Reading Autoethnography: The Impact of Writing Through the Body

In this paper, we explore alternative ways in which academic writing can have impact, specifically in how it can move from the clearly measured to the deeply felt. We do this by writing a creative nonfiction narrative of our experimentation with autoethnography, detailing our responses to four published autoethnographic articles. We found that reading and engaging with these papers meant that we also had to listen and reconnect to our bodies in ways that initially seemed foreign to us as academics. But we persevered, and this project strengthened our resolve to create time/space to engage writing/research that deeply moves and transforms us. Within our experience, this writing offers alternatives to the dominant techno-rationalistic certainty of academic discourses that work to artificially separate mind from body

A Collective Feminist Ethics of Care with Talanoa: Embodied Time in the ShiFting Spaces of Women’s Academic Work

Institutional structures of Australian universities are increasingly characterised by unsustainable practices of accelerated time and work intensification. This chapter aims to locate and analyse what a collective ‘ethics of care’ might look like as a response to these practices. It does this by narrating micro-stories of the embodied social practices of women-academic workers, drawing on experiences of time spent at an off-site group retreat. The stories within the chapter are carried by Indigenous Fijian talanoa ways of knowing and critical autoethnography. The use of talanoa brings a relationality to ‘self-care’, shifting it away from the individual experience towards a more collective movement. Doing this helps to recapture the pleasure and purpose that characterises ‘timeless time’, thereby positively influencing everyday cultures of practice in higher education

Lost in production: the erasure of the teacher educator in Australian university job advertisements

Special Issue: The work of teacher education: policy, practice and institutional condition

Navigating changing times: Exploring teacher educator experiences of resilience

While there exists notable research in Australia and internationally on the ways pre-service and early career teachers develop and maintain resilience, there is a paucity of literature examining the resilience of teacher educators. The teacher education landscape has a dynamic nature, and in the Australian context, there have been multiple changes to policy and accreditation that have impacted on the work of teacher educators, including: the introduction of literacy and numeracy testing and a teaching performance assessment for teacher education students; and strict regulatory controls for providers. This context, combined with the intensification of academic work in higher education settings, has led us to investigate the personal and contextual factors that enable or constrain teacher educators’ resilience. In this chapter, we draw on a social ecological model of resilience to explore the factors that sustain and challenge teacher educators in their work, and use the findings to highlight implications for the field of teacher education