academia

During this academic year, as well as teaching through a pandemic, I have been working on a PCAP course (Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice). A few months ago, as part of the assessment of this, I had to write a number of reflective case studies about my work. These were linked together with a reflective introduction which was quite heartfelt, looking very briefly at the experience of pandemic teaching as a new starter in the context of established theories/models about early academic life. I’m not wholly ashamed of that introduction and I thought it might be of more general interest, and so I’m posting it here with minor edits. It is, of course, very basic: I am no expert in this area and make no claims to novel insight!

The early years of a lecturer’s first permanent role are generally expected to be hard, for multiple reasons: the new academic is coming to understand their new role and identity (Simmons, 2011, Wilkinson, 2018) while also learning the systems of their new institution and, often, developing a large amount of new teaching material. Kugel (1993) described new lecturers initially focusing on self, and then subject. Only later do they shift to considering students, and hence transition from a teaching-led to a learning-led way of thinking – which in turn leads to consideration of more sophisticated pedagogies.

Covid-19, and the resulting emergency shift to online teaching, has added to this load. Watermeyer et al (2021) speak, based on a large survey, of “academics bruised by their experience of emergency online transition… A story of trauma in the face of… profound professional and personal disruption… Of self-concept on trial and in tatters”. The emergency introduction of blended learning has upended Kugel’s progression by forcing staff who are in their first year of teaching, who are still developing self and subject knowledge, to engage very firmly with learning-led approaches. It is not clear whether this is beneficial for students, but it has surely increased the level of rapid adjustment and assimilation of ideas that Simmons and Wilkinson described.

This research feels quite pertinent to my own situation as a new starter. Much of the material that I have been adapting for emergency online learning is material that I have never taught before, and I have been learning to navigate the systems of a university in flux without any knowledge of how those systems work in normal times.

Goffman, as cited & described by Wilkinson (2018), discussed university teaching through a theatrical metaphor. He described “backstage” contexts in which lecturers can stop performing, and “stage talk” where they discuss performance techniques with colleagues. Wilkinson discussed differences in how much backstage space is available for a woman in a male-dominated field, but it is also interesting to consider how these concepts may differ – and how this might affect the development of professional identity – in a year when lecturers are working from home, and are connected to students and peers only during clearly designated periods when their webcams are on.

Dear reader, if you ever get the choice, I do not recommend starting your first permanent academic job in the year of a pandemic.

The first year of a job is always hard: you have to create teaching materials for the first time, you have to try to get yourself set up for research and, if like me you’re taking over leadership of a degree programme, you have to figure out a lot of “how stuff works at this institution” and build relationships with a lot of people in a hurry.

That’s the baseline. But thanks to COVID, workload for anybody with teaching responsibilities has increased dramatically beyond that level. We’ve been working really hard to deliver a good learning experience through a “blended” approach, but this takes longer to prepare, and also (despite seemingly having less – but not always much less – face-to-face contact) takes longer to actually run and deliver.

To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of my own institution; it’s something that’s affecting most of the sector. Nor am I unaware of how lucky I am to be in a job right now. But nearly everybody I speak to who has teaching responsibilities in UK HE is teetering on the edge of burnout. This has obvious implications for mental health – it isn’t sustainable, and it will require recovery time – but also slightly less obvious implications for the research side of our careers. Of course having very little time available for research is an impediment, but so too is being constantly exhausted: one just isn’t creative in that state.

Once the dust settles I’m predicting four long-term consequences:

1. A partially lost generation of early career researchers, who were on precarious and/or fixed-term contracts when the pandemic hit.
2. A mental health crisis of gigantic proportions across the academy. Some would say that we already had one of those, but this will be worse.
3. A noticeable difference in research output, and probably also career progression, between people with and without teaching responsibilities.
4. A similar, or greater, difference in research output and career progression between those with caring or other responsibilities outside work and those without. Greater than usual, I mean.