Alisa Percy

The casualisation of teaching and the subject at risk

The casualisation of teaching in Australian higher education has come to be problematised as a risk to the quality of teaching and learning. However, the potential and location of risk, and therefore what constitutes an appropriate institutional intervention, requires interrogation as universities comply with the various regulations that, on the one hand, legitimise further casualisation in the name of flexibility, and on the other, insist on institutional responsibilities in the performance of quality. Taking a critical approach to risk consciousness, this paper examines the way casualisation is produced through workplace reform and problematised as a danger to the student learning experience through the quality agenda in Australian higher education. By examining the tensions between the discourses of flexibility and quality, the authors argue that casualisation should not simply be understood as a problem with individual teaching expertise that can be overcome through formal training of the individual. The neo-liberal political rationality that seeks to individuate responsibility and locate “risk” in this way masks the broader systemic tensions within the culture of the university which the authors argue have increasingly profound consequences for the quality of university education. Arguing that professional learning and quality enhancement are the product of open collaborative and collegial social practice, the authors conclude that addressing casualisation only in terms of systematic teacher training is a politically expedient response to a highly complex political issue facing Australian universities. Drawing on professional learning literature, the authors argue for a shift in policy and practice within the university to recognise, value and integrate the expertise and potential quality contribution of casual teaching staff at a micro-level with a particular focus on the teaching team.

Tutors' Forum: engaging distributed communities of practice

The need to engage students studying at a distance in order to reduce isolation, foster a sense of belonging and enhance learning has received significant attention over the past few years. Conversely, very little research has focused on teachers working in this type of environment. In fact, we argue, they appear to be the forgotten dimension in ‘communities’ of distance learning. In this paper we identify some of the problems generated by teaching university subjects simultaneously across a network of campuses: a practice known as multi‐location teaching. We examine strategies for engaging multi‐location teachers as key contributors to a quality learning experience for students, and provide an analysis of how identified teaching needs and professional development are addressed within one particular teaching team by a small but powerful micro‐practice called the ‘Tutors’ Forum’. Drawing on data collected through a survey and interviews conducted over 2006/07, we discuss the benefits and critical success factors of the Tutors’ Forum in facilitating engagement and professional development for teachers working at a distance from the subject coordinator and other members of the teaching team. These factors include a specific style of leadership that fosters an inclusive, dialogic space where the patterns of interaction are characterised by reciprocity, collegiality and professional care. We discuss the implications of this practice for the further engagement of university teachers in an increasingly casualised and fragmented higher education sector.

Re-integrating academic development and academic language and learning: a call to reason

This paper argues for the re-integration of academic development (AD) and a academic language and learning (ALL) practitioners in Australian higher education. This argument is made as universities aim to develop internationally recognised, inter-disciplinary and standards-based curricula against the backdrop of international comparative education (e.g., Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), the Australian Qualifications Framework and a quality emphasis on English language standards (e.g., Tertiary Education Quality and Assessment Agency). Drawing on Rowlands argument that professional life in the academy has become fragmented across five fault lines ([2002]. Overcoming fragmentation in professional life: The challenge for academic development. Higher Education Quarterly, 56(1), 52–64), I propose a sixth: the pedagogical fault line between language and learning which I argue is institutionally manifest in the historical bifurcation of AD and ALL practitioners in the academy. This paper traces the historical separation of these two fields of practice in Australian higher education in order to disturb the present distinction and show how it is more an accident of history than the result of sound pedagogical decision-making. The paper argues that in the current educational context, it is timely to consider a re-integration of these two aspects of the academic field. It is suggested that such a move will create research and teaching connections that develop synergies in educational development that are able to work with language and learning simultaneously.

A critical turn in higher education research: turning the critical lens on the Academic Language and Learning educator

This paper suggests that historical ontology, as one form of reflexive critique, is an instructive research design for making sense of the political and historical constitution of the Academic Language and Learning (ALL) educator in Australian higher education. The ALL educator in this paper refers to those practitioners in the field of ALL, whose ethical agency has largely been taken for granted since their slow and uneven emergence in the latter half of the twentieth century. Using the lens of governmentality, genealogical design and archaeological method, the historical ontology proposed in this paper demonstrates how the ethical remit of the ALL educator to ‘make a difference’ to student learning is not necessarily a unifying construct providing a foundational moral basis for the work, but a contingent historical and political effect of the government of conduct in liberal society. The findings of this approach are not intended to undermine the agency of the ALL educator, but to assist in making sense of the historical conditions that frame and complicate their institutional intelligibility as ethical agents in the academy.

Spaces of teaching and learning: integrating perspectives on research and practice

education studies. Despite this promise, the chapter fails to deliver. Whilst it may inspire other readers, the analytical gap between the discussion of a 79-year-old novel and relatively current interviews with male teachers was not bridged for this reviewer. In contrast, authors emerald and Carpenter present the reader with a wonderful chapter that demonstrates auto-ethnography is not for the fainthearted. This chapter presents the context, the constructs and opportunities this method can provide. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects discussed in the chapter is the role of the theoretical lens. Chapter authors demonstrate how autho-ethnography presents a unique opportunity for both the reader and the researcher to determine the lens they apply to the narrative. In the final chapter Davis and Dwyer once again take up the problem broached in Chapter 1 of bridging the many and varied forms of narrative research. They do so through interviews with three established scholars in the field. These interviews reveal the diverse roots of narrative research and the range of disciplines that now employ this methodology. This chapter reinforces Dwyer and emerald’s assertion that the landscape is broad and a ‘single definition of narrative methods is not possible or desirable’. In doing so, it is a perfect summation of the works within the book and provides the reader with additional expert insights into the key challenges of narrative methods and future developments in research. Following every chapter is a set of questions. However, these questions go beyond a teaching resource. They are framed in such a way that they engage the reader in reflection about both the chapter and their own work practices. In doing so they provide added insight into the process of narrative research and provide a resource that can be used by the reader to examine their own practice or developed further for use with students. Through their generous discussions of struggles with their research design and analytical phases, the chapter authors provide the reader with pathways for their own design and decision making. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It presented a new way of viewing such a rich, varied and yet logical methodology and exposed new ways to analyse and present research into the lives and experience of people and the milieu they encounter or live in.