Shaping the time to be a good teacher: a case study on teacher excellence and time ownership in a British transnational university

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study is about a lecturer protecting herself and her teaching from the university’s increasing demands on her personal and timeless time. The British university is shaped by a fundamental arrhythmia: the co-existence of digital time, that academics are encouraged to embrace working from anywhere at any time; and analogical time, the linear time of classes, deadlines, and required administrative tasks. Pressured by these competing demands on their time and responsibilities, research and surveys show that academics feel alienated as university time arrhythmia ‘devours’ both their thinking and personal time and can compromise their wellbeing. This case study aims at uncovering the connection between the lecturer’s practices of teaching excellence, her administrative work and university time. Qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews illustrates how university time and teaching excellence are related, and university arrhythmia can actually be used to protect good teaching. This lecturer skilfully managed university time-devouring arrhythmia: when the university used an analogical logic of time, she used digital time, and vice versa. By doing this, she protected her personal and timeless time as well as her own teaching from mounting demands of teacher excellence, measured by the university’s simultaneous and conflicting digital and analogical logics of time.