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[clark]

Another adjunct and I have been sketching out a course that we'd like to team teach.  One significant question looms, however: how much will we be paid?  We are each from different departments, and we will each have to do a lot of prep work, so we each deserve full pay.  But, because we are adjuncts, could we only expect to be paid one-half of what we would normally be paid per course?  If so, then we'd have to drop the idea.   

[johnr]

You should be asking the department chairs at your specific university since the answer most likely varies from place to place.  Here, if you want to co-teach, then you must split the salary, unless it's in the summer, in which case each class is self supporting, so if you can enroll enough students to pay for both of your full salaries then you both will be paid your full salary.  Is that confusing enough?

[msparticularity]

The bigger barrier, in my opinion, is in getting the course approved at all. Generally speaking, courses created by any non-tenured faculty--let alone adjuncts--get no consideration by departments since they tend to be seen as not addressing the core mission and needs of the department(s) in question (at least in the estimation of the Powers That Be).

Do you have any indication that either of your departments has any interest in this course?

[voxprincipalis]

We are each from different departments, and we will each have to do a lot of prep work, so we each deserve full pay.  But, because we are adjuncts, could we only expect to be paid one-half of what we would normally be paid per course?  If so, then we'd have to drop the idea.  

This is usually the case even if you are not an adjunct -- which is why so many people are interested in team-teaching and so few actually do it. If you share a course with someone, you each do a full course's worth of work but only get half the credit. So, doing a team-taught course is in essence agreeing to an overload. Sometimes I'm willing to do that if the course is fantastically interesting or important to me, but other times the bureaucratic hurdles are so tiresome and discouraging that it isn't worth it. Which is sad, really, as team-taught courses can be really great, but the system usually works against their creation or implementation. (Of course, they can also be awful, but that's more a consequence of the individual teachers rather than the idea or structure.)

VP

[seniorscholar]

This is usually the case even if you are not an adjunct -- which is why so many people are interested in team-teaching and so few actually do it. If you share a course with someone, you each do a full course's worth of work but only get half the credit.

We can do it here and both get full pay if we double the class size.

For a graduate course, when we discovered that grad classes can not be cross-listed (and the two of us came not only from different departments but from different schools within the university), we successfully managed for several years to each teach a course in our own graduate program . . . both just happened to meet at the same hour, so after the first meeting they could be combined in the same room. This worked only because graduate classes in one of the departments are always in late afternoon / early evening (so finding an available classroom was no problem, and no official person needed to know about it). We wouldn't have tried, though, had we not both been tenured full profs.

And I would suspect that an adjunct at most places would have trouble proposing and getting approval for a new course, let alone getting approval for and paid full salary for a team-taught course.

[undisciplined]

Have you ever team-taught a course? I have and I would not do it again by choice. YMMV. But if you are looking for intellectual collaboration, go write an article together.

[arty_]

The error here is in developing this course without buy-in from your administrators upfront. 

It's BEFORE you develop your course that you get important answers to your question about money!

The comment about non-tenure track faculty developing courses is spot on.  Our department lacks the money to cover our curriculum without adjunct help. Anything I develop (I'm TT), team teaching or not, must be taught as an overload (i.e. UNPAID) : there is no room in our particular curriculum for anything at this time.  We have stacked classes as it is.

Best of luck!!!