Academic Higher Education Research Articles

A Programme for Women achieving Excellence in Research (PoWER): theoretically informed intervention design and evaluation

ABSTRACT Academics in Higher Education are often expected both to teach and to research; this is a particular challenge for women both structurally and individually. Initiatives to address structural issues include AdvanceHE. Here, we focus on individual issues and report on the Programme for Women Achieving Excellence in Research, a theory-based intervention. Barriers to success were assessed and course content tailored accordingly. Evaluation demonstrated that barriers were reduced and that confidence increased. Although the barriers are both individual and contextual, our rigorous approach allows international application through intervention modification without loss of fidelity. This offers a new approach for academic developers to enable female researchers.

Experiential Learning for Circular Operations Management in Higher Education

This research-to-practice article delves into novel learning experiences for operations management education, involving the circular economy and experiential learning. Higher Education academics are required to develop effective learning that actively and impactfully helps nurture in students the essential competency to face sustainable development demands. In operations management education, one possibility is to integrate real-world circular economy challenges into learning activities that address issues concerning solid waste generation in business processes and operations. This type of innovative learning experience involves both conceptual understanding and practical implementation. Accordingly, experiential learning is considered a suitable pedagogy for this purpose in this work because of its hands-on applications, critical thinking, and active engagement. To illustrate this proposition, this paper presents a case study concerning an operations management undergraduate course at a Mexican university. The case study indicates how to translate a situation of solid waste generation in a business into relevant disciplinary experiential learning. The results show that students regarded the learning experience as motivating, interesting, and relevant while widely accomplishing their learning objectives. However, limitations did exist regarding experiential learning, the methodological approach, data collection, and implementation challenges. Future work points to the need for further learning experiences and to improve research reliability, transferability, and validity.

Why We Teach – Part I: Reflections from higher education academics from around the world [Education Corner

Why We Teach – Part I: Reflections from higher education academics from around the world [Education Corner

Why We Teach – Part II: Reflections from higher education academics from around the world [Young Professionals

Why We Teach – Part II: Reflections from higher education academics from around the world [Young Professionals

Crafting Connections: Creating Counterspaces to Academic Diversity Labour

In this piece we discuss the workspace precarities of women of colour academics in higher education in the United States between the early 2000s and early 2020s and share some thinking about how one might labour beyond institutional structures of diversity. In particular, we offer an argument for the importance of counterspaces to the institutions that employ them and the power of collective labour outside institutional structures (in this case, sewing and quilting) for weathering shifting institutional priorities and labour inequities. We offer insights into why it might be necessary for women of colour academics to cultivate a relationship to emotional labour that is productive when it is collective and crafted away from workplace policies. We explore how crafting provides such an opportunity for what we describe as Non-Professional Productive Labour.

ChatGPT and the Pedagogical Challenge: Unveiling the Impact on Early-Career Academics in Higher Education

Emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT offer considerable promise for enhancing professional development in higher education. This study focuses on the experiences of early-career lecturers who utilise ChatGPT for professional development. Central questions explore ChatGPT's influence on their overall professional experience and the challenges and benefits of its use. While research on AI in education has been growing, few studies have delved into the specific experiences of young academics using ChatGPT. This study employed qualitative methods to address this gap, pre-cisely 45- to 60-minute in-depth interviews with two purposively selected lecturers, followed by a thematic analysis using a grounded theory approach. Our findings reveal a multifaceted landscape: on the one hand, ChatGPT enhances the ability to construct intricate academic arguments, increases effi-ciency in research and teaching tasks, and heightens critical thinking capabilities. Conversely, chal-lenges such as initial technical hurdles, occasional incorrect outputs, and concerns about over-dependency were also highlighted. Through this investigation, the study contributes to the broader discourse on AI in education by illustrating both the promising opportunities and potential pitfalls of using ChatGPT in academia. The study underscores the need for a balanced approach to AI adoption. It offers insights into the role of AI tools like ChatGPT in shaping the future of professional development in higher education.

The First-year Integration Test: a validation study.

To date, there has been little agreement on what important facets should be incorporated in quantitative measures of the academic and social first-year experience. Moreover, such scales are typically developed in academic higher education (HE) contexts (i.e., universities providing more theoretical and scientific education), and are disconnected from the experiences of students in professional HE contexts (i.e., university colleges, offering more vocational education that prepares students for practicing a specific occupation, such as social work). The First-year Integration Test (FIT) is a newly developed instrument that aims to map out students’ perceptions of how they are dealing with their academic and social transition in the first semester of HE, and was based on thorough qualitative research in professional HE. In the present study, the psychometric value of FIT is explored. Results show that FIT has good construct validity, and all scales are internally consistent. Also, evidence was found for the convergent, discriminant and criterion-related validity of the instrument. We argue that FIT holds potential as a tool for generating student feedback, as a monitoring tool within an institution’s quality assurance system, and as a valuable research instrument.

Female Academics in Higher Education: Conducting Qualitative Research against All Odds

This piece brings together the experiences of four Chilean researchers and one Spanish researcher with different professional backgrounds (psychology, sociology, nursing, and education), who conduct qualitative inquiry from other approaches, moments, and gender-sensitive topics of interest in the border regions of Arica and Parinacota, and Tarapacá, both in northern Chile; the capital Santiago; and in Andalucía, southern Spain. In this paper, the authors problematize their research experiences by focusing on their condition as academics conducting qualitative research in the context of neoliberal higher education and with a pandemic affecting all spheres of life. Finally, they explore what their experiences have been like in leading government-funded research projects and representing the voices of underrepresented people in different spheres of life in the field of education and health. Voices are shared to identify challenges and assess implications for qualitative research in these difficult times in the academy.

Link between job burnout antecedents and consequences: an empirical study on higher education faculty members in the Saudi context

PurposeThis study aimed to examine the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of burnout among higher education faculty in Saudi Arabia using the theoretical framework of the job demands-resources model.Design/methodology/approachUsing a quantitative research design, a cross-sectional survey was employed to collect data from faculty members across multiple Saudi universities. The constructs were measured using validated scales, and data analysis included exploratory factor analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, factorial ANOVA, and multiple regression.FindingsThe study identified moderate levels of burnout, confirming a significant positive relationship with role conflict and a negative relationship with internal locus of control. Burnout significantly contributed to depression, insomnia, and turnover intentions. However, no significant relationship was found between burnout and workplace conflict when controlling for other variables.Research limitations/implicationsThe study's findings can inform policymakers and academic administrators about measures to alleviate faculty burnout, thus contributing to healthier academic work environments aligned with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 goals.Originality/valueThis research extends the job demands-resources model within the context of higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia, offering nuanced insights into burnout dynamics among university faculty in this region. Despite the model's robustness, the absence of a significant relationship between burnout and workplace conflict signals the need for a more intricate understanding of burnout's antecedents and consequences.

PROFESSIONAL GROWTH THROUGH PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES: LIVED EXPERIENCES OF HIGHER EDUCATION FACULTY IN A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY IN LAHORE

The main purpose of the current study was to analyse the perceptions of Higher Education Faculty’s (HEFs) perceptions of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) as a means of professional growth. HEFs’ responses to PLCs and their professional growth via PLCs were explored in depth. It was a qualitative study with a phenomenology study method. Five higher education faculty members (Male = 2, Female = 3) were selected through a purposive sampling technique from a private university in Lahore. A semi-structured interview guide was developed for the collection of data. The participants were face to face interviewed. For the data analysis, thematic analysis was performed, and themes were explained considering participants’ responses. HEFs were aware of professional learning communities. HEFs were discovered to have a positive perception of PLC and explained how active collaboration with colleagues helped them grow professionally. It is recommended that higher education organisational leaders should implement PLCs to help the faculty grow professionally as; ultimately, it will enhance the quality of students’ learning. Keywords: Professional Learning Communities, Higher Education, Higher Education Faculty of Pakistan, Professional Growth.

Reviewing the literature: Collaborative professional learning for academics in higher education

ABSTRACT The literature indicates that collaborative activities can support professional learning (PL) for academics teaching in higher education (HE). Nevertheless, limited approaches for collegial PL exist that can be embedded in the day-to-day work of busy academics. This paper reports on an evidence-based approach to practice that was undertaken to develop an authentic, structured, collegial approach to PL for academics. This involved a review and synthesis of relevant literature, which revealed that collegial PL could be supported through self-initiated communities of academics; collaborative, social interaction with peers; safe, non-judgemental, supportive, conversations; critical reflection; sustained inquiry into practice; an exploration of perspectives; and bespoke resources. These findings informed the development of the Collaborative Peer-Observation Learning Circles (CPO/LC). The approach includes a four-stage process and adaptable template resources designed to facilitate academics’ collegial PL while also meeting the needs of accreditation requirements in HE.

A personal reflection upon navigating into a senior academic role.

There are 22,795 University professors in the UK, where 6,340 are women and only 40 are Black women, whilst Asian women are a few more in number. This clearly demonstrates the uncommon narrative of the under-representation of Black minority ethnic (BME) academics in higher education (HE) which has been written about in detail. In contrast, it is rare to read reports on initiatives to successfully navigate senior academic posts. In this article, I will describe two initiatives that I have developed and organized to successfully navigate senior BME academic posts, which have impacted my journey. The first initiative was to understand why postdoctoral researchers were "post-docing" for years, having not been successful in making the transition to lecturers. What was hindering the transition? I was one of them, and some of my female peers as well, who incidentally left HE. I was determined not to leave. I again thought about how to tackle it. It is a known fact that hearing successful BME people experiences and journeys and also understanding how they navigated HE can be powerful. In addition, empowering oneself with additional skills including mentoring, networking, applying for positions, not excluding ourselves due to the lack of confidence, and finally, the importance of having a work-life balance is important as health is wealth. I used this to put together the BME Early Career Researcher (ECR) conference-How to Stay in Academia. After 6 years, it is still going strong. In this article, I will share the impact made over the years which will include testimonies and promotions, including my recent promotion to an associate professor. The second initiative was to understand the barriers and challenges of senior lecturers being promoted to readers and professors. Having successfully transitioned to a lecturer, being overlooked for promotion was now an issue. The project was conducted in 2016/17 at KCL as part of the action plans that needed to be delivered having been a recipient of the Bronze Race Equality Charter Mark. I was provided with a cohort of 51 names of BME staff from different disciplines and was directed to see how I would engage them to hear their experiences. My first concern was that the staff would have engaged in previous initiatives with little or no benefits to them; however, this did not deter me. I thought of the best approach which commenced with a phone interview and then followed up with a focus group, ending with an informal conversation with the Principal of the University. Within 6 months, a BME male was promoted to professor. After a year, both genders were promoted to associate professors (readers) and professors, and to date, I am aware of at least 10 promotions. In both examples, I will demonstrate the support from our allies, some of whom are senior leaders that have openly supported us in our journey. This article will demonstrate a slight shift in the narrative, but a lot more needs to be done, and I am convinced the time is right to start pushing for more. This special issue is an example.

Academic rope to cope: Teachers’ coping strategy to academic anxiety

ABSTRACT The pandemic drove an abrupt global change that brought anxiety and distress to individuals. As such, the study explored the coping strategies used by higher education faculty members in dealing with academic anxiety. A concurrent triangulation mixed method was employed. Data were gathered from the faculty members of a state university using questionnaires and interviews. The faculty members primarily employed religiosity, problem-solving, cognitive reappraisal, and relaxation/recreation as their coping mechanisms. Furthermore, the females were more inclined to use emotional release, and the young adults employed social support and overactivity. Henceforth, the female faculty members may be exposed to peer counseling where they will be able to freely release their anger because of academic anxiety and the young adults may be showered with care and understanding from the people who are close to them and they may be provided with activities to do that may lessen their academic anxiety.

Descriptive predictors of nursing faculty’s job satisfaction

Introduction: Nursing shortages are directly impacted by the growing number of faculty vacancies in the United States. Many factors contribute to these vacancies including age, retirement, compensation, lack of funding for positions, marketplace competition, geographical area, lack of qualified applicants, and workload. The retention of qualified nursing faculty is crucial to the future health care system and to higher education institutions with nursing programs. Identifying work factors that consistently influence faculty members' intentions to remain in academia is crucial to ensuring public health with a robust nursing workforce of the future. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the literature related to determining job satisfaction and job descriptive work-engagement levels of individuals who are employed as higher education faculty members in the field of nursing.Description: Retention efforts for nursing faculty, due to shortage, have become necessary to examine how faculty perceive their engagement with teaching. A descriptive, correlational project study design was performed using an invitation to complete an online survey via Qualtrics as a part of a larger study of nursing faculty. This article will examine six predictor variables of the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) and the Job in General (JIG).Discussion: This study explored the job descriptive index and job satisfaction of faculty in nursing schools as it relates to an assortment of descriptive variables, including demographics, pay, supervisors, rank, peers, and workload reflections. Nursing faculty perceptions of promotion opportunities, salaries, resources, and support play an important role in attracting, hiring, and retaining nursing faculty, as shown by the results of this study. The findings from this study can serve higher education institutions in ascertaining the satisfaction variables that can be altered to attract and retain faculty in nursing.

Job stress amongst female faculty members in higher education: an Indian experience from a feminist perspective

Women academicians in higher education in India have a more rigorous path to follow than their male counterparts in achieving their due professional status. There are several factors that hinder their progress, including patriarchal concepts in certain role expectations from women; stereotyping of women in certain roles; and non-acceptance of women in certain others. The notions about women that have thus got embedded in the higher education sector in India have a negative impact on their career progress. There is also the need to understand the phenomenon of the glass ceiling that women are faced with in their career promotion efforts in higher education and the inequalities they often encounter under male chauvinism. Against this backdrop, the present paper strives to study the factors that contribute to the job stress and dissatisfaction of women in higher education in India, using the constructs of feminism. The paper concludes that understanding these constructs enables the members of the academia to rationally navigate the experiences of women in higher education and to create supportive policies that ensure a sustainable future for academic women with job security, satisfaction, and dignity.

Realizing the Narrative: Higher Education Strategies as Creative Economy Agents in Indonesia

The development of the creative economy in Indonesia encounters several obstacles, including regulatory issues and government protection, as well as the need for more technological knowledge and innovation owned by business people. Higher education academics, as intellectuals, play an essential role in developing this creative economy, considering that academics are very closely related to science, technology, and research innovation. This article will discuss Indonesia's creative economy and how people perceive it. Furthermore, it will look at the importance of higher education as a printer for young entrepreneurs in the sector. This article examines two aspects of curriculum development based on the creative economy and work placements for young entrepreneurs. It will then demonstrate how young graduates can be empowered to build creative economy careers. This research uses a literature review as the design. Five articles were taken as the data sources for this study. The results of the study show that to create young creative workers, higher education must create a curriculum that is based on the creative economy and is oriented towards; competency-based, facilitating creativity, skills, and talents possessed by students, and there is a balance of soft science and hard science for future tertiary graduates. In the narrative of job placement for young creative workers, every tertiary institution is trying to connect and even be able to create business opportunities in various sectors of the creative economy without looking at the economic and social factors of these young creative workers.

Evaluating higher education (HE) work design to sustain academics' work–life balance

PurposeThis paper aims to examine work design and the linkages of work design with the work–life balance of academics in higher education (HE).Design/methodology/approachA sample of 307 academics was recruited for this study. The result was analysed using SPSS (statistical package of social science) and AMOS (analysis of moment structure) structural equation modelling (SEM).FindingsThis paper discovered that high autonomy, task significance, task identity and feedback were linked to greater work-to-family enrichment (W-FE) levels amongst academics, whilst, low job autonomy, task identity and task significance were linked to high work-to-family conflict (W-FC) levels.Originality/valueThis paper highlights the importance of promoting good academics' work–life balance by evaluating and improvising the academics' work design.

Black women academics in the United States of America and South Africa deploying principles of Feminist Decoloniality as Care (FEMDAC) to confront experiences with microaggressions

abstract While several studies detail the experiences of university students with racial and gender harassment, bullying, and microaggressions, few explore these phenomena among Black women faculty members in higher education transnationally. This article makes a novel contribution by examining Black women’s agentic responses to marginalising experiences in higher education. Black women’s extraordinary efforts to succeed in westernised universities built on the subjugation of and from the labour of their ancestors, awareness-raising about their negative experiences, and strategies to change colleagues’ behaviours defy ‘business as usual’ in higher education. Neoliberalism, Gender and Curriculum Transformation in Higher Education is a multi-site project led by Professor Relebohile Moletsane (Moletsane & Mabokela 2019), who partners with Black women to support their academic and scholarly success. This article reviews results of a survey administered to participants to document their experiences and explore the interventions designed by Moletsane’s Feminist Decoloniality as Care (FEMDAC) investigators at universities in South Africa and America. This article describes four ways in which researchers effectively operationalise feminist decoloniality as care, by: 1) truth-telling about the impact of neoliberal institutions on the daily lives of Black women academics; 2) locating the source of academic woundedness not solely in the individual behaviours of bad actors but in systemic oppression; 3) creating opportunities for women to see the similarities in their experiences transnationally and to recognise ways in which institutional structures marginalise them; and 4) mutual support, a team mentoring approach, and reproducing Black excellence.

Analyzing the Effects of Eco-Spirituality on Organizational Commitment and Employee Engagement Among Female Academics in Higher Education

This study investigated the connections between eco-spirituality, organizational commitment, and employee engagement by female academics within higher education institutions. The results of this study indicate that eco-spirituality has an effect on organizational commitment, and organizational commitment has an effect on employee engagement. Both of these relationships were found to be significant. In addition, this research's findings indicate a direct and indirect relationship between employee engagement and eco-spirituality. Even though this relationship has never been investigated in any of the previous studies, the findings of this research show that there is such a relationship. An employee engagement study, an organizational commitment study, and an employee spirituality study were all conducted using regression analysis. We also considered the correlation between the two data sets when analyzing the connection between the dependent and the independent variables. An examination of the construct item's dependability was carried out.

Reshaping teaching in higher education through a mandala of creative pedagogies

ABSTRACT Enhancing creativity skills and dispositions is one of the many student capabilities academics in higher education are required to promote. Although there are several issues that can hamper academics’ engagement with creativity including demands of performance indicators and limited freedom to experiment with teaching. In this article, we consider the findings from a research project with a group of tertiary academics who explored the complexities and opportunities related to teaching for creativity, creative learning, and teaching creatively. From the academics’ dynamic interaction with and between creativity and their traditional and academic cultures, we were able to extend on an existing framework to give a more nuanced understanding about how creativity can be incorporated into teaching in higher education. We present a mandala of creative pedagogies as an analysis framework and a teaching tool that can accelerate a range of skills acquisition for graduates, including connecting with global and local knowledges.