3.3
Introducing: the academic workplace
In 2017, academic practitioners tend to be found studying in or employed by postsecondary institutions, such as universities, colleges, institutes of technology, and seminaries17. These diverse postsecondary institutions—which can be publicly or privately owned—“serve as a staging ground for conflicting societal demands, ranging from capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of existing class structures on the one hand to upward mobility and social equality on the other” [189]. Such societal demands influence the course offerings, business ethos, and global ambitions of postsecondary institutions and their administrators [1, 72, 205]. Many postsecondary institutions now fiercely and internationally compete for students, researchers, funding, and prestige [1, 72, 189, 205]. Within this complex, dynamic, and highly political domain, universities tend to balance “three basic missions: teaching, research, and public service” [205]. These three basic missions, as well as the aforementioned societal demands, directly influence the everyday practices of academics.
Teaching can be a full-time or part-time, face-to-face or online, and unionised or non- unionised role for many academic practitioners18 [91, 157, 170]. In their roles as educators, academics can be expected deliver instructional sessions to undergraduate students, post- graduate students, professionals, and public audiences during workshops, classes, seminars, presentations, masterclasses, and intensive short-term ‘residential’ courses [44, 157, 170]. The format, audience, cultural context, and funder of an instructional session can influence the configuration of an academic’s teaching practice [44]. Likewise, an academic’s career stage (e.g. graduate students vs Professors), gender, as well as formal training in or familiarity with pedagogy and andragogy19, can also influence the configuration of an academic’s teaching practice[91, 157, 170]. For example, a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the UK might have never studied pedagogy or andragogy, but could be teaching a mix of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and undergoing evaluation using the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)[109]. Elsewhere, an academic in a similar post might have needed to take a teacher training certificate program to be able to deliver course materials. In many cases, graduate students act as teaching assistants, as opposed to the primary instructor, and they contribute to “complex teams of lecturers, administrators and others [who] collaborate in complex programs which have to be right first time, or not happen at all. Such programs de- pend on commodification of content, sophisticated timetabling systems and explicitly shared rules and procedures to ensure fair and consistent treatment for students across the modular
17Seminaries are theological colleges or divinity schools that educate students on religious issues and topics. 18Of course, not all academics are required to teach. Some academics have purely research-oriented roles. 19Pedagogy refers to the methods and theories of education. Andragogy deals with the specific methods and theories for teaching adults.
36 HCI research practices
scheme” [44, pp. 42-43]. Beyond all of this, the trend of ‘globalising’ or ‘internationalising’ educational offerings has meant that some teachers have mobility—in terms of where they work—and in some cases have had to learn to deliver instructional materials in their second or third (or other) language [44, 170].
Research is, in many cases, a separate component of contemporary academic practice20. It is often the primary reason why academics join academia, and researchers “have to love [their] research so much that [they]’re willing to do all of the other stuff that this job requires” [93]. “All of the other stuff” includes teaching and public service activities, which can be incredibly time-consuming [93]; many academics are left to conduct their research in the workday hours, evenings, or semesters when they are not required to teach or perform public service duties. Academic research is heterogeneous; it can be conducted by an individual or a team. It can use qualitative, quantitative, experimental, computational, mixed, or a variety of other methods [87, 233]. It can rely on positivist, interpretivist, postmodernist, or any other number of epistemologies [87, 233]. It can be “publishable” or not [163, 176, 229]. The exact configuration of many of these latter statements depends on which discipline or field of research an academic practitioner hopes to contribute to (or is already contributing to). Academic communities tend to be unique in terms of the theorists they use, the ways they communicate their research results (e.g. at conferences vs in journals vs in books), and the expectations they hold for their fellow researchers [102]. These unique community expectations influence research practices in ways that are compounded by diverse global cultural contexts [104], research funding requirements [51], institutional expectations about types of research and acceptable research outputs[44], as well as an academic’s career stage (e.g. graduate students vs Professors), gender[91], and social network [3, 68].
In addition to their teaching and research practices, academics are often expected to—or are voluntold to—perform public service duties [205, 271, pp. 76-78]. These duties can include a variety of public engagement activities, which Hart, Northmore and Gerhardt [98] summarised along the following seven dimensions: 1) public access to facilities; 2) public access to knowledge; 3) student engagement; 4) faculty engagement; 5) widening participation; 6) encouraging economic regeneration and enterprise in social engagement, and; 7) institutional relationship and partnership building [98]. These duties can “be realised in a number of ways, from student volunteering to opening university libraries to the public, to authoring a general interest book” [271, pp. 76-78] or hosting a lecture, seminar, or discussion with a mass media organisation [98]. Much like with teaching and research practices, the institutional and research-community-driven expectations related to public
20However, as mentioned, some academics maintain primarily research-focused roles, and some academics purely act as teachers. Moreover, some academics—including a few of my participants—have combined their teaching and research practices.