944 students registered in first-year Chemistry courses this fall - up from 886 last year.

At the same time, these teaching positions at MUN are solely contractual, with no long-term job security. That leaves us particularly vulnerable when cuts come around. After 18 years working in Chemistry at Memorial, including 7 years (the last six uninterrupted) as a Teaching Assistant Professor, I’ve already been told that my contract won’t be renewed beyond this semester. The courses will still need to be taught, and that work will have to be absorbed by colleagues who are already stretched.

Follow along today as I take you through a day in the life of teaching faculty at MUN, and what our work looks like behind the scenes.

Thanks for allowing me to take over today! Before I sign off and tackle a bit more marking for the day, I want to leave ...
10/22/2026

Thanks for allowing me to take over today!

Before I sign off and tackle a bit more marking for the day, I want to leave you with a couple more thoughts.

Short term contracts result in structural barriers to doing research and being productive in the recognized ways necessary to be competitive for permanent faculty positions. Trying to plan and maintain longterm projects and programs of study while only having short term precarious employment is incredibly hard.

Contract faculty do the work of teaching, research, mentorship, and service that universities depend on. Fair employment means recognizing that work — and ensuring the people who do it have the stability, compensation, and support they need to keep doing it.

The invisible and unpaid labour outside of contracts is still labour. Just because work happens outside the classroom, outside office hours, or outside a formal workload calculation doesn't mean it isn't essential.

Thanks to all my colleagues who continue to advocate for fairness and job security!

One of the things I’ve learned as a contract academic is that even when you have incredible support, mentorship, and adv...
10/21/2026

One of the things I’ve learned as a contract academic is that even when you have incredible support, mentorship, and advocacy within your department (which I’m fortunate enough to have!), the uncertainty surrounding contract renewal can still take a real toll.

When you’re never entirely sure whether your contract will be renewed, it’s difficult not to feel that uncertainty hanging over everything you do. The possibility of not being renewed affects morale, creates anxiety about the future, and makes it harder to feel secure in a career you’ve worked hard to build. You can feel valued by your colleagues and students while still feeling uncertain about your place in the institution.

This isn’t a reflection of the people working to support us. It’s a reminder that individual departmental support, no matter how meaningful, cannot replace the employment security that precarious academic workers need and deserve.

Supporting contract academics is good for all members of faculty. When we advocate for greater stability, fair working conditions, and recognition of the work contract academics do, we strengthen our departments, our university, and the academic community as a whole.

Precariousness is something I think about and talk about a great deal. For me, it means a lot more than just not having ...
10/21/2026

Precariousness is something I think about and talk about a great deal. For me, it means a lot more than just not having a permanent position.

Being a precarious worker shapes my decision making, broadly. From parenting and having kids, to transportation and housing, to my decision to stay in this province, to health and wellbeing, precarity has impacted on my life in a multitude of ways. It fundamentally shapes how I plan my life. It adds unsteadiness to the most well developed plans.

Being a precarious academic shapes how I can and cannot imagine my future as a researcher and an educator. Living with a baseline of uncertainty is an extremely heavy load to carry alongside trying to build a career and contribute meaningfully to research and to my students.

Address

Memorial University
St. John's, NL
A1B3X5

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 4:30pm
Tuesday 9am - 4:30pm
Wednesday 9am - 4:30pm
Thursday 9am - 4:30pm
Friday 9am - 4:30pm

Telephone

+17098648642

Website

,

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when MUN Faculty Association posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to MUN Faculty Association:

Shortcuts

Share

Category