The RED Report: The contribution of sessional teachers to higher education, Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2008

From the introduction, by Professor Rob Castle, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic and International), University of Wollongong:

To maintain for permanent staff the ideal of being teaching and research academics, we have had to rely on sessional staff. The analogy I’ve always made with sessional staff is to describe them as the proletariat of the academic profession, but that Victorian description of an industrial working class just doesn’t fit as well as that other part of Victorian life, the domestic servant.

In many ways the lifestyle of the traditional teaching research academic is totally dependent on the contribution of sessional staff, in the way that Victorian middle class lifestyles were dependent on the domestic servant. They slept in the attic, ate in the kitchen and you grumbled constantly that what they did was actually not quite what you wanted. But nonetheless, they were absolutely essential to your being and to your lifestyle. I think this applies equally to many sessional staff today.

From the opening summary:

The analysis of current policy and practice across the participating institutions found that

- Evidence of systemic sustainable policy and practice is rare;

- There is a general lack of formal policy and procedure in relation to the employment and administrative support of sessional teachers;

- While induction is considered important in all universities, the ongoing academic management of sessional teachers is not as well understood or articulated;

- Paid participation in compulsory professional development for sessional teachers is atypical; and

- Despite various national and institutional recognition and reward
initiatives, many sessional teachers continue to feel their contribution is undervalued.

What follows are some notes compiled from one such meeting – the postgraduate students’ panel that is the final session on day 1. I wanted to post these before the conference so that anyone interested might get a sense of what we’ll be talking about; also because the group decided they will finish their session with a list of “10 things graduate students want.” This seemed like something that could benefit from some dialogue. So after reading their ideas, maybe some of you might like to leave your thoughts to add to the mix. We can then draw them in to the conversation on the day.

The panel comprises:

Tammi Jonas (University of Melbourne & CAPA)
Brady Robards (Griffith University)
Simon Sellars (Monash University)
Hannah Stark (University of Adelaide)

Their task is to respond to the day’s events and present their own perspectives on ‘the state of the industry’.

*Notes compiled by Alison Huber*

NB: These notes are designed to reflect some of the things we talked about on the day, not what the presentations will consist of themselves. Speakers will now prepare presentations that build on what we discussed. Also, while some of these topics will have been covered earlier in the day, the panel felt it would be useful to offer the postgraduate’s perspective on these matters. In no particular order, the four topics that will be addressed are:

1. Sessional teaching, inc. course coordination and tutoring

* Lack of adequate training and support; lack of work space in which to meet with students; what sort of impact does this have on the experience and quality of teaching?

* Disparity across institutions in relation to wages – some universities expect their tutors to attend lectures and meetings and mark essays all without payment of any kind, while other institutions pay for much more of what’s involved in tutoring; some institutions are no longer paying postgraduates for giving guest lectures, claiming that its real payment is the experience. At stake here is: what should be reasonably expected from a tutor in a time vs. wages analysis? With increasingly time-consuming models of assessment for markers (eg, monitoring blogging or other online tasks), and the increase in the numbers of email rather than face-to-face contact with students, old models of remuneration are becoming increasingly redundant.

* Payment in relation to experience – while tutors with PhDs are paid more than those who are still postgraduates, what about rewarding tutors for their years of tutoring experience? There are several issues that could result from this though – it could lead to disadvantage for those who do have experience (because they will be more expensive to hire); at the same time, it could also return tutoring to its original purpose, which was to give postgraduate students access to the experience of teaching undergraduates. Also noted in this conversation was the fact that some departments continue to give tutoring work to very experienced tutors, many of whom have long finished their PhDs, and so take the work away from those inexperienced postgrads who are then never given the chance of sessional tutoring. The question here seems to be, what is the status of ‘experience’ in sessional tutoring?

* Morale – to what extent do the conditions of sessional teaching contribute to a lack of morale, and to what extent might this impact on the learning experience for students? Under these conditions, is the standard of education being compromised?

2. Professional development and mentoring

* the obscure nature of the PhD candidature and its processes at many institutions – there were a variety of stories shared here about people needing to muddle their own ways through their candidature, with little guidance until reaching milestones. This is an issue partly to do with supervision, but also to do with the way that the postgrad is often left to his/her own devices in a ‘survival of the fittest’ model of candidature. Again, the disparity across different institutions became obvious here. Can there be a coordinated effort to ensure that students have equal access to professional development throughout their candidatue?

* since it seems clear that there are not enough jobs in universities for the volume of PhD graduates in Australia, to what extent might departments and institutions have a responsibility to help students think about work outside the university, and how the skills of the PhD transfer into the wider workplace? How can we avoid the pessimism that many students feel about their prospects when they are constantly told that there are ‘no jobs’?

* what about the end of the PhD, when students are often ‘cut loose’ from their scholarship, their office (if they had one), etc? is there a way that institutions can assist students in that post-PhD moment between submission and reports, to help them transition into (full-time) work? The NTEU has lobbied for an extension of scholarship to include this time, so that students can get on their feet following submission; this is a time of confusion and exhaustion for many students.

3. Collegial atmosphere/ growth of a departmental culture/ networking

* everyone talked here about the importance of feeling part of a research culture in a department that includes both the academic staff and the postgraduate students. A variety of examples emerged here about models that have been successful in producing a sense of community, as well as some about the lack of a supportive environment in which to study.

* in an ideal world, ‘supervision’ is not just a one-on-one hierarchical model, but actually a ‘peer’ model, where students have access to other academic staff in a collegial context (eg, seminar series), and where they work with each other; this is part of the way to avoid the sometimes lonely life of the solitary postgrad.

* the group noted the importance of physical spaces in developing this atmosphere: meeting rooms or tea rooms, as well as offices on campus that allow students to use their postgrad experience like a ‘real job’ where they go in daily, 9-5 (or similar), to an office where others are doing the same thing around them.

* the encouragement of networking outside the home institution – this can be an issue of funding (in terms of enabling students to attend conference etc), but how can universities further help their students form or access a network of scholars in their field? This is particularly important for students who find themselves isolated in their department because of a specialised PhD topic.

4. Post-PhD career path

* in a similar vein to Topic 2, the panel thought that many of the challenges/ decisions that a student faces post-PhD are not discussed openly, and again people are left to trial and error to find out ‘what happens next’. What are the options for post-PhD? How prepared should one be for this time during candidature itself? What is an academic job interview like, for example, and can institutions help to prepare for these sorts of experiences during candidature? If publications are so important to getting jobs and grants, why are they not made more of a feature/ requirement during candidature?

* increasingly, the experience of work in the immediate years post-PhD is one of piecemeal casual employment; what does this mean in a broader sense for universities, and how does it affect the purpose of the PhD? How long should one be prepared to pursue this sort of work in the years following a PhD qualification?

Other things we noted

We did discuss the idea of presenting a Utopian model for PhD experience; while some of the panel liked this idea, others thought that it was dangerous for giving the impression of this being a panel of ‘dreamy’ or naïve postgrads who don’t live in the reality of university budgets and policies (which is not the case). So we want to find a balance between outlining an ideal world, and finding a way that this ideal can operate within the current constraints of university politics.

It’s also important to find the balance between complaining about things that are inadequate/ wrong in the system, and offering suggestions for ways in which conditions could be improved.

We realise too that there is not really any new information here in what we discussed; rather we see this panel as being important in highlighting what we already know to be the deficiencies and strengths of the current postgraduate/ PhD experience in order to have an open discussion in such a forum. The group represents a range of positions/experiences, both positive and negative, and we want to highlight these differences in the panel.