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Vol. 10 No. 3 (2013)

Published: 1 July 2013

Articles

  • Editorial 10.3

    Marina Harvey, Karina Luzia

    This marks my final issue as Senior Editor of JUTLP and I would like to congratulate the new senior editorial team: Romy Lawson, Alisa Percy and Dominique Parrish. I know I leave the journal in very good hands and the leadership team will ensure that JUTLP will continue to champion teaching and learning in higher education. I would like to also thank all the people who have contributed to the success of this journal: the authors, the reviewers, the members of the editorial board, and those who have contributed to the editing and desktop publishing processes. I would also like to thank you , the reader – without you there is no purpose for our writing. I feel very privileged to introduce the editorial for this special issue of JUTLP as improving opportunities for sessional staff has been a passion throughout my academic career. I would particularly like to thank all who have contributed to the reviewing for this edition and wish to congratulate Marina and Karina for their hard work in producing this edition and in exciting outcomes from the Benchmarking leadership and advancement of standards for sessional teaching project. Geraldine Lefoe, Senior Editor Editorial Marina Harvey & Karina Luzia How do you measure up? Standards for sessional staff teaching: moving from periphery to core. Sess•ion•al Staff /sessional stǽf/ noun. Any teachers in higher education employed on a casual or contract or sessional basis. This includes lecturers, tutors, online course facilitators and moderators, markers and demonstrators. [BLASST.edu.au] Sessional staff provide the majority of teaching in Australian universities (May, Strachan, Broadbent & Peetz 2011; Percy et al. 2008). They are important, yet have been on the ‘periphery’ (Kimber 2003) of learning and teaching plans. The time has come to ensure that sessional staff are now acknowledged and actively included as ‘core’ to quality learning and teaching. This special issue of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice is an outcome of the national BLASST (Benchmarking leadership and advancement of standards for sessional teaching) project. A key motivator for the project was to systematise good practice through the establishment of a national standards framework. The result is the BLASST framework which is underpinned by three key principles: quality learning and teaching, support for sessional staff and sustainability. This framework is a truly collaborative product: the result of years of research and commitment by a large number of people who shared a vision for quality learning and teaching with sessional staff. In the true sense of distributed leadership, these people included academics, professional staff, sessional staff and students from all levels and disciplines of several universities. Their engagement and research generated new insights, learning and knowledge about sessional staff.

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  • Supporting sessional teaching staff in the UK – to what extent is there real progress?

    Colin Bryson

    A major proportion of teaching in UK universities is undertaken by a diverse and large group of sessional staff, in common with many HE systems around the world. This articles reviews efforts over the last decade to support and develop such staff and to improve their situation. Improvement in this area is very slow. The article concludes by considering what progress is likely in the future and the factors and conditions which facilitate or hinder progress.

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  • Workforce development and renewal in Australian universities and the management of casual academic staff

    Robyn May, Glenda Strachan, David Peetz

    Most undergraduate teaching in Australia’s universities is now performed by hourly paid staff, and these casual academics form the majority of the academic teaching workforce in our universities. This recent development has significant implications for the careers and working lives of those staff, for other academic staff, and for students, implications which are yet to be closely examined. Investigation of the working conditions of casual academic teaching staff is important, as the ageing of the continuing academic workforce suggests the universities will need to consider workforce development and renewal, and the casual academic workforce may represent an important source of labour. This paper examines the support casual academic staff receive from their universities to undertake their work, and how this level of support has an impact on their job and career satisfaction. It uses data from the Work and Careers in Australian Universities Survey, conducted in 2011 across 19 universities. Casual academic teaching staff answered questions which provided information on a range of demographic details, conditions of work, their motivations for casual work, and their access to a range of job and career supports. The research found that there is variation among universities in their provision of physical supports such as provision of a desk and computer, supports for collegial inclusion such as meeting attendance, and access to professional training. The range of assistance provided to these staff had an impact on their job and career satisfaction.

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  • Setting The Standards For Sessional Staff: Quality Learning And Teaching

    Marina Harvey

    Across the Australian Higher Education sector a focus on quality is driving a new paradigm for learning and teaching: quality standards. One challenge is to engage all academics with this progress towards systematic quality enhancement and assurance. Sessional staff, who provide most of the face-to-face teaching in Australian universities, remain at the periphery of learning and teaching. Any development of standards must therefore proactively address the role of sessional staff in attaining and achieving quality learning and teaching. Building on seminal research on sessional staff, this paper argues the need for standards as a potential strategy for quality learning and teaching with sessional staff. The rationale for, and process of, developing national standards is outlined and the learning and teaching standards are introduced.

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  • Benchmarking with the BLASST Sessional Staff Standards Framework

    Karina Luzia, Marina Harvey, Nicola Parker, Coralie McCormack, Natalie R Brown, Jo McKenzie

    Benchmarking as a type of knowledge-sharing around good practice within and between institutions is increasingly common in the higher education sector. More recently, benchmarking as a process that can contribute to quality enhancement has been deployed across numerous institutions with a view to systematising frameworks to assure and enhance the quality of higher education. However, to date, sessional staff who are the majority of teachers in higher education, have been mostly excluded from or invisible in this process, both within individual institutions and across the sector. To ameliorate the effects of this exclusion and to acknowledge the contribution made to quality teaching by sessional staff, the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) funded BLASST project is establishing a national sessional staff standards framework which sets in place standards to evaluate and support the quality of performance and outcomes in learning and teaching, and in management and administrative policy, procedure, and practices affecting sessional teachers in higher education. In this paper, we present four case studies of benchmarking across four Australian universities that piloted the sessional staff standards framework in order to enhance and support quality learning and teaching by sessional staff. We discuss some of the strengths and limitations of this approach to supporting sessional staff and show how the benchmarking process facilitates active engagement for and particularly by sessional staff in enhancing quality teaching and learning.

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  • A Message From The Chalk Face – What Casual Teaching Staff Tell Us They Want To Know, Access and Experience.

    Natalie R Brown, Jo-Anne Kelder, Brigid Freeman, Andrea R Carr

    The University of Tasmania established a project in 2009 to investigate the particular needs of casual teaching staff, identify strategies to improve access to information, and facilitate a consistent approach to employment, induction, development and recognition. The project was managed by the university learning and teaching centre, and co-ordinated by a Reference Group. A preliminary survey in 2010 explored casual teaching staff information and resource needs and a mapping exercise was undertaken to establish institutional practices. The findings of the preliminary 2010 survey and mapping exercise prompted the development of an institution-wide Casual Teaching Staff Policy. The preliminary 2010 survey was subsequently updated and a second survey administered in 2012 to obtain additional baseline data against which to evaluate the casual teaching staff project and implementation of the Casual Teaching Staff Policy. This paper presents the results of the 2012 survey designed with this dual focus in mind. The 2012 survey items were explicitly aligned to the Sessional Staff Standards Framework arising from the Benchmarking Leadership and Advancement of Standards for Sessional Teaching (BLASST) project. The 2012 survey results were mapped to the Sessional Staff Standards Framework guiding principles (Quality Learning and Teaching, Sessional Staff Support and Sustainability), standards (Good Practice, Minimum Standard, Unsustainable), and criteria spanning different institutional levels (Institutional Level, Faculty Level, Department Level, Individual Level). Together the quantitative and qualitative survey data results provide a rich depiction of the world of casual teaching staff at the University of Tasmania. On the one hand the results evidence examples of well-supported, fully engaged casual teaching staff; on the other hand, a distressing picture emerges for many such staff. The findings are presented with discussion regarding the requisite ensuing steps in this ongoing initiative to improve the employment, induction, development and recognition experiences of University of Tasmania casual teaching staff.

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  • Academic aspirations amongst sessional tutors in a New Zealand University

    Kathryn A. Sutherland, Amanda Gilbert

    In New Zealand, as in many other western societies, the higher education system has become an increasingly less secure place in which to work, and over 40 per cent of those teaching in New Zealand higher education are sessional staff of some kind. Our university in New Zealand has long relied on part-time paid tutors, many of whom are students themselves, to deliver part of the teaching in large courses. These tutors work with groups of students facilitating their learning in workshops, seminars, laboratories and a variety of other teaching environments. We have tracked the experiences of tutors over a significant period of time, and surveys of tutors’ experiences since 2007 reveal that the majority of respondents hold tight to the hope of a future academic career. They regard tutoring as good preparation for an academic career, and many report being even more committed to pursuing an academic career since beginning tutoring. How can we best support tutors to navigate their way into an academic career that might look somewhat different from the one they set out to pursue? This paper shares data and insights from our longitudinal research with tutors, and encourages those supporting sessional staff to think about how to enable tutors to take a scholarly approach to their teaching, regardless of the career path they eventually take.

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  • A CLASS Act: The teaching team approach to subject coordination

    Geraldine E. Lefoe, Dominique Rene Parrish, Lynne Maree Keevers, Yoni Ryan, Jo McKenzie, Janne Malfroy

    Advancing the development of good practice around the teaching team has been the focus of a recently completed, nationally funded Australian grant entitled Coordinators Leading Advancement of Sessional Staff (CLASS). The project focused on developing leadership capacity of subject coordinators to provide supportive contexts for sessional staff to enhance their knowledge of teaching practice and contribute to subject improvement through a team approach. An action learning approach and notions of distributed leadership underpinned the activities of the teaching teams in the program. This paper provides an overview of a practical approach, led by the subject coordinator, to engaging sessional staff through the facilitation of a supportive network within the teaching team. It addresses some of the gaps identified in the recent literature which includes lack of role clarity for all members of the team and provides some examples of initiatives that teams engaged with to address some of the challenges identified. Resources to support this approach were developed and are shared though the project website. Recommendations for future direction include improved policy and practice at the institutional level, better recognition and reward for subject coordinators and resourcing to support the participation and professional development needs of sessional staff.

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  • Sessional Academic Success: A Distributed Framework for Academic Support and Development

    Jillian Hamilton, Michelle Fox, Mitchell McEwan

    With approximately half of Australian university teaching now performed by Sessional Academics, there has been growing recognition of the contribution they make to student learning. At the same time, sector-wide research and institutional audits continue to raise concerns about academic development, quality assurance, recognition and belonging (Red Report, 2008; May, 2013). In response, universities have increasingly begun to offer academic development programs for Sessional Academics. However, such programs tend to be centrally delivered, generic in nature, and contained within the moment of delivery, while the Faculty contexts and cultures that Sessional Academics work within are diverse, and the need for support unfolds in ad-hoc and often unpredictable ways. In this paper we present the Sessional Academic Success (SAS) program – a new framework that complements and extends the central academic development program for Sessional Academics at Queensland University of Technology. This program recognizes that experienced Sessional Academics have much to contribute to the advancement of learning and teaching, and harnesses their expertise to provide school-based academic development opportunities, peer-to-peer support, and locally contextualized community building. We describe the program’s implementation and explain how Sessional Academic Success Advisors (SASAs) are employed, trained and supported to provide advice and mentorship and, through a co-design methodology, to develop local development opportunities and communities of teaching practice within their schools. Besides anticipated benefits to new Sessional Academics in terms of timely and contextual support and improved sense of belonging, we explain how SAS provides a pathway for building leadership capacity and academic advancement for experienced Sessional Academics. We take a collaborative, dialogic and reflective practice approach to this paper, interlacing insights from the Associate Director, Academic: Sessional Development who designed the program, and two Sessional Academic Success Advisors who have piloted it within their schools.

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