Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemEvolution and resilience of academics in Higher Education ecosystems in Australia( 2023-05)For several decades, higher education has been facing rapid change and successive challenges. This is in part due to global and Australian economic trends which are also experiencing accelerating change and challenges from social-cultural, technological, geopolitical tensions and aggression, climate and environmental factors and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Higher education is seen as key in finding solutions to this diverse array of challenges. First, through creating employable, adaptable, and entrepreneurial graduates who become a key part of the future workforce with the promise to create a more equitable society. Second, through research which produces knowledge to provide the basis for improvements and even solutions to global and Australian challenges. Questions, however, have been raised this century about the extent to which higher education can continue to deliver on the promise of quality outcomes from education and research in the current strained environment and inflexible academic workforce. Many posit for higher education to succeed alternative academic workforce models and changes to the academic role will need to be made. Such alternative workforce models include increased diversity of professional staff to better match activities and differentiation of academic roles which are better fit for purpose in either education or research, the former with an emphasis on teaching and the latter including greater emphasis on academics with entrepreneurial and commercialisation skills. In many higher education institutions, it is now common to have academic roles differentiating into three distinct categories; teaching or education-focused, teaching and research integration (also known as the 40:40:20 traditional academic role) and research focused with education-focused roles growing most rapidly. This growth has not necessarily happened in a systematic and coherent manner. Instead change to academic roles can be seen as largely unplanned local decisions caused by institutional pressures and system wide drivers. Expectations are that these roles will deliver on the promise of educational quality and the student experience and enable higher education to serve communities more ably, but this is not necessarily a given. There are many unknowns about the long-term impact of differentiated academic roles, especially those teaching and education-focused academic roles where disciplinary research has been removed. The theoretical framework of resilience, adaptive capacity and cycles and psychological development and self-determination were powerful heuristics to investigate the responses of academics to these roles. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data collected through analysis and interviews with academics mostly in science, three main findings emerged. First, teaching and education-focused roles have been increasing most rapidly. Second, academics in these roles experienced a range of consequences as a result of moving from disciplinary research to teaching. Third, while all academics undergo adaptive cycles in response to stress, education-focused academics and women were perhaps most vulnerable to stress and loss from the ecosystem, even after their heroic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While theory predicts greater academic role diversity will increase resilience and adaptive capacity, this is not necessarily a given without changes to the higher education ecosystem in Australia in which academics operate.