Making a mess of academic work: experience, purpose and identity

Within the policy discourse of academic work, teaching, research and administration are seen as discrete elements of practice. We explore the assumptions evident in this 'official story' and contrast it with the messy experience of academic work, drawing upon empirical studies and conceptualisations from our own research and from recent literature. We propose that purposive disciplinary practice across time and space is inextricably entangled with and fundamental to academic experience and identity; the fabrications of managerialism, such as the workload allocation form, fragment this experience and attempt to reclassify purposes and conceptualisations of academic work. Using actor-network theory as an analytical tool, we explore the gap between official and unofficial stories, attempting to reframe the relationship between discipline and its various manifestations in academic practice and suggesting a research agenda for investigating academic work

Taking a break: doctoral summer schools as transformative pedagogies

This chapter focuses on the doctoral summer school as a challenging pedagogy for doctoral education, in which the traditional supervisory relationship and the disciplinary curriculum are deconstructed through intensive group processes. We draw on our experiences as pedagogues on the Roskilde University Graduate School in Lifelong Learning which has hosted an international summer school for the last ten years. We describe the new learning spaces created and explore the democratic group processes and the collaborative action learning in-volved when discipline and stage of study are set to the side in this multi-paradigmatic, multi-national context. Despite the wide range of participants in terms of length of study, focus and methodological approach, the respite from supervisory pedagogies and the careful critiques of multi-national peer ‘opponents’ is often transformative in the doctoral students’ research sub-jectivities and continuing journeys

The doctor and the blue form: learning professional responsibility

Book synopsis: This book presents leading-edge perspectives and methodologies to address emerging issues of concern for professional learning in contemporary society. The conditions for professional practice and learning are changing dramatically in the wake of globalization, new modes of knowledge production, new regulatory regimes, and increased economic-political pressures. In the wake of this, a number of challenges for learning emerge: more practitioners become involved in interprofessional collaboration developments in new technologies and virtual workworlds emergence of transnational knowledge cultures and interrelated circuits of knowledge. The space and time relations in which professional practice and learning are embedded are becoming more complex, as are the epistemic underpinnings of professional work. Together these shifts bring about intersections of professional knowledge and responsibilities that call for new conceptions of professional knowing. Exploring what the authors call sociomaterial perspectives on professional learning they argue that theories that trace not just the social but also the material aspects of practice – such as tools, technologies, texts but also bodies and actions - are useful for coming to terms with the challenges described above. Reconceptualising Professional Learning develops these issues through specific contemporary cases focused on one of the book’s three main themes: (1) professionals’ knowing in practice, (2) professionals’ work arrangements and technologies, or (3) professional responsibility. Each chapter draws upon innovative theory to highlight the sociomaterial webs through which professional learning may be reconceptualised. Authors are based in Australia, Canada, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and the USA as well as the UK and their cases are based in a range of professional settings including medicine, teaching, nursing, engineering, social services, the creative industries, and more. By presenting detailed accounts of these themes from a sociomaterial perspective, the book opens new questions and methodological approaches. These can help make more visible what is often invisible in today’s messy dynamics of professional learning, and point to new ways of configuring educational support and policy for professionals

Responsibility matters: putting illness back into the picture

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore specific instances of junior doctors’ responsibility. Learning is often understood to be a prerequisite for managing responsibility and risk but this paper aims to argue that this is insufficient because learning is integral to the management of responsibility and risk. Design/methodology/approach – This is a “collective” case study of doctors designed to focus on the interrelationships between individual professionals and complex work settings. The authors focussed on two key points of transition: the transition to beginning clinical practice which is the move from medical student to foundation training (F1) and the transition from generalist to specialist clinical practice. Findings – Responsibility in clinical settings is immediate, concrete, demands response and (in) action has an effect. Responsibility is learnt and is not always apparent; it shifts depending on time of day/night and who else is present. Responsibility does not necessarily increase incrementally and can decrease; it can be perceived differently by different actors. Responsibility is experienced as personal although it is distributed. Originality/value – This detailed examination of practice has enabled the authors to foreground the particularities, urgency and fluidity of everyday clinical practice. It recasts their understandings of responsibility – and managing risk – as involving learning in practice. This is a critical insight because it suggests that the theoretical basis for the current approach to managing risk and responsibility is insufficient. This has significant implications for policy, employment, education and practice of new doctors and for the management of responsibility and risk

Feminist Teaching, Feminist Research, Feminist Supervision: Feminist Praxis In Adult Education

Feminist teaching and research have both been the subject of analytical discussions within adult education. Feminist research supervision has received rather less attention. We focus on two main issues, the role of experience and the feminist analysis of power/knowledge dynamics, in order to highlight the similarities and differences between the three areas

Constructing pedagogic identities: versions of the educator in AE and HE

This paper analyses the relationships between pedagogic identities in HE and AE, suggesting that HE could build its social purpose orientation and reclaim pedagogy by learning from the AE community

Pedagogy, Positionality and Adult Education: Missing Links?

Adult educators in the UK are now covered by one of two sets of professional standards. Using our previously developed framework for evaluating pedagogic models, we examine the extent to which perspectives on, and assumptions about positionality are evident and the ways in which diversity is recognised by those standards

Learning to be a social scientist: discipline, department and university academic work practices

What are the everyday practices of academic work in social science? How do social scientists learn these everyday practices, particularly as they relate to the complex demands of the discipline, the department and the university? Whilst a number of studies have examined scientists and scientific work (including Latour and Woolgar, 1979), and ethnographers of higher education have focused on institutions (eg Tuchman 2009) and students (eg Nespor 1994, Mertz, 2007), rather less attention has been paid to social scientists. This is somewhat ironic in the context of a conference on work and learning, given that we are social scientists ourselves. In order, therefore, to attend to this omission, a recent study of the ‘black box’ practices of academic work in the social sciences, from which this paper is drawn, was developed (Malcolm and Zukas, 2014). The study takes a sociomaterial approach, in keeping with a strand of studies on work and learning (eg Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuk, 2011). It builds on previous work on the construction and development of disciplinary academic identity and practice (Malcolm and Zukas, 2009). The research was intended to trace how academic work in social science is learned, negotiated, experienced and enacted within universities and disciplinary communities. In particular, it examined the ways in which the competing ‘workplaces’ of institution, department and discipline interact, and how academics experience and negotiate the connections and conflicts of these academic workplaces. The empirical work from which this paper is drawn was based on three case universities. We shadowed individual social scientists in their daily work to produce a detailed picture of everyday academic practice. Observations included meetings, teaching and research activities and social, collegial and technological interactions as well as the collection of images, artefacts and relevant textual material (such as emails, disciplinary texts, public documents). In this paper, we will consider time, physical and virtual workplaces and [networks of] disciplinary, departmental and university relationships. By attending closely to the organisation of intellectual, technological, social and physical space and to the ways in which academics’ time is negotiated, mapped and ‘consumed’, we explore how and why academics learn to adopt particular working practices. Further, by taking account of networks of relationships, we examine questions of power and influence in and through discipline, department and institution. Although understood by social scientists as primary in their ‘real’ work, we show how disciplinary relationships are often enacted in the times and spaces between ‘work about work’ (eg recruitment and promotional activities, accountability demands, etc.). We identify overwork, self and institutional exploitation and gender inequalities as issues. We conclude that only a better understanding of social scientists’ learning of work practices will enable us to support them in negotiating successfully and collegially the complex demands of discipline, department and university work practices

The 'Good' Teacher? Constructing Teacher Identities for Lifelong Learning

The symposium will focus on trans-national constructions of the 'good' teacher through popular culture, through professional development orthodoxies and through professional practices such as professional growth plans, inspection and teacher regulation

Reassembling academic work: a sociomaterial investigation of academic learning

Academic work is changing fast, as is the work of other professionals, because of challenges such as accountability and regulations frameworks and globalised academic markets. Such changes also have consequences for everyday academic practice and learning. This paper seeks to explore some of the ways in which academic work is changing by opening the ‘black-box’ of everyday academic work and examining the enactment of academics’ everyday learning. The paper draws on a study of everyday academic practice in the social sciences with respect to the institution, the department and the discipline. Assuming a sociomaterial sensibility, the study also sought to understand how academics’ learning is enacted in everyday work. Within three universities, fourteen academics were work-shadowed; social, material, technological, pedagogic and symbolic actors were observed and, where possible, connections and interactions were traced. The paper illuminates through two stories from the study how specific practices and meanings of disciplinary academic work are negotiated, configured and reconfigured within and beyond the department or meso-level, attending to resistance and rejection as well as accommodation and negotiation. The paper responds to educational concerns of professional (here, academic) learning by foregrounding both the assembling and reassembling of academic work and the enactment of learning