Abstract:

Over the last 20 years, Australian universities have increasingly recognised the importance of education in their institutional missions. Since the Australian government’s Bradley review (Bradley et al., 2008), which set a national target of at least 40 per cent of 25 to 34-year-old having attained a qualification at bachelor level or above by 2025, Australian universities have focused on not only improving the quality of education, but also to do this for ever increasing numbers of students - similar to widening participation targets and quality improvement work seen in systems in the United Kingdom and European Union.

For research-intensive universities such as the University of New South Wales (UNSW), key considerations include how best to support teaching academics, to raise the quality of teaching, to facilitate culture change around education within a research-intensive environment, and to improve the student experience for over 60,000 domestic and international students.

To address this challenge, the university recognised the need to support our educators and develop ongoing generations of these educational experts. Introduced in 2017, the Education Focussed (EF) role offers a new career path for UNSW’s most passionate and innovative educators, enhancing education across UNSW through a greater focus on, and sharing of, pedagogical knowledge and teaching innovation. EF academics are supported to succeed through professional development activities, grants and awards, and the university’s new promotions policy (to full professor). The greatest benefit of a stronger educational focus is the enrichment of the student experience at UNSW.

To build this community, we drew on Wenger’s (1998) ideas on communities of practice, and on Bronfenbrenner’s (1974) ecological framework to design a holistic, developmental approach for our EF program. The impact of this program can be seen in the overall higher student satisfaction scores of EF academics, their promotion to educational leadership positions across the university (over 50 promotions, with parity with other academic tracks), and the growing number and recognition of the EF community (e.g. over 600 appointed, 14 institutional as well student’s choice awards, two KPMG Inspiring Teacher Awards, six national citations from the Australian Awards for University Teaching and over 30 appointments as senior and principal fellows of the Higher Education Academy UK). EF academics are now the fastest growing academic group not only at UNSW, but across the Australian tertiary sector (Ross, 2019). Importantly, the EF program is facilitating a culture change at UNSW – one that values education and recognises its importance alongside research, as demonstrated by vibrant, cross-disciplinary EF Communities of Practice comprising EF, non-EF and professional staff.

This presentation will present a case study of UNSW’s EF program and our approach to academic development as academic community development. We will discuss the processes by which we effected this change and the issues we faced related to professional identity, role clarity, workload, education leadership, institutional cultures, and scholarship and research (Geschwind & Brostrom, 2015; Tight, 2016; Nyamapfene, 2018). We will share the lessons we have learned in implementing this university-wide change, as well as the impact it has had on our academic staff, on our university as an organisation, and on our students.

Keywords:

Education focussed, academic careers, culture change.