Teaching and learning on the margins (original) (raw)
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The Journal of Further and Higher Education, 2022
This article draws on findings from a qualitative case study of a firstyear online unit (subject) offered by a large public university through Open Universities Australia. It includes the student voice, taken from formal evaluation surveys, and the voice of casual academic tutors, provided through first-hand interviews and questionnaires. What emerges from the findings is the high value placed on tutors by their students and the tutors' important contribution to student success, contrasted with the low value and lack of recognition given to tutors in the contemporary, marketised academy along with the destructive effect this has on tutors' professional and personal wellbeing. Suggestions for future research to begin addressing this situation are included. Comments on the relevance of the research to the conditions created in higher education by the COVID-19 pandemic conclude the article.
2018
This case study examines the experiences of participants in a core online Humanities unit situated at the nexus of three trends salient to contemporary higher education in Australia and internationally. Widening student participation seeks to include a broader range of social backgrounds from which students commonly enter the university, and to build a more socially just and educated society. Flexible online learning is embraced by universities as a way to achieve enrolment growth and demonstrate innovativeness. Casualisation of academic teaching is fuelled by tightened government funding for universities leading to an emphasis on cost-cutting and flexible human resource practices. These three trends propel the growth of two peripheral groups in the academy; non-traditional students who study online, and casual academic staff. This study aims to increase understanding and awareness of the impact that these trends and pressures have on those who operate on the periphery of university...
Students Flourish and Tutors Wither: A Study of Participant Experiences in a First-Year Online Unit
The Australian Universities' review, 2017
Flexibility is a key word in the contemporary higher education system in Australia. Flexible and diverse entry and exit points, as well as flexible forms of recognising learning, open up the possibility of attaining a university degree for students ‘...hitherto largely excluded from university attendance’ (Birrell & Edwards, 2009, p. 8). Flexible modes of course delivery centring on online learning allow a further widening of access to university studies for students unable or unwilling to travel to and from campus (Norton, 2014), often due to location, employment and/or family commitments, or for medical reasons. An increase in university enrolments of ‘nontraditional’ students, particularly those classified as mature-age, regional or remote, low socio-economic status or with disabilities, has been one result. At the same time, government funding for higher education has been tightened and regulatory pressures have increased, requiring universities to adopt flexible workplace model...
Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 2015
There is a dearth of literature on Access to Higher Education (AHE) tutors, which this paper addresses. Tutors play an important part in constructing emotional and academic support for students. Understanding their constructions of professional identity and their views of the students they teach helps to explain the learning environments they create. The empirical qualitative data comes from a study of AHE students' and tutors' views of their experiences on AHE courses that was collected in seven rural and urban AHE-providing institutions in the East Midlands of England in 2012-2013. It was analysed using open or inductive coding to reflect the emphases given in their interviews by participants. Emerging findings suggest that tutors' commitment to 'second chance learning' arose, in part, from their own biographies and recognition of the disempowerment experienced by AHE students who were often economically disadvantaged and had had negative experiences of schooling and/or a period of work before joining the course. Tutors' sense of agency and identity and the cultures on AHE courses were negotiated each year through getting to know the students, meeting their extensive demands for support, directing their teaching and learning experiences and contesting the institutional contexts of the courses.
In line with global trends in higher education, many Australian universities are energetically embracing the concept of flexible online learning, which has significantly increased the number of students studying university courses through online and/or open-access delivery. This mode is highly utilised by non-traditional students, and is therefore an important avenue to fulfil Australian government policies aimed at equity of access. Without online access, many successful students would remain excluded from university study. Within a Qualitative/Interpretivist approach, my research utilises in-depth interviews and an analysis of students' reflective work to develop a complex and nuanced picture of their experience with online study. The focus is on a core, first-year unit, designed to facilitate the successful transition of new-to-university students into academic life in an online environment. This acts as an instrumental case study (Stake, 2008) for examining the experience of online, non-traditional students within the learning environment formed by these broader policy-related trends in higher education. Findings point to the transformative power of participation in university level study for successful online students.
The Online Academic: Case Study Narratives of Change and Resistance
By telling stories, we make identity claims (Ronai, 1997). This paper presents' a case study exploring the stories (or narratives) of one university lecturer who teaches using a combination offace-to-face and online modes. The case study has been drawn from the pilot phase of research I am undertaking into how experienced lecturers' perceive their teaching selves in live and online teaching contexts' and how their teaching identities are being trans:formed through the experience of online teaching. In conversations with me, the lecturer participants' are encouraged to articulate and reflect on their teaching selves as represented in website material, computer-mediated communication andface-to-face teaching/learning contexts'. The case study reveals some of the emergent themes in my research and it enables a demonstration of the 'top-down'and 'bottom-up'discourse analysis procedures which I am developing to explore academics' stories and identi...