SUSTAINED ENQUIRY

Sustained enquiry

Sustained enquiry

Rationale

Gappa, et al. (2005) suggest that “the continued vitality of the academic profession is ... of concern to a very large number of people and institutions” (p.32) and central to that vitality is recruiting and developing of new academics. Given the importance of new academic staff to the profession as a whole, the purpose of this research paper is to develop an understanding related to the difficulties and support available to the new academics. This paper offers a number of original insights into this issue and contributes to both the scant literature on career support for new academics and to practice with a model that may have applicability across a number of different settings.

Literature Review

In discussing the nature of academic work, Bath and Smith (2004) offer a perspective based on activities and classify academic work as a combination of “research, teaching or service” (p.10). In reviewing the literature, they offer a number of examples of activities undertaken by academics such as “learning about new developments in one's discipline … advising/mentoring/assisting colleagues … teaching … conducting research … committee work” (p.11). While this activity-based approach is useful in introducing the variety of work involved in being an academic, it is less useful in explaining the culture and patterns of convention in which that academic work takes place. Green (2009) offers a different perspective and suggests that academic work should be thought of as being located in a discipline rather than as a set of activities and suggests that, while academics may be comfortable within their own discipline, they are “novices” in terms of contextualizing that into higher education generally (p.35). Bath and Smith (2004) argue that this means academics will have a sense of belonging to a discipline as a first point of professional reference and the outcome of this, according to Kember (1997), is that “many university academics hardly consider themselves 'teachers' at all, instead visualising themselves more as members of a discipline” (p.255).

For Trowler and Bamber (2005) the relationship between institutions and academics is one of “multiple games with competing goals and different rules” (p.79). Austin (2002), for example, argues that a combination of things such as student diversity, changing technologies, expanding expectations, and growing workloads are fundamentally changing the nature of academic institutions and that conceptualizations of academic work have yet to catch up. One possible outcome of this is a “mismatch” between the traditional values of higher education and its “massification” (Trowler & Bamber, 2005, p.82). Asmar (2002). Honan and Teferra (2001) consider this in the context of the challenges facing the academic profession in the United States and raise two fundamental issues about, first, how new people can be attracted into faculty jobs and, second, how academic careers will progress in the future. Unless these tensions between traditional conceptions of academic work and the reality of a more competitive and dynamic sector are resolved, they argue, the outcome will always be unfulfilled expectations especially amongst those new to the ...