Teaching specialist positions: creating elite teachers or an academic under-class in Australia’s research-intensive universities?

Abstract

Teaching specialist positions differ from casual teaching positions and teaching-only positions in Australian universities. Teaching specialist academics have a workload that is comprised of 60+% teaching, with any research time usually assigned to the scholarship of teaching, rather than to discipline-specific research. These positions purportedly access the same opportunities for promotion and staff development as those offered to research-only or research-teaching academics. Whether this is the reality, is an issue that this thesis explores. Teaching and scholarship were always the mainstays of academic work, but since the Second World War, advances in technology and its consequences for economic development, have elevated research above teaching in prestige and status. In this thesis, narrative and thematic history approaches based purely on publicly available documentary sources are employed to examine trends and policy that influenced university teaching at both the international and national levels. Critical analysis of the impact of globalisation, neo-liberalism, New Public Management and Commonwealth Government policy inform understanding of the issues that led to the adoption of teaching specialist positions by nearly every Australian university over the past decade. The emergence of teaching specialist positions in the Group of Eight (Go8) universities is the focus of this thesis. These universities built their reputations and leadership on research, but all have adopted teaching specialist positions in one form or another. Why they have done this and what they have gained from it are key issues addressed in this research. This thesis argues that the level of support for teaching specialist positions amongst the Go8s is varied. Some appear to hold a genuine belief that these positions will contribute to an improvement in teaching quality, whilst others seem to have implemented them because it is now standard practice across the sector. What the Go8s do have in common with each other, is their almost unquestioning compliance with government policy and their responsiveness to competition within national and international higher education arenas.