Casualisation of work – Page 3 – Music for Deckchairs

Just not that into you

Kate Bowles June 10, 2012 25 Comments

New Faculty Majority Board Member Jack Longmate, writing in the NFM blog this week, thinks that there are fresh signs of “potential for traction in public policy thinking” in relation to the conditions faced by academics working off the career track in America’s higher education system. His optimism has been sparked by Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, who’s been speaking out against “casino capitalism”. Reich was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, and he writes on the…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Risk

The hardest part

Kate Bowles March 28, 2012 3 Comments

OK, so here’s a quick follow-up on yesterday’s post about Blackboard’s complex rebranding of itself as an open source visionary. Phil Hill thinks this isn’t the key point, and I feel that he’s right. As I mentioned yesterday, Ray Henderson has issued a significant challenge to higher education, in the form of an offer “to solve the hardest problems in education, comprehensively.” Educators are really familiar with being the experience of being told that we have a problem that someone…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Student engagement

Hope’s temper

Kate Bowles February 13, 2012 1 Comment

Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. … Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. (Henry Giroux, 2004) The Adjunct Project is one of the most important outcomes of the recent US summit on precarity in higher education. Behind it is an impressively…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

Precarious

Kate Bowles February 7, 2012 8 Comments

Truth is forever twinned as having an incidence and carrying an import. Even sciences like medicine and chemistry so physically concrete carry significance for the soul. … Microscopes become tragic in what they may reveal. (Kenneth Cragg, The Order of the Wounded Hands, 2006) Well, here’s something concrete that has import for the soul. Higher education systems around the world have become dependent on the availability of a large pool of cheap labour who are prepared to teach students for…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, University marketing

The robot and the muse

Kate Bowles December 23, 2011 2 Comments

It’s that time of year. Predictions and lists everywhere, like the snow currently falling over Google, WordPress, bitly … (memo to northern hemisphere: look down very carefully and like Gulliver you will see the tiny little people from the other half of the world running around doing their Christmas shopping in shorts). It happens like this every year, but higher education has a particularly worried tone at the moment, which is no wonder considering the lack of restraint in the…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk, Student engagement

Is it time?

Kate Bowles December 8, 2011 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, Professor Frank Larkin reported for the L H Martin institute that staff-student ratios in Australian higher education are a bit worse than are commonly claimed. What makes this sensitive is the government’s ambitious target of 40% of 25-34 year olds being degree qualified by 2020. There’s some debate about the viability of this target, and the details are vague on exactly how this will raise national productivity unless we’re really prescriptive on what those undergraduates study, and what…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Change management, Higher education, Rankings

Trust wipeout

Kate Bowles October 28, 2011 18 Comments

From Cap and Gown yesterday, this question: Can someone in universities please start thinking about cultures of trust and what creates them?? The urgency of the double question mark won’t seem out of place to anyone working in universities at the moment. Across the academic-professional staff divide, or in the ways that academics and students talk about each other, or in the tense and often bitter exchanges between management and unions, there’s a tone that’s ungenerous at best, and openly suspicious…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

Blank slate thinking

Kate Bowles June 2, 2011 1 Comment

It seems we’ve made the decision to standardise our first year teaching mode to two hours of content delivery, with one hour weekly for class discussion. At the moment, more than half teach in this way, but some disciplines offer shorter lectures and longer discussion. It’s a classic bit of historical untidiness, like an uneven streetscape in an area destined for gentrification. Straightening this out will make our individual workloads easier to calibrate, and in turn this will make everything…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Higher education, Student engagement

Letting ourselves go?

Kate Bowles April 30, 2011 0 Comments

A Canadian study of health issues affecting early career academics suggests that they may be sacrificing physical exercise in order to try to secure an inside lane position on the cinder track that leads to tenure. The study hints that if they’re doing this, they’re “letting themselves go”, and the point is touchingly made with an illustration of a bulging (male) waistline. Remedies include taking part in a charity fun run or “park[ing] your car far away to get a little…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Higher education, Risk

Bursting point

Kate Bowles April 24, 2011 0 Comments

There’s a conversation building about whether we’re wise to look at higher education through the lens of the economy, given that nothing much looks good through the bottom of that dirty glass. Markets achieve extraordinary results using the levers and pulleys of scarcity, rivalry and desire, but this volatility doesn’t always help the big public institutions that deliver other kinds of social and cultural benefits, like education. So we half-protect these familiar institutions of public life from the market in…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Risk, Student engagement