Gazing Inward: Teaching in the Postgraduate Milieu (original) (raw)

Women's ways of working: circumventing masculine structures working within and upon the university

Three female, and feminist, academics become participant researchers to explore their working practices seeking to make visible the ways they work to wo(manage) the masculinist environment of the University. After reviewing the literature, the paper starts by considering what 'masculinist' means in this context, finding that it refers to both rigidity of structure positioned as 'impartial' and, paradoxically, processes that enable competition and the clear identification of winners and losers; a University regime compatible with neo-liberal governance. Such values are at odds with those promoted within Early Years Education where 'caring' and 'inclu-sion' are fundamental, embedded in a strong 'domestic' tradition. The paper examines the historical practice of transferring 'mothering' skills into the educational institution and considers current attitudes and behaviours in relation to this synergy. Analysing their own attitudes and practices through an innovative (and time-effective) methodology, AAA/I (Asynchronous Associative Auto/Inquiry), the participant researchers consider the ways in which, through collaboration, they ameliorate University processes and working conditions to support each other and their students. Findings are discussed in relation to masculinist traditions and competitiveness, collaboration and caring, and the creation of 'protective enclaves', feminised micro-contexts within the larger masculinist domain. Considering their actions in toto, the trio reflect on the extent that their actions promote, evade or hinder a move towards greater gender equality and admit to the personal costs of continually striving to change the working environment. Introduction This paper uses a gendered frame to examine how female academics can enhance their working conditions and the satisfaction of their female students by adopting collaborative, even collusive, 'ways of working'. The discussion is deliberately a gendered one because we are choosing to explore our ideas from a feminist position but also for practical reasons: we are all women, and for the most part our students are female too (but when male students enroll we do include them in our supportive practices). It sets out to consider how, as women, we manage our working lives, seeking successful careers within a profession where the 'ways of working' are commonly termed masculinist and men are promoted more often than women. 2 It was our intention to focus on the positive strategies we employ but, in response to feedback , we later discuss the cost of this positivity on our individual career progression and the choices that we have made. There is no intention to present a saccharine account, to artificially sweeten the discussion but nor do we want to position our university as a difficult place to work. From our reading and our academic networks we know that the challenges we face are not uncommon. The paper takes a narrative approach. It aims to blend the stories of three individuals with different career trajectories to find a 'common' voice. We have been colleagues for many years, co-teachers and co-researchers within the same university department and, more importantly , remain close friends despite working in an environment that is often considered to promote competition rather than the caring ethos we value. Part of our survival strategy includes developing novel ways of working like the research methodology that we describe within this paper, an approach that enabled us to share our reflections even though we were too busy to meet together face-to-face. The intention was to collect the relevant aspects of our 'life stories' and set them in context in order to weave a coherent 'life history' of our working practices. In doing this, we were following a tradition commonly used within educa

An Arts-Informed Narrative Inquiry into the Lived Experience of Women Casual Academics

An arts-informed narrative inquiry into the lived experience of women casual academics In this PhD dissertation I present an account of a person-centred, feminist research project that explores the lived experience of women casual academics in Australia. Casual academics comprise more than 60% of academics employed in Australia, most of whom are women. Yet very little is known about the lived experience of these women. As I understand lived experience to be known and communicated through story and narrative, I employ a narrative epistemology as a foundation to this research project’s design and communication. In addition, I understand lived experience to be fully embodied, messy and contextually situated. I therefore employ a narrative inquiry to elicit the emotionally and cognitively lived experience of six women casual academics from three different universities in South East Queensland. I then re-present these stories in the form of proto-verbatim theatre. Proto-verbatim theatre is a contemporary form of performance which employs the words and stories of research participants within a highly theatricalised aesthetic. The form of the genre makes explicit the constructedness of the re-presentation and cognitively and emotionally engages an audience in the stories of Others. I employ this form as it is congruent with the fully embodied stories of the research participants and their doubly Othered status as women and casual academics. Throughout this dissertation my voice is present in a first person narration in order to invite readers to hear my position within the research and to illuminate three of the main themes and aims with which I engage. First, I claim that no text is without an author; second I identify this research as a particular, contextually situated account of one research project; and third I critique traditional, masculine discourse that propagates a duplicitous neutrality of authorship. Finally, in addition to elements of a traditional PhD dissertation, I present a drama script, photographs and links to video recordings of a proto-verbatim theatre production in order to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ or explain (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) the lived experience of women casual academics. I also deliberately refrain from drawing ‘trustworthy conclusion and actionable recommendations’ in this dissertation (Bloomberg & Volpe, 2012), as the women casual academics’ stories, and my understanding of them, are ‘in-the-making’ (Childers, Rhee, & Daza, 2013); and the form of my communication seeks congruence with its content.

Women's ways of working: Circumventing the masculine structures operating within and upon the University

Women's Studies International Forum, 2017

The spaces and places that women casual academics (often fail to) inhabit

Higher Education Research & Development, 2015

This paper discusses a research project that aims to address the binary/irony of the central physical and teaching space that women casual academics inhabit within Australian universities, against their lack of presence in the existing discourses around higher education. The invisibility of women casual academics within the discourses around higher education generally, and scholarship around sessional staffing more specifically, provoked an arts-informed narrative inquiry into the lived experience of women casual academics. In this paper I offer an overview of the investigation and present extracts from a verbatim drama based on the words and worlds of women sessional staff in order to create congruency between the narrative communications of women causal academics' lived experience, and to make a space for the acknowledgement of women casual academics and a place for their voice.

Telling my story: Being a feminist researcher in higher education

South African journal of higher education, 2010

Fielding questions and curiosity about your research prompts you to consider how it is being read and understood. As a reader of research my inquisitiveness is about what its relationship is with other research, why the research is designed in a particular way and how researchers arrive at their findings. In other words, one looks for conceptual coherence in the arguments that are raised during the process of doing research. This article represents a reflexive account of my engagement with empirical research as a feminist researcher. I present supporting epistemological arguments to challenge the hegemony of a ‘universal’ knowledge that continues to make knowledges that are produced through feminist methodologies, suspect; thus undermining the value of such knowledges. My stance is that knowledge that is produced through research is always situated and thus never universal. Furthermore, the situatedness of the knowledge of the participant as well as the located knowledge of the researcher contributes to the research product (Haraway 1991; Stanley and Wise, 1993).

Creating feminised critical spaces and co-caring communities of practice outside patriarchal managerial landscapes

The experiences of five female lecturers working in higher education in the UK are explored as they engage in the search for a feminised critical space as a refuge from the masculinised culture of performativity in which they feel constrained and devalued. Email exchanges were used as a form of narrative enquiry that provided opportunity and space to negotiate identities and make meaning from experiences. The exchanges provided a critical space, characterised by trust, honesty and care for the self and for each other, that enabled a sharing of authentic voices and a reaffirming of identities that were made vulnerable through the exposing of the self as an emotional, politicised subject. Drawing on existing theoretical understandings of critical feminised spaces enabled us to create a pedagogical framework for work with students in further developing caring and co-caring communities of practice that are not alternative to, but are outside the performativity landscape of education.

Women in Academia: Reconceptualising and recontextualising nurturance pedagogy in higher education

Education as Change, 2007

According to Gore (1993:68-69), authority in the construction of feminist pedagogy is addressed in at least three ways, namely: authority versus nurturance; authority as authorship; and authority as power. While authority as authorship suggests considering teaching as an enactment of a narrative in which authority refers to the power to represent and challenge versions of reality; authority as power interrogates the ideal of not replicating traditional conceptions of teacher as single-authority figure that mainstream patriarchal education has been critiqued for. In this paper I explore the theme ‘authority versus nurturance’, as it emerged from my study, “Enacting Feminisms in Academia”, which was conducted with educators teaching English from a feminist perspective at five universities in Southern Africa. Women dominate the teaching profession. However, despite the existence of various egalitarian policy transformation documents and legislation (especially within the South African context), that make provision for women to assume research and senior management positions, their roles and status continue to be tied largely to teaching and administrative duties. These roles inevitably activate and perpetuate patriarchally mandated scripts of women/female teacher as loving nurturer; emanating from the associative and traditional functions of woman as caregiver, and bounteous mother. The expectation for female educators to enact maternal roles becomes more pronounced within institutions of higher education, where massification of education, and substandard pre-tertiary education have seen an increase in the intake of students who arrive for university education with stymied literacy and conceptual skills. Thus, the discourse on nurturance versus authority emerges from attempts to interrogate and reconceptualise the feminisation of education. This paper explores the participants’ unanimous efforts to unhinge the female teacher from association with caregiver and intellectualised mammy, while simultaneously ensuring that she is not read as disconnected mother. It also presents the participants’ views about the need to recontextualise teacher-student interpersonal relations, to render them more appropriate for relating to university-age students. Key Words: feminist pedagogy; higher education; nurturance pedagogy.

Academic Women: Lived Experiences in Contexts of Inequality

Acta Paedagogica Vilnensia, 2018

This article builds on the results of a research project into the professional experience of seven academic women in universities and research centers in Catalonia, Spain. The aim of the project was to explore the personal and professional experience of three generations of women in the process constituting their identity as university teachers, researchers and managers. The writing of their professional life histories has enabled us to investigate how they, as women, have become the types of higher education teachers, researchers and managers that they were becoming, and we wished to delve into the relationship between their personal experiences and the development of their professional careers. In this process, we have revealed the strategies of adaptation, resistance and creation developed by women, the forms of symbolic violence that they experience and the changes through which their careers have passed within the context of an institution that is still continuously revealed by different studies to be deeply discriminating and unequal for women.

Academic women’s voices on gendered divisions of work and care: ‘Working till I drop . . . then dropping’

European Journal of Women's Studies

Our main goal in this article is to discuss the structural and persistent problems experienced by women academics, especially with respect to the gendered divisions of academic tasks and unequal divisions of care obligations in the domestic sphere. The analysis is based on reflexive thematic analysis of the open-ended questions of an online questionnaire on the academic work environment, work satisfaction, stress, academic duties and allocation of tasks, and thoughts on gender equality. Academics from different countries voice their lived experiences, frustrations as well as worries about their future. We aim to highlight how these issues are embedded in the structures of academic capitalism and argue against the tendency to individualise these issues in a bid to inspire an informed collective resistance.

Gazing Inward: Teaching in the Postgraduate Milieu (original) (raw)

Related papers