‘Transitioning’, as the term suggests, is a process and not one that can be achieved via once-off workshops (Hurst 2010). Joining a new university should thus be viewed as a ‘critical point’ for new academics, since it is an important process for new lecturers to learn the value system of the organisation, as well as for employers, to shape the attitudes and behaviour of the people they employ (Scheckle 2014). Transitioning is an important temporal
moment, which Archer, in her M/M approach, is at pains to emphasise the need to account for changes over time (1995).
The need to attract and retain a new generation of academics or the next generation of academics has already been emphasised as an enabling discourse for new lecturers in HE (HESA 2011). This call has been echoed in local as well as international contexts, for example in the Dearing Report (NCIHE 1997; Gosling and Hannan 2007), with the UK and Australian governments, for example, keen to ‘attract, prepare, place, develop and retain quality teachers (White, Bloomfield and Le Cornu 2010: 182). New lecturers are considered a critical target group in South Africa, based on the evidence that nearly half of the professoriate are due to retire in less than a decade (HESA 2011). The importance of recruiting and retaining quality teachers is crucial to avoid an untenable situation where a large exodus of academics from the boom years of the 60s and 70s (Trowler and Knight 2000) will leave the academy bereft.
Besides the need to increase numbers, there is an imperative for the next generation of academics to contribute to the re-orientation of universities in accordance with their social purposes, and to meet new constitutional, economic and social needs and development challenges (HESA 2011; Waghid 2002). This means that novice academics need to be inducted into the academy in much more structured and deliberate ways than in the past (Quinn and Vorster 2012).
Professional development for new lecturers has become an established feature of higher education, nationally and internationally, over the past decade (Gosling 2007; Fanghanel and Trowler 2007), and the successful completion of such programmes has become an accepted standard and is often a requirement of probation (Sales 2014; Stefani 2004). The rationale is that new lecturers will become effective educators, armed with pedagogical knowledge about teaching, learning and assessment, quality frameworks, the student experience and integration of research, scholarship, and professional activities with teaching and learning (Fanghanel and Trowler 2008; HEA 2006; Ramsden 2003).
Programmes used to induct new lecturers into the HE sector are viewed in different ways based on their different purposes. From an operational and human resources (HR) perspective, induction is viewed in terms of drivers such as ‘productivity, participation and quality’ (White et al. 2010: 181), not in terms of the teaching function of the academic role. There is the assumption that anyone with a good grounding in content knowledge can teach
(Gravett and Petersen 2002). While most staff appointed to academic positions have already completed a research degree, and thus already have training and experience in the methodology of their research, there is ironically very little parallel provision for specific preparation for their teaching role, even though teaching takes up a lot of head space and physical energy. Further assumptions that formal training programmes on their own will make better university teachers (Gibbs and Coffey 2000) or that academics can rely on the prior experience of being taught might be inadequate for HE teaching, as the current content or subject matter still needs to be recontextualised and translated into a pedagogy for learning in a specific context.
The term ‘induction’ conjures up notions of lecturers being streamlined into a duct or pipe, under considerable pressure, to be churned out at the other end in altered shapes and sizes. However, given the complexities highlighted in the previous chapters, it is clear that new academic induction cannot be a mere churning out or transmission of information about the many systems and operations at the university. Neither can it be an acculturation process, that is, from the novice on the periphery to the expert positioned at the centre of the community (Lave and Wenger 1991). Novice academics have a great deal to contribute, especially because of their positionality on the periphery, and they may be experts already in many areas that can benefit the institution, if they are enabled to bring their experiences to bear on HE practice.
The concept of ‘newness’ is thus both an enabler and a constraint in the way new academics are perceived and perceive themselves, as they invoke their ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polanyi 1983) of what being an academic means. New academic staff are discursively constructed as moving from professional expert to novice teacher (Cangelosi, Crocker and Sorrell 2009; Jansen 2010), in a liminal space where they are caught ‘between a rock and a hard place’ (Hellströhm 2004). New academics are perceived and engaged with as experts and novices at the same time (Tierney 2003). They are both vulnerable and robust, and knowledgeable in their respective fields but, in being new to HE, they experience difficulty in making the contextual and conceptual shifts into their classrooms, where they have to make critical decisions that sometimes have a negative impact on the social inclusion of students.
Therefore, new university teachers more than others need to do ‘identity work’ by ‘making and re-making their identities’ in order to establish themselves in their new environment and culture (Trowler and Knight 2000: 34). However, this identity work involves a process of socialisation (Becher and Trowler 2001; Clegg 2008; Henkel 2000; Trowler and Knight 2000)
into the profession of teaching and the practices and expectations of this role (Boyd 2010; Field 2012). A complex, dynamic set of demands on the new academic, related to identity formation, emerges in the initial period of becoming a teacher, when the professional typically retains an identity as a professional in a new context, for example, as an architect or physiotherapist (Boyd 2010).
Many new academics experience a perceived loss of status when they join a university where they are no longer regarded as an expert among other experts (Boyd 2010). This clash of professional and academic worlds can lead the newly appointed academic to feel all the insecurities that come with being a novice, which is particularly hard for those used to being experts in their own right (Sales 2014). Janhonen and Sarja (2005), however, challenge the ‘expert to novice’ discourse, suggesting that there is a complementary relationship between previous practitioner and the new teacher identity, theorised as moving from first-order (practice setting) to second-order practitioner (within a higher education setting) (Murray and Male 2005). The downfall, however, in trying to engage with the university as a structural entity, is that new academics identify strong social and cultural factors that affect their sense of agency (Kahn 2009). Most individuals redefine their identity, for example, as ‘architect teacher’, in which they integrate their identity as a professional with their new career identity as an academic. New academics, who are unable to redefine themselves as having a new identity, may experience discomfort in their new roles, and may choose not to continue in academia but return to professional practice (McArthur-Rouse 2008). This adds to the ‘revolving door’ syndrome (Cross and Johnson 2008), where new academics leave as soon as they arrive, due to inhospitable conditions in HE.
To obviate this, many professional development induction programmes provide a physical and conceptual space through their teaching and learning curricula (Kandlbinder and Peseta 2011; Knight 2002; Ramsden 2003; Scheckle 2014), which supports the transition. Kandlbinder and Peseta (2011), drawing on a research survey on higher education teaching and learning across Australia, New Zealand and the UK, identified five concepts that hold ‘key’ status in professional development courses for most academics, new and established: reflective practice, constructive alignment, student approaches to learning, scholarship of teaching, and assessment-driven learning. In the South African context, programmes also include topics on diversity, interpersonal skills, literacy practices, classroom management, innovation, and technology. Albeit in lesser or greater depth and detail, these frameworks are similar to the course content of induction programmes in South Africa, surveyed on university websites.
What is less obvious is how these programmes are enacted and for what purpose. To what extent are the above cognate areas problematised to respond to unique university contexts? This dialogic engagement with the material and with literature is what influences the understanding of practice that new academics take with them when they are ‘released’ from programmes into the university. It also shapes the extent to which new academics feel they can exercise their agency in their departments and faculties, based on what they have encountered in the induction programme, but this is often with a great deal of difficulty as knowledge gained in professional developmental spaces is not easily transferable to departmental specificity (Fanghanel 2007; Kahn 2009; Mathieson 2011). The other problem is that much of the teaching and learning content is ‘mangled’ (Haggis 2003) or ‘lost in translation’, literally and figuratively in the South Africa context, in the way that it is ‘taught’ on professional development programmes, as well as in the way the content is appropriated and interpreted for practice by individual lecturers.
Being in the classroom is a value-laden task because new teachers with their own unique sense of self, ultimate concerns and projects are facilitators of students’ engagement with knowledge and their engagement with the academic world. This is not an intuitive process for academics, new or established, and without serious guidance and critical thinking about how knowledge is structured and engaged with, old values are also unwittingly reproduced. These attitudes are evident, for example, in the handing down of curricula and syllabi by heads of some departments to new lecturers without a feed forward on the re-contextualising mechanisms needed for specific department or university settings. Nor are strategies on how to re-interpret (Gamble 2006) specialised knowledge for undergraduate purposes shared. These constraining attitudes restrict the ability of new academics to exercise agency in being innovative in facilitating effective curriculum change and learning for their students. A lack of focus on knowledge and its structures (Bernstein 2000) means that academics have a limited view of the change that students as knowers (Maton 2008) should undergo in subject areas, that is, from a simplistic view of knowledge and learning towards a more relational view where they become aware of the sophisticated relations and connections between different bodies of knowledge (Ramsden 2003).
The range of discourses discussed below, relating to the induction of new academics and their transitioning to HE, are interconnected and intertwined with discourses embedded in ASD, and departmental and disciplinary framing of teaching and learning. These discourses have a causal link with how new academics take up professional development programmes, and the extent to which they commit to a process of self-adjustment in relation to the rest of
the university. These discourses will now be discussed as two main orders of discourses, namely decontextualised induction and contextualised induction, with their related sub- discourses, which are evident in the ways they are enacted and practised in HE. They are efficaciously evaluated on the strength of their influence, which is in turn conditioned by both structural and cultural features relative and relevant to the challenges confronted by new academics. As Real mechanisms, they have the power to enable or constrain new academic practice; the ripple effect thereof is the impact on student learning and the broader transformational goals for HE.
New lecturers are thus faced with simultaneous challenges of content, context and practice at an institutional, faculty and departmental level which are salient in this study, as the new academics draw on some, if not all, of these discourses to varying degrees in the deliberation, discernment and design of their agential choices (Archer 2000) with regard to teaching and learning. In realist terms, discourses are not deterministic, but they do have considerable ability to shape and influence agents’ choices. Agential choice and freedom are always there, whether new academics choose to resist or comply with dominant ways of thinking in the sector and at their institutions. Irrespective, these discourses have a ‘ghostly presence’ (Clegg 2009) in the lives of new academics, because they have emerged from very real and lived experiences of agents who predate the cultural (and structural) contexts in which current new academics find themselves.
After sketching the established discourses of induction of each order of discourse invoked in HE today (some enabling for new academic development while others constraining), I move on to a discussion of specific discourses that emerge from the various SEPs and CEPs in the socialisation processes of new academics as incumbents. These discourses, as third- order emergents (Archer 1996), are the result of the result of the conditioning influences of the afore-mentioned discourses and structural contexts, and have real emergent properties and powers to shape how new academics think of themselves, how they define their projects, and how they exercise their agency.