Abstract:
Education focussed (EF) roles have become increasingly prevalent in higher education (HE) systems globally, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Singapore. In Australia, the rate and breadth of growth in EF roles shows a trend towards increasing specialisation within the academic workforce. These roles typically have no expectation for disciplinary research and represents a change – both conceptually and in practice – from the more established teaching and research (TR) role. This change not only represents a departure from prevailing expectations of the academic role, but also places the EF role in opposition to the existing structures, norms, and values that govern academic work. This study explores the EF role as a system change across Australian HE, encompassing the perspectives of EF and TR academics, senior leadership, and professional staff, from a range of discipline areas and organisations. This study’s significance is in increasing the complexity of our understanding of the EF role and its implications at the sectoral (i.e. policy reform), organisational (i.e. institutional reforms and initiatives), and individual (i.e. identity and generational change) levels - as well as the forces that underpin these changes. The study used a multiple comparative case study design to situate the introduction and development of EF roles within their organisational contexts, collecting data from strategic documents and interviews with more than 60 participants in four universities from Australia’s major university groupings, as well as sector-wide organisations. There is a prevailing view of the EF role as primarily being for “failed researchers” and as a dead end for individuals’ academic careers. This study's findings present an alternative point of view – showing the diversity of experiences of the EF role, as well as the range of opportunities and challenges attendant to its introduction. The EF role reconceptualises the academic role and is a system adaptation that triggers a series of other changes in multiple dimensions – not only to academic expectations, workload formulae, and promotions policies, but also to academic identity, community and belonging, and academic culture. These changes have implications for academic practices today, but it also represents generational change – with implications for the academic role and the skills younger academics will need into the future. This presentation will discuss the EF role as a symptom of and catalyst for broader changes within the HE sector, both in Australia and internationally, and as a prism through which change in Australian HE can be understood.