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1.
ABSTRACT

How should academic staff engage in outreach with communities outside of the university? The need of academics to answer this question has intensified in the UK given the changing priorities of academic job roles, shaped by increasing institutional concern for widening participation, graduate employability and research impact in an era of austerity and high tuition fees. While university outreach professionals, such as those in widening participation, have access to a range of networks, resources and support mechanisms for outreach activity, academics often face a series of profession-specific pressures that make engagement in outreach complex and contingent. This article draws upon the experience of 25 academics from 18 different subject areas and 18 institutions to examine and provide responses to key challenges faced by academics involved in outreach in the UK. We examine such issues as: the conceptualisation of outreach; funding; recognition and management of workload; nurturing relationships with internal and external partners; capacity-building; commercial interests, payment and responsibility; pedagogical style and content; integration of outreach into curricula, and evaluation of programmes. The examination offered is not all encompassing, but acts as a series of reference points to consider the challenges faced by UK academics in an evolving outreach sector.  相似文献   

2.
《Africa Education Review》2013,10(4):664-679
ABSTRACT

The considerable transformation of higher education (HE), driven by the South African government's demand for accountability of resources for the attainment of its mandate has altered the ‘business’ of academia. In response to the financial austerity measures, performance management (PM) systems have been implemented in South African HE to monitor and enhance staff performance. This article conceptualizes PM in higher education using agency and stewardship theories. Data emanates from a phenomenological study of academic heads of department's (HOD) experiences of PM. There is evidence that agency theory may be an appropriate mechanism to achieve explicit accountability, and to monitor and enhance performance. However, it is fraught with problems within academic contexts. The findings demonstrate limitations of agency theory with regard to the stewardship of academics. Thus foregrounding the need for the retention of approaches underpinned by stewardship theory. This article thus makes a contribution in terms of providing a proposition for an analytical framework that integrates agency and stewardship theories in researching PM in HE. Central to this proposition is working within a continuum of these theories to mediate the apparent tension between control and collaboration/collegiality.  相似文献   

3.
Almost half of current academic staff will need to be replaced within three years in the Australian academic workforce. Literature suggests that casual academics are a potential solution, yet they are frequently excluded from the career development opportunities that would allow them to fulfil an ongoing academic role. Most academic development programmes designed for and delivered to casual academics are constructed by academic developers with little or no input from casual academics themselves. This paper documents what casual academics determine to be their academic development needs and how they could be addressed using three pathways of professional and career development.  相似文献   

4.
Higher education literature identifies mistrust as one of the prominent features of managerialism. Similarly, multi-campus institutional studies have interrogated mistrust in various ways. However, there is limited research on academics’ experiences of how mistrust relates to their understandings and values of their academic profession in multi-campus contexts. This article contributes knowledge to narrow this gap. It draws from a study that examined academics’ experiences of how space enables or constrains their practices towards academic identity construction in an open distance learning institution in South Africa. A total of 12 academics who work on satellite campuses of the institution were interviewed. The social production of space framed the analysis. Findings indicate that a multi-campus institutional context aggravates mistrust and impinges on academics’ interaction and prospects for development within a wider institutional space. Recommendations are made about how to reduce the influence of mistrust on academics’ practices in multi-campus contexts.  相似文献   

5.
Given the impact of austerity on higher education systems, an intellectual concern with the impact of austerity on faculty seems appropriate. In this article, austerity is explored through the everyday lived experience of faculty and its impact on both their personal and professional contexts. This aspect has been under-researched in the higher education literature and addresses the complexities and contradictions that the austerity can create for faculty. The study located in the Republic of Ireland provides an interesting context as the global financial crisis in 2008 resulted in 9 years of austerity measures that impacted on all aspects of the economy and particularly on the higher education sector. A social realist approach using Archer’s morphogenetic framework was employed. The framework facilitated an in-depth understanding of the relationship between structure, culture and agency and how austerity was experienced by faculty within their institutions.  相似文献   

6.
Australian universities over the last 25 years have been unified, internationalised, corporatised and become mass educational providers. This process is replicated globally as a response to rapid mass enrolments and marketisation. In the light of these changes, a corporate and managerial model has been identified, which has been the subject of growing discontent within the academic workforce. However, from a political economy perspective there is a lack of understanding on how and by what means academic labour has been commodified in this process. This paper, using Australia as its case study, argues that the managerial culture has alienated academics from their labour. This has resulted in them losing control over their skills and thus becoming disassociated from the educational purposes of their work. Higher education has been subjected to systemic regulatory governance that has fundamentally transformed the nature of academic labour. We contend that the regulatory state has reached so deep down into the university that academics have effectively become a de-professionalised and proletarianised labour force.  相似文献   

7.
Research agendas are understudied, despite being key to academic knowledge creation. The literature suggests that the ways that academics determine their research agendas are conditioned by individual, organisational and environmental characteristics. This study explores the cognitive aspects of academics' research agendas in the social sciences by using a theory on thinking styles as an analytical framework. The results suggest that the research agendas of academics in the social sciences are significantly associated with their thinking styles. These findings aid understanding of how academics set their research agendas. This study also represents an important landmark in research on thinking styles, focusing on academic research work as a potential venue for further studies. The findings are relevant for policymakers, research funding agencies, university administrators and academics because they have implications for academic research development processes, outcomes, and for research and academic identity socialisation during doctoral studies.  相似文献   

8.
The current focus on identifying criteria for academic teaching practice is influencing performance goals for teaching academics. This has produced a strong imperative to engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning; however, it is not always clear how teaching academics continue to build capacity to do this during their academic career. Drawing on the literature, this paper analyses the outcomes from two years of faculty and institutional teaching grants to gauge their role in generating effective engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The paper identifies some improvements to the grants programs which have contributed to quality outcomes.  相似文献   

9.
Academic mobility has existed since ancient times. Recently, however, academic mobility—the crossing of international borders by academics who then work ‘overseas’—has increased. Academics and the careers of academics have been affected by governments and institutions that have an interest in coordinating and accelerating knowledge production. This article reflects on the relations between academic mobility and knowledge and identity capital and their mutual entanglement as academics move, internationally. It argues that the contemporary movement of academics takes place within old hierarchies among nation states, but such old hierarchies intersect with new academic stratifications which will be described and analysed. These analytical themes in the article are supplemented by excerpts from interviews of mobile academics in the UK, USA, New Zealand, Korea and Hong Kong as selected examples of different locales of academic capitalism.  相似文献   

10.
This qualitative study reports on findings from interviews with ten academics in an Australian university six to twelve months following academic workforce reshaping and the widespread introduction of teaching academic roles. The research aimed to determine how the workforce reshaping impacted on the capacity of academics with teaching responsibilities to engage in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Findings indicate that whilst academics were willing to undertake SoTL, participants’ capacity to engage was hampered by the workload model, middle academic leaders’ capacity to define and lead SoTL, and a perceived lack of SoTL value. A major concern for participants was that shifting goal posts (in relation to roles and expectations) would make it difficult to successfully apply for future academic work. The research indicates the need for the sector to consider the selection criteria for middle leadership roles, as well as ongoing academic leadership development to support adaptability and change agility.  相似文献   

11.
One consequence of globalisation is the demand on academics to better prepare students for work and life in an interconnected world through curriculum internationalisation. Many academics are hesitant, resistant, or ill-prepared to engage with curriculum internationalisation. This paper explores how this can be addressed by reconfiguring the way academic developers engage with academics within their teaching/program teams at the discipline level. Drawing on Star Trek and nomadic space, we theorise a participatory, situative approach to engaging disciplinary academic teams in the internationalisation of the curriculum process. We illustrate this from our work with teaching/program teams in two Australian universities.  相似文献   

12.
The literature demonstrates that stress in the working life of academics has increased over recent years. However, qualitative research on how academics cope with this is very scarce. Using online interviewing with thematic analysis, this paper examines how 31 academics in a post-92 predominantly teaching-focused UK university cope with the stressors of work. An innovation was to ask about both positive and negative experiences at work unlike most stress research which focuses only on negatives. Six themes emerged from the data; administrative loads, coping with stress at work, task preferences, the academic role, and positive and negative feelings around research/scholarship and thoughts around leaving academia. Increases in student numbers, being able to spend less time with students, heavy workloads, increasing administration, poor management, funding cuts and government initiatives threatening the future of education, obtaining research funding, and increasing insecurity of academic posts were all stressors. Positives identified included satisfaction gained from teaching students, support from colleagues, relative autonomy at work and the ability to manage their time more effectively were perceived as factors that can moderate some of the negative consequences of work stress. Overall, academics reported being happy at work because of the satisfaction gained from teaching and research.  相似文献   

13.
Despite universities’ enthusiasm for internationalization, international academic mobility requires considerable institutional and cultural adjustment in terms of teaching and supervision styles, research expectations, and departmental relationships. Although language competency underpins these practices, research on international academics has neglected the impact of language proficiency on professional identity. This article uses autoethnography to document conversations about language ability during my first two years as an academic in a French-language university. My responses to language-related comments evolved over time, reflecting how I positioned myself as a linguistic – or audible – minority, vis-à-vis the linguistic majority. Using cultural phenomenology, the findings highlight the interactional, unstable nature of international academic identities and the importance of positive collective support for international academics who shift from majority to minority linguistic status.  相似文献   

14.
Abstract

Recent studies of academic work have identified increasing pressures on universities and academics throughout the world. These pressures relate to such factors as diminishing resources available to the higher education sector, widening diversity of the student clientele, moves for increased accountability and tensions between the research and teaching goals of academic work. Among the pressures being placed on the teaching component of academic work are the need for increased accountability of teaching performance and the need to update professional competence related to teaching. This paper reports a study of a selected group of academics — relatively junior staff who have participated in significant professional development activities related to their teaching. The data provided by the interviews with these academics allow a glimpse at their academic lives and how they fit teaching and professional development related to teaching into their working lives. The study highlights how these academics structure their work around their teaching commitments and how, although they make time available for professional development related to their teaching, this is done in response to the activities offered rather than as a proactive component of their career planning.  相似文献   

15.
This article explores the role that universities play in shaping the relationship between academics and their work. Drawing on Miller and Rose's interpretation of our present era as being characterised by ‘Advanced Liberal’ governance, this article demonstrates how discourses seeking to govern academic labour enrol ideals about the academic and subjectify academic staff within strategies to govern their conduct. Entrepreneurial conceptions of ‘good’ academic conduct are valorised through such initiatives as performance evaluation, interdisciplinary research programmes and Graduate Certificates of university teaching and skills development. Drawing on the past literature and an analysis of three Australian public universities, this article proposes three ideals through which academics are enrolled into strategies to govern their conduct: ‘the career academic’, ‘the tribal academic’ and ‘the celebrity academic’. The centrality of an entrepreneurial sense of self within academic ideals contributes to the production of insidious effects within academic practices. The subjectification of academics, as entrepreneurial knowledge managers, may potentially produce strain within academics who fail to close the psychological distance between their self-perceptions and academic ideals. This article proposes that future investigations of the development of academic ideals and values should engage with an analysis of modes of self-government. The utility of self-government is explored in an analysis of the dynamic production of academic ideals within policies and programmes aimed at governing the behaviour of academic staff.  相似文献   

16.
This study explores the impact academic teachers’ writing of a teaching portfolio can have on their professional learning. Through an open-ended questionnaire, 26 academics from three faculties reported on insights, effects on teaching practice, and effects on collegial exchange that the portfolio writing entailed. We discuss how the experienced impact relates to the three competence levels excellence, expertise and scholarship of teaching and learning. With regard to academic development, we conclude that the writing of reflective teaching portfolios has the potential of contributing to an emerging academic community of practice characterised by a scholarly approach to teaching and learning.  相似文献   

17.
Academic work is changing fast, as is the work of other professionals, because of challenges such as accountability and regulations frameworks and globalised academic markets. Such changes also have consequences for everyday academic practice and learning. This paper seeks to explore some of the ways in which academic work is changing by opening the ‘black-box’ of everyday academic work and examining the enactment of academics’ everyday learning. The paper draws on a study of everyday academic practice in the social sciences with respect to the institution, the department and the discipline. Assuming a sociomaterial sensibility, the study also sought to understand how academics’ learning is enacted in everyday work. Within three universities, fourteen academics were work-shadowed; social, material, technological, pedagogic and symbolic actors were observed and, where possible, connections and interactions were traced. The paper illuminates through two stories from the study how specific practices and meanings of disciplinary academic work are negotiated, configured and reconfigured within and beyond the department or meso-level, attending to resistance and rejection as well as accommodation and negotiation. The paper responds to educational concerns of professional (here, academic) learning by foregrounding both the assembling and reassembling of academic work and the enactment of learning.  相似文献   

18.
For this article Institutional entrepreneurialism at Babe?‐Bolyai University (Romania) serves as a premise for more general reflections. These include discussion of the market sensitivity of entrepreneurialism; that is how a university can be very entrepreneurial in one market and less entrepreneurial in another. Consideration is also given to the idea that institutional entrepreneurialism can sometimes collide with the individual entrepreneurialism of academic staff, and universities are then forced to take defensive measures. We also touch on the academic reward system and how it could be changed in order to stimulate academics to exploit their knowledge and create market relevant products.  相似文献   

19.
ABSTRACT

In an increasingly competitive environment that positions students as consumers, universities have become ever more marketised, responding to policy contexts that foreground value for money, consumer choice and competition. The intensity of marketisation is argued to have profoundly affected the nature of academic work and scholars themselves, recreating academics as commodities to be weighed and measured, becoming corporatised, alienated and inauthentic in their practice. Yet with the majority of accounts of the commodification of higher education focusing on students, the actual process of how academics become consumed is under-theorised. This article therefore begins with a discussion of the historical context, providing evidence of the familiar indices of marketisation such as rampant self-promotion, the scramble for external funding and intense competition. It argues that this commodified DNA of the university provides the context for the seduction of the modern academic within the consumer society, a movement from the gratification of needs to the perpetual frustration of desires through the ‘Diderot Effect’ of policy shifts. It concludes with an examination of how contemporary academic work can be viewed through the lens of consumerism and how academics themselves have become consumers.  相似文献   

20.
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