What?
The spectre of TEQSA looms large for Charles Sturt. The conditions on our registration as a Higher Education provider has cast a spotlight on the TEQSA Standards and what they mean for academic staff. It is fair to say that Academic staff strive to balance the pressures of teaching/research/ administration in an environment that has structured the teaching cycle in tight timelines. The conditions on our registration place an imperative on all of us to improve on how we do things:
My role as Associate Dean (Partners and Quality) has required me to become very knowledgeable about the TEQSA Standards and to be able to communicate the Standards to others. As a result I have been delivering workshops on the TEQSA standards, with a particular emphasis on the scholarly activity requirements.
TEQSA watchers suggest it is also lifting regulatory requirements for the whole sector, using CSU as a starter. Condition six requires the university to review and report on “the scholarly outputs for all teaching staff and staff with oversight of teaching” at study centres operated by SGA. TEQSA says it must approve the reviewer and their terms of reference.
Campus morning mail (May 6, 2019)
So what?
The requirement for Charles Sturt to demonstrate effective scholarly engagement of staff creates an interesting tension between creating a culture of scholarly engagement and purely ticking boxes of compliance. In an environment where workloads create immense pressure for staff to meet deadlines and many other compliance obligations, how can we create an opportunity for staff to engage in a culture of scholarship, when it may be perceived as yet another burden to workload?
Looking at the ADKAR model, successful change commences with creating awareness of the reasons for change. The ADKAR model was created by Prosci founder, Jeff Hiatt. Essentially, it is an acronym that spells out the five stages of change, with the first part being the need for change.
In order to create change in the way that we engage with scholarship, we need to understand the need for change. One way to accomplish this is through awareness raising through the delivery of professional development. I enjoy facilitating workshops and ensuring that those in attendance are able to engage with the topic. I enjoy the discussion that workshops can elicit and the creation of a space to enable questions and debate. With a topic centred on regulatory requirements this is not always easy. The tension to meet those requirements against the desire for staff to engage in a meaningful way creates a desire to explore how we can meet in the middle. Indeed, academic staff more often than not are already engaged in scholarly activity. Our challenge is to find ways to record staff engagement with scholarly activity, and ensure that in the record-keeping process we do not diminish the greater goal of creating a culture of scholarship.
Where I’m seeking input
What other ways can we engage staff? What does scholarship mean to staff already engaged in a high workload environment?
