Jo-Anne Kelder
Dr Jo-Anne Kelder has extensive expertise in designing, delivering and evaluating curricula across health sciences in higher education and is experienced in supporting teaching teams to evaluate curricula and engage in scholarship. She primarily publishes in the field of learning and teaching and has partnered and/or led institutional and nationally funded learning and teaching projects. Jo-Anne has received three institutional team awards/citations and an individual Vice Chancellor’s citation for teaching excellence in 2017.
Supervisors: Paul Turner and John O'Neill
Supervisors: Paul Turner and John O'Neill
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Papers by Jo-Anne Kelder
Casual teachers make up a significant proportion of the academic workforce in universities worldwide. Training and support for these staff has implications for quality of learning and student experience. Organisational support, professional development, recognition and reward that is inclusive of casual teaching staff enables all staff to undertake their roles effectively and also facilitates retention of good teachers.
This showcase aligns with the conference theme by contrasting the value to the sector of casual teachers in creating high quality graduates against their apparent lack of value as evidenced by paucity of professional and career support that many institutions provide them. The Higher Education Standards Framework (2015) indicates provision of professional development for all teaching staff, suggesting that a (re)valuing of our casual teachers is appropriate.
This showcase presents and describes the themes identified from a 2016 survey based on national research into sessional (casual) staff standards and aligned with the Benchmarking Leadership and Advancement of Standards for Sessional Teaching (BLASST) project’s sessional staff standards framework. The discussion includes comparison with the results from the equivalent 2012 survey and focuses on the evidence that the shift to uberification is well-established and having a profound effect on academic identity for the majority of academics. Casual academic teaching staff are disadvantaged in several respects in comparison to academic staff employed on continuing and fixed term contracts. The Bradley Report found that income insecurity, unpaid work in addition to formal workload, and isolation is a common experience for sessional (casual) academics. Higher Education literature and data from the survey, and survey data, consistently indicate that casual teaching staff are invisible in the higher education workplace with limited access to resources, including professional development. In addition, women are disproportionately likely to have insecure and inhibited career pathways, largely employed in lower level academic positions.
A mixed methods approach: quantitative survey data juxtaposed with thematic analysis of qualitative data from survey respondents’ open-ended answers and follow-up focus group comments; investigates the experiences and opinions of casual teaching staff at an Australian university. The BLASST Framework guiding principles (Support, Quality Learning and Teaching, Sustainability) provided the meta-themes to frame the data analysis.
While no significant change in the prospects for casual teachers at the university appeared during this study, findings will aid institutions seeking to guide initiatives to enhance contributions of casual staff to quality learning and teaching and support professional development opportunities for academics.