Gail Crimmins’ BLASST Presentation The lived experience of women casual academics - what we can...

Gail Crimmins’ BLASST Presentation

The lived experience of women casual academics - what we can learn from those that teach at university

Gail CrimminsUniversity of the Sunshine Coast



This presentation aims to:

Briefly contextualise a research project that investigated the lived experience of women causal academics;

Re-present some of the lived experiences of women casual academics;

Discuss what we can learn about the recruitment, engagement and professional development of sessional staff, and those with whom they work, from the narratives of women casual academics.


In 2011, 67,000 of all academics employed in Australian universities were employed on a casual contract (May, Strachan, Broadbent, & Peetz, 2011).

It is estimated that up to 80% of first year teaching is undertaken by sessional staff (Percy et al., 2008).

In addition, casual employment figures in academia, when compared with figures from other industries, reveal that in 2011, 19% of all employed persons in Australia were employed on casual contracts, yet 61% of the Australian academic workforce were casually employed (May et al., 2011).

Finally, the majority of casual academics in Australia are women (May et al., 2011; Rea, 2012).

Context


Correspondingly, the increase in casualised employment within Australian academia is part of a worldwide phenomenon (Smith & Coombe, 2006).

In 2006 Bryson and Blackwell identified that over half the academic staff employed in the UK were employed on temporary contracts, and a similar percentage of casual academic employment has been identified in Canada (Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, 2015).

Furthermore, in 2014 in the USA contingent appointments constitute 70% of faculty teaching positions in the non-profit higher education sector (Kezar & Maxey, 2014).

Thus, there is an “ongoing transformation of the profession into a majority of contingent [temporary] employees" (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006, p5).


The “full-time, permanent, centrally-located teaching/research academic is no longer the norm around which [university] policy and practice can be formed” (Percy et al. 2008, p. 7).

Or, the casual academic is now the norm around which university policy and practice needs to be formed.


The identified absence of women casual academics’ voice in academic discourses led me to consider two distinctive - but convergent – phenomena.

The what and the how of women casual academics’ narratives…..

and why they are currently absent


I engaged with six women casual academics from three different universities in SE Queensland, over 12 months, to elicit their lived experience of casual academia. I then restored their narratives – verbatim - in order to capture and re-present the messiness, richness, and fully-embodied nature of their lived experience.

Human experience and narrative require ‘interpretation’ not explanation, and interpretation requires methods that are distinct from analysis (Hendry, 2010). Consequently, the approach I adopted to ‘handling the data’ in the research project was a narrative interpretation or re-storying process.


In order to acknowledge and publicly re-present the experience of women casual academics in Australian universities I created and staged six short scenes of verbatim drama based on the lived experience of women casual academics.

Verbatim theatre is described as theatre of public dialogue and democracy whose main purpose is to “to give listening ears to voices that often go unheard” (Wake, 2010, p.3).


This is part of the first scene

The scene is scene one: When and in what circumstances did you become a casual academic? (1:07 seconds in)


What can we learn from the women casual academics about when and in what circumstance they became casual academics?

There isn’t an obvious official or objective recruitment process in place (chance played a large part in the women gaining academic work);

The women are permanently ‘casual’;

They often offer rich, industry-based knowledge and expertise;

They are motivated by student learning


This is scene four

The scene is called ‘Delta Dawn what’s that flower you have on?’


What did we learn from women casual academics about their feelings of connectedness and integration in the academy?

They feel marginalised, disconnected, unheard.


This is a section from scene five

The scene is called ‘there’s nothing you can do, you can’t speak up’


What can we learn from these women about the lack of formal recruitment and management of casual academics?

If we know that most ‘management’ of casual academics is undertaken by subject or course coordinators, what are their professional development needs?

What opportunities were identified for engaging the skills and expertise of casual teachers into the curriculum with which they engage?


This is a section from scene 2

The scene is called ‘and then there’s this long wait in-between semesters’


So what can we learn from those that teach at university?

In particular, what we can learn about the recruitment, engagement and professional development of casual academics, and those with whom they work, from the lived experience of women casual academics?



List of references:

Hendry, P. M. (2010). Narrative as inquiry. The Journal of Educational Research, 103(2), 72–80. doi: 10.1080/00220670903323354

Kezar, A., & Maxey, D. (2014). Faculty matter: So why doesn’t everyone think so? Thought & Action, 2014, 29-44

May, R., Strachan, G., Broadbent K., & Peetz, D. (2011). The casual approach to university teaching; Time for a re-think? In K. Krause, M. Buckridge, C. Grimmer & S. Purbrick-Illek (Eds.), Research and development in Higher Education: Reshaping higher education 34 (pp. 188-197). Gold Coast, Australia: Research and Development Society of Australasia, Inc

Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. (2015). Adjunct Walkout Day: Growing use of contract faculty in Ontario traps many in precarious work, threatens quality of higher education By: Canada Newswire, Canada Newswire, 02/25/2015

Percy, A., Scoufis, M., Parry, S., Goody, A., & Hicks, M. (2008). The RED Report, Recognition - Enhancement - Development: The contribution of sessional teachers to higher education. Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Retrieved from http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1139&context=asdpapers

Rea, J. (2012). National Tertiary Education Union written submission to the Independent Inquiry to Insecure Work. Retrieved from http://www.nteu.org.au/library/view/id/2186

Schuster, J. H., & Finkelstein, M. J. (2006). The American faculty: The restructuring of academicwork and careers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Smith, E., & Coombe, K. (2006). Quality and qualms in the marking of university assignments by sessional staff: An exploratory study. Higher Education, 51(1), 45-69

Wake C. (2010b). Towards a working definition of verbatim theatre. In P. Brown (Ed.), Verbatim: Staging Memory and Community (pp. 2-5). Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press.

Gail Crimmins’ BLASST Presentation The lived experience of women casual academics - what we can...

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