Abstract
This paper describes developments in the rise and implementation of teaching focused positions in universities. We note that such development is not without challenge given the research priority of many universities, and we note that teaching focused academics need to be across developments in the disciplinary knowledge of their field and able to integrate these into their teaching practice. We argue that teaching scholars must be different but equal to those engaged in research and/or research and teaching, we note the Importance of Ernest Boyer and we highlight the role of scholarship in teaching focussed positions. We provide examples of universities that have implemented teaching focused positions and identify implications for Chinese universities.
* This paper is based on work undertaken by Belinda Probert for the Office of Learning and Teaching:
Probert Belinda, “Teaching focused academic appointments in Australian universities: recognition, specialization, or stratification?” The Office for Learning and Teaching, December 2012.
———, “Why scholarship matters in higher education,” The Office for Learning and Teaching, May 2014.
Introduction
The growth of teaching focused appointments in Australian universities is part of an international trend that many (inside and outside of higher education) see as inevitable. The unbundling of previous academic roles away from traditionally integrated research, teaching and administration categories would, in turn, lead to an increasing differentiation within the academic workforce. Among the agreed driving forces behind this unbundling are: the demand for much greater levels of participation in higher education (from mass to universal), the pressure to provide for lifelong learning opportunities, increased competition from private providers and from global rankings, and the transformative potential of information technology in the design and delivery of higher education programs. It is within this context that we focus our attention on the rise of teaching focused positions in higher education.
In this paper we describe current developments in the rise and implementation of teaching focused positions in universities. We argue that acceptance of teaching focused positions is not without its challenges, especially in cultures that reward and privilege research over teaching. Following Boyer, 1 teaching focused academics need to be across developments in the disciplinary knowledge of their field and able to integrate these into their teaching practice.
In order to develop our ideas we structure the paper around three themes: teaching scholars—different but equal, the Importance of Ernest Boyer and the role of scholarship in teaching focussed positions. We conclude by providing several examples of universities that have implemented teaching focused positions and identifying implications for Chinese universities.
Teaching Scholars: Different but Equal?
Teaching or ‘education’ focused appointments are not concentrated in any particular Australian university grouping, and have been introduced for a number of quite different and contradictory reasons. 2 These range from an explicit desire to raise the status of teaching and develop teaching focused career paths, to the more widespread desire to improve institutional research rankings by transferring research inactive staff to a teaching focused classification. This can have the effect of both reducing the teaching workload of the most productive researchers as well as reducing the research-active denominator for research rankings. Overall, the recent growth in teaching focused staff numbers has probably been, in general, more opportunistic than strategic.
Whatever the institutional motive, the creation of a separate category of teaching-focused academic staff is occurring within a shared university culture that has increasingly privileged research over teaching over the last two decades, and in which there is widespread skepticism about the possibility of teaching focused careers, and parity of esteem between these activities. The position descriptions and methods of appointment for teaching focused academics vary widely between institutions, but the most common approach is for a process of application from existing teaching and research staff to a fixed term (or occasionally continuing) appointment in a teaching focused role. It is generally viewed as a one-way street.
Within universities, the appointment of teaching focused academics raises questions about the relationship between teaching and research. If these new kinds of staff are not undertaking disciplinary research, creating new knowledge in their chosen fields, what makes their teaching distinctively ‘higher’? How should they be selected and how should their work be evaluated at different stages of their careers? Within some universities, there is a strong rhetorical resistance to the concept of ‘teaching only’ roles, with an explicit insistence on the scholarly nature of university teaching (in line with the new Provider Registration Standards) and the importance of the ‘teaching-research’ nexus. There is, however, relatively little clarity in the definition of what constitutes a scholarly approach, or what this nexus means in practice. The growth of teaching focused positions in universities in Australia needs to be seen in the wider context of the growth of higher education teachers within Technical and Further Education (
This in turn leads to other questions: What are the qualities that should be common to all higher education teachers, and what are the differences between a ‘lecturer’, a ‘teacher’ and an ‘academic’? For example, the PhD is now the entry-level qualification for most teaching and research academics in Australian universities (even if it has to be completed on the job). Should a PhD or equivalent research experience be the base level qualification for appointment to any higher education teaching focused position? 3
In Australia, for providers to be able to use the title University (including University College and University of Specialisation) they must demonstrate ‘sustained scholarship that informs teaching and learning in all fields in which courses of study are offered’. Other higher education providers must employ academic staff who ‘are active in scholarship that informs their teaching’. 4 All higher education providers must ensure that teaching staff ‘have a sound understanding of current scholarship and/or professional practice in the discipline that they teach’. 5
Despite the weight carried by the concept of scholarship in the current regulatory framework, its meaning is unclear. 6 The Bradley Review 7 panel opted to define it in opposition to research in order to ensure that the title of university could not be ‘diluted’ to embrace teaching only institutions that did not undertake research. Thus research (the creation of new knowledge) is distinguished from scholarship, with the latter being confined to the ‘dissemination’ of knowledge and a ‘commitment to the development of teaching practice’. 8 Universities are therefore required to undertake research that leads to the creation of new knowledge, while non-university providers are only required to ‘deliver teaching and learning that engage with advanced knowledge and inquiry’.
The distinction between different types of higher education provider is an important one, regardless of what one thinks about whom should be allowed to call themselves a university. However, the linking of ‘scholarship’ to dissemination or teaching in this way does not build on any shared historical understanding of the concept within Australian higher education. In fact, there is little evidence that the terms ‘scholar’ and ‘scholarship’ are used easily within Australian universities to describe distinctive values or qualities.
Despite, or perhaps because of a lack of clarity about its meaning, the word ‘scholar’ has begun to appear in the titles being given to teaching focused academic appointments in Australian universities, with the explicit intention of signalling their ‘higher’ status, and protecting them from being seen as ‘teaching only’. For example, Teaching Scholar is the title given to teaching focused appointments at Central Queensland (
The mobilisation of the word ‘scholar’ in connection with teaching in the current context reflects the tension that results from attempting to create more differentiated academic roles within a culture that overwhelmingly privileges research over teaching. The addition of the term scholar or scholarly to roles that might otherwise be seen as lower in status is clearly intended to signal that higher education teachers do more than disseminate or transmit knowledge. This becomes particularly clear in the case of Central Queensland University which has created another category, alongside the teaching scholars, of ‘teaching focused’ appointments for those who have ‘not met the expected requirements for either the teaching scholar or research active scholar categories’. 9 Curtin University, on the other hand, defines its teaching focused appointments as staff who will spend 75 per cent of their time in ‘Teaching Delivery and Teaching Related Duties’, more suggestive of ‘dissemination’ than ‘scholarship’, explicitly taking on the teaching load of their more research active colleagues. 10
Some of the variations in appointment type across the sector can be seen as encouraging signs of institutional and role differentiation within a mass higher education system. However, the use of new position descriptors to mean very different things is not without risk. If teaching focused can mean both ‘failed academic awaiting performance review’ and ‘respected leader of curriculum reform’, it is hard to see how everyone is going to know who is whatever the confusion between these different attempts to deploy the notion of scholarship, they converge around the desire to define and preserve what should be distinctive about higher education. We need to interrogate these claims carefully, precisely because of their role in protecting what is ‘higher’ about higher education in an era of universal participation.
The Importance of Ernest Boyer in Shaping the Debate
In the current debate about the need to create more differentiated academic roles Ernest Boyer’s classic text, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, is omnipresent. 11 Back in 1990, Boyer challenged American universities with the question: ‘can we, in fact, have a higher education system in this country that includes multiple models of success?’ 12 Boyer was motivated not by the current challenges of global competition and what he saw as the unfortunate dominance of research over all other forms of scholarly activity. Boyer argued that universities ‘had a restricted view of scholarship, one that limits it to a hierarchy of functions. Basic research has come to be viewed as the first and most essential form of scholarly activity’. He worried about the effect of ‘mission creep’ and the ‘uniformity of the pattern and the divisive struggle on many campuses between “teaching” and “research”’. 13
Despite the different context, the questions Boyer sought to answer in Scholarship Reconsidered are the same ones that are now being asked about Australian
What we are faced with, today, is the need to clarify campus missions and relate the work of the academy more directly to the realities of contemporary life. We need especially to ask how institutional diversity can be strengthened and how the rich array of faculty talent in our colleges and universities might be more effectively used and continuously renewed. 14
Boyer proceeds to argue persuasively for a conceptualisation of academic work as being made up of four, equally valuable kinds of scholarship—the scholarships of discovery, integration, application and teaching.
Boyer’s thesis has been extremely influential in the way many observers write and talk about universities in Australia, as well as the
It could be argued that despite widespread enthusiasm in Australia for Boyer’s insistence that teaching is a scholarly activity which matters, the substance of his wider proposals has been largely ignored. They are worth revisiting since he provides a coherent framework for thinking about the full range of contemporary academic work, and the changes that need to be made in the training and development of academics to ensure that these different types of intellectual work reflect the distinctive characteristics of higher education—namely the values of scholarship. His framework also provides a way of keeping the shared ‘higher’ part of higher education provision at the forefront of debate about institutional differentiation.
For Boyer, scholarship ‘is at the heart of what the profession is all about’. The conceptual distinction between the scholarships of discovery, integration, application and teaching is widely recognised as a result of his writing. But there is a risk in using these distinctions directly to justify role or institutional specialisation if it is not also recognised that ‘some dimensions of scholarship are universal—mandates that apply to all’.
15
For Boyer, all academics should ‘establish their credentials as researchers’. They may not go on to focus on specialised investigative work, but they ‘must demonstrate the capacity to do original research, study a serious intellectual problem’, and submit the results to their peers. ‘Indeed, this is what the dissertation or a comparable piece of creative work, is all about.’
16
By attempting to create new knowledge the epistemological basis of the discipline or field is mastered, and its contingent nature understood. The universal focus on discipline specific research methods as part of this training plays an essential role. This might be the basis for asserting that a PhD, or an equivalent level of deep disciplinary engagement, should be the expected foundation for the careers of all higher education teachers, whether they teach in research-intensive universities, or
The second universal dimension of scholarship according to Boyer is the requirement that all academics ‘stay in touch with developments in their fields and stay professionally alive’. 17 The rhetoric of the teaching-research nexus has been taken, by some academics, to mean that there could be no such thing as a ‘teaching focused academic’, since it is doing research that is the key to being professionally alive. Some of this resistance is deeply self-interested and reflects the preference of academics for time away from students; there are also those who, less self-interestedly, fear that academics not directly involved in the creation of new disciplinary knowledge will inevitably become out of date. Yet the idea that each individual academic should embody a direct link between their research work and their teaching is a curious one, at least as far as large parts of the undergraduate curriculum are concerned, in which there is little place for the highly specialised research areas of individual academics.
The requirement to be fully aware of the changing frontiers of your discipline is, nonetheless, an essential one. If this is our objective then why not, as Boyer suggests, ‘assume that staying in touch with one’s field means just that—reading the literature and keeping well informed about consequential trends and patterns’? 18 The evidence for this might be created through the process of staying in touch itself rather than through an annual tick box performance management approach or a teaching portfolio. Boyer suggests that academics for whom the scholarship of discovery is not their focus might, from time to time, prepare a paper in which they select two or three of the most important new developments or articles in their fields, and then present the reasons for their choices. This is not intended as a one-on-one performance management task, nor as a submission for promotion, but as part of the way in which disciplines and fields of study should collaborate within their workplaces on a daily basis, crossing the boundaries of teaching and research.
In discussing the scholarship of teaching, Boyer again emphasises the importance of deep knowledge of the relevant discipline or field that is to be taught. His list of performance indicators for teaching would begin with evidence that those who teach are, above all, ‘steeped in the knowledge of their fields’. 19 As experts in the field of university teaching, Paul Ramsden and Ken Bain have both suggested excellent teachers are also likely to be interested in the history of their fields or disciplines. 20 This wider perspective is something that Boyer sees as central to scholarly teaching, and it, in turn, relies strongly on the scholarship of integration. Rather than seeing this as a radically different kind of work from the other scholarships, the capacity to integrate is central to teaching since it is about making connections, placing specialisms in a larger context, ‘illuminating data in a revealing way, often educating non-specialists too’. 21 The scholarship of integration is also the best way to describe the kind of discovery that occurs at the edge of disciplines or where fields converge in new ways. Boyer argues that ‘those who help shape a core curriculum or prepare a cross-disciplinary seminar surely are engaged in the scholarship of integration and, again such activity should be acknowledged and rewarded’. 22 Good teaching is not simply about transmitting or disseminating knowledge, but ‘about transforming and extending it as well’. 23
The Role of Scholarship in Teaching Focused Positions
The linking of scholarship and teaching has another recent impetus, resulting from attempts to codify and quantify teaching quality for the purposes of creating career paths based on teaching excellence. This can be seen at its most extreme in Richlin’s influential definition of a teaching hierarchy that moves from ‘good teaching’ to ‘scholarly teaching’ and finally to ‘undertaking scholarship of teaching’. 24 Just to add to the complexity of the argument, Richlin’s approach, which is widely shared among parts of the teaching and learning community, considers the scholarship of teaching to be published research about teaching practices. In other words, scholarship in this context is most definitely research rather than dissemination. It is not at all clear why this kind of research designed to improve practice should be called ‘scholarship’ except in so far as all research is defined as scholarship.
Boyer chose not to distinguish between scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching, but his Carnegie Foundation colleagues have subsequently argued for the importance of the distinction. In defending the value of SoTL today, Hutchings et al. point out how work on pedagogy has made its way into the category of ‘research’ for promotion and tenure purposes. 25 They see the field has having a particular value at a time when many colleges and universities are making teaching only appointments, in which they see the danger of a yet further separation between the roles of teaching and research. ‘We believe that the scholarship of teaching and learning is the best way for institutions to keep the interconnections between these intellectual functions alive for individual faculty.’ 26 Within the existing academic culture, it could be argued that their logic is impeccable. The status of teaching focused academics is to be protected by giving them research standing, even if the link to better learning for students is tenuous. It is also not irrelevant that these arguments are being promoted by those whose discipline is higher education teaching and learning.
In their book Turnaround Leadership for Higher Education, Fullan and Scott argue that ‘teaching and learning must become the integrator of the traditional university triumvirate of research, teaching and service and engagement... Trying to do all three independent of each other is a recipe for fragmentation and failure. Research has the natural upper hand. Teaching and community engagement and service, if attempted in silo fashion, will always be mediocre.’ 27
The biggest lever for change so far has been academic promotions policies, and in some institutions these now allow a wide range of contributions to be considered as evidence of performance, even if staff remain sceptical. 28 These are also policies that are debated widely by academics themselves, generally owned by academic boards rather than management lines of authority. They are seen as central to the integrity of the profession. For Boyer, the move to recognise careers based on teaching was not something to be imposed by university ‘management’.
The focus on the scholarly dimensions of higher education teaching has also distracted from the increasing complexity of this teaching, resulting from several factors: the move to universal levels of participation; radical changes driven by technological innovation, and growing demand for graduate capabilities that include high level transferable skills in addition to disciplinary-based knowledge; and increasing reliance on teachers with current professional or clinical experience in professional programs from architecture to nursing.
Large numbers of less well-prepared students has led to the development of a range of teaching support roles, while technological opportunities create roles for educational designers of different kinds. Much teaching is highly team-based, requiring collaboration across increasingly specialized roles. Similarly, the adoption of university wide graduate capabilities requires a team based approach to curriculum development rather than a narrow focus on disciplinary expertise. Teaching-focused academic roles need to be conceptualized within this increasingly complex teaching environment.
Case Studies of Teaching Focused Roles
We suggested earlier that research is often privileged over teaching in terms of status and rewards, so it is paradoxical that the earliest efforts to establish teaching focused roles emerged in research-intensive institutions. One of the earliest and most serious responses to the new focus on the quality of teaching came from the University of Queensland, which in 2006 set up a Working Party to
consider whether the teaching roles of academic staff were adequately recognized and rewarded, and whether there was scope to consider a role for teaching-focussed appointments within the University. 29
The University of Queensland went on to introduce teaching focused academic appointments, with the same terms of employment as teaching and research staff. The background discussion paper noted that this classification should not be used to deal with staff deemed to be underperforming in relation to the proposed Research Quality Framework (
It is not expected that there will be many existing staff in this category in each school who would meet the criteria sufficiently well to move to a teaching-focussed appointment. It is expected that, in future, most teaching-focussed appointments will be new positions, with the strict criteria made clear in the position descriptions. 30
In 2012, 14.6 per cent (239) of those teaching at
A similar process of thinking and policy development occurred at Monash University, leading to the creation of ‘education-focussed’ roles in 2009. The term ‘education’ focused rather than ‘teaching’ focused was deliberately chosen to signal that these are to be staff who are experts in education, as opposed to staff with high teaching loads. As at
At Monash, academic staff must apply for an education-focussed role as though they were applying for a new job. This in itself sends a strong signal that no ‘under-performers’ need apply, and makes very clear the criteria to be used at each level of appointment. Since the introduction of the classification there have been two rounds of appointment, with 106 staff successfully transferring. 32 In 2012 Monash reported a total of 320 teaching only staff, almost 16 per cent of its teaching workforce. 33 Flinders University has now adopted a similar process of appointment and the Monash ‘education focused’ terminology, and after the 2012 round of applications a total of 55 staff had been appointed to these roles. Notably, Flinders University has decided that education focused staff should not be reported to the Department of Education as teaching only because they will all have some research in their workload.
These innovations were not confined to research-intensive universities. Over the same period as
In other universities where a rapid improvement in research rankings has been the prime objective, a more punitive approach has been adopted in some cases, with staff required to move to teaching focused roles on the basis of their uncompetitive research performance or face redundancy, and with the prospect of significantly increased teaching workloads. The impact on staff morale and long term professional development is likely to be very different depending on the institutional motivation.
The development of teaching focused academic appointments has not simply been determined by institutional strategy. It also has distinctive disciplinary characteristics. There have always been professionally oriented disciplines were disciplinary research has been less important in the appointment of academic staff than industry or professional experience.
There is, nonetheless, a new form of disciplinary differentiation in the appointment of teaching focused academics. It is a development that bears particular scrutiny because it has been driven at the discipline level by a desire to sustain the highest international research rankings at the same time as improving the quality of undergraduate teaching by devoting more specialist resources to it.
Once again, this development is not confined to Australian higher education. A clear example can be found at University College London (
The key feature of this development is that research inactive staff are not being transferred into these teaching only roles, and that these are positions which involve significantly different kinds of workloads where expert teaching is the most valued component. In Australia there is little evidence yet of such clearly differentiated teaching loads, though the current round of enterprise bargaining will surely bring this to the surface. While it might be suggested that this category reflects a return to the time of full-time tutors and senior tutors as the first step in an academic career, the environment has changed so dramatically, that the comparison is probably misleading.
While this is purely speculation at this point, it is possible that the appointment of teaching focused academics in some instances is linked to the perceived difficulties of the undergraduate program. Economics is now an extremely technically-demanding discipline, very different from that of 20 or 30 years ago. Even the best-prepared students need excellent teaching to succeed.
In Australia an approach similar to Economics at
Similar developments have occurred in Departments of Mathematics and Statistics in a number of Go8 universities. The Universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide have all made formal appointments of first-year mathematics coordinators, with the Science Faculty at Adelaide appointing First Year Directors for all four of its fundamental science disciplines. Similarly, the Universities of Queensland and Wollongong have formally appointed Directors of first year chemistry. 37
The concept of director of first year teaching is longstanding in several Science faculties in the Group of Eight, but such appointments have fallen in and out of favour. What appears to be different in their current incarnation is the belief that, in different ways, these appointments are being accorded greater status and career opportunities. These questions are pursued below in more detail, but here it is the fact that such approaches appear largely confined to the teaching of Science in research-intensive universities which is notable. The challenging nature of the curriculum appears to be a factor, and the largely compulsory nature of much first year science, together with the large component of service teaching on which the financial health of many disciplines relies. In other words, the stakes are sufficiently high in some discipline areas to provoke serious re-thinking about how to improve first year teaching and learning.
Alongside these interesting developments, it is also apparent from the data that a very significant proportion of all teaching only appointments now being reported are in Health Sciences, and represent a simple re-categorisation of existing clinical appointments. Teaching only staff in Health made up 36 per cent of the total of teaching only staff reported for 2012 by the 14 universities with significant numbers of such staff.
38
At Monash University 39 per cent of teaching only staff are in Health, while this rises to 59 per cent at
While Melbourne’s 4 categories of academic appointment give the Dean plenty of scope for the kind of workforce needed to implement this approach to professional education, this should not be seen as a simple plan to define clinical expertise as ‘teaching only’ or ‘teaching specialist’. On the contrary, the aim is to have teaching and research staff engaged in keeping up their professional skills, and most clinical specialists—including a planned Clinical Professor—engaged in practice based research.
While for some universities teaching only appointments have been concentrated in clinical and professional programs, others have adopted a strategic university-wide approach to their distribution across all programs. At Bond University for example they are evenly distributed between health, law, management and commerce and society and culture. Similarly, at
Issues Relevant to Chinese Higher Education
The scale and diversity of Chinese higher education is immense—which level of government has responsibility; private, comprehensive, discipline focussed and research intensive universities. Adding to the complexity is the size of some universities.
There are around 3500 universities, managed by Central, provincial and local governments. While some universities cover a limited number of disciplines, others are discipline specific. In the last 20-30 years many universities have changed dramatically; for instance most of the ‘normal’ universities (which were established to focus on teacher education) are now comprehensive universities. There are 30+ million students in the system, with around 8 million entering the system each year. The faculty (academics) range from the very best in the world working with the best facilities and almost unlimited funding to, well, the other extreme. Most students and many faculty live on or close to their campuses.
Chinese higher education institutions face similar challenges to their western counterparts. Research universities, face the dual challenges of enhanced research productivity and teaching quality. There is a strong view in many Chinese universities that in order to participate and prosper in the global system, a
In a context where research productivity defines academic status is it is not surprising that a research-dominated tenure system may force many of faculty, who fail to publish enough within a given period, to “retreat” to newly created teaching-focused (sometimes teaching-only) or administrative posts, or give up his/her post in research universities all together. Tsinghua University and Peking University (the top two universities in China) and several other leading Chinese universities, are now in the process of personnel reform characterised by introducing the
Since 1999 there has been rapid enrolment expansion in Chinese universities which challenges teaching quality by diluting teaching resources in higher education. A larger issue of teaching quality, or education quality in general is the relevance and responsiveness of teaching and learning in relation to the need of the labour market. The education system, especially the curriculum and teaching methods, is widely criticised by government and by the labour market as being examination-oriented as opposed to competence based; over-standardised and theoretical as opposed to being flexible, and creative and close to the world of work and life. And to some extent this is justified because many of the faculty have never worked outside of the university sector, and indeed many of them live their life almost entirely on the campus where they and their families reside and where they teach and and undertake research; in other words their lives have been totally circumscribed by the university setting in which they work and live.
The development of an academic discipline concerning university teaching and learning is still relatively small in scale in China. Because of their history originally as Teachers’ Colleges the Normal Universities and Colleges have academic institutes and programmes that focus on teaching and learning as a field of expertise. However, recently several leading universities such as Tsinghua have established centres for university teaching and learning advancement to provide training, assessment and consultation for faculty development. The Tsinghua Centre for Teaching and Learning Advancement was overhauled recently to provide comprehensive support to Tsinghua’s strategic planning for enhancing university-wide teaching excellence. The exact structure and function of the centre is yet to be finalized by the central administration of the university. Importantly, the strategies and programs that Tsinghua and Peking universities establish to recognise the importance of quality teaching in their institutions and how faculty skills around teaching, assessment, curriculum design and delivery are developed will have significant influence regarding future developments across almost all other universities in China.
The scholarship of university teaching and learning in Chinese higher education as a whole could best be described as under developed and will require support from an number of sources including government and western universities to build capability and skills across the diverse types of universities. While the central government is committed to do this, there are a number of impediments which, in the short term, may work against the development of a scholarship of teaching as a legitimate form of research. As long as there is a focus on research achievement, an absence of a clear model to adapt, the lack of expertise to drive the changes that are needed, and the sheer size and diversity of the Chinese higher education system the development of a system where teaching and research are both seen as important and recognised through tenure and promotion processes may not be a priority. Given this, the approach taken by Tsinghua and Peking universities will be important as the models and approaches they development may well become the basis for development across a large number of Chinese Universities and Colleges.
Conclusion
In this paper we have outlined the factors that have emerged to support the development of teaching focused positions in Australian universities. We have argued that there are institutional as well as discipline-based imperatives underpinning the implementation of teaching focussed roles and have noted that it has been research-intensive universities that have been the early adopters in the establishment of these roles. One consequence is the development of a differentiated workforce—rather than one where the norm was the all-rounder academic—a teacher, researcher and a good citizen who contributed to the administration of the department and engaged in service inside and outside of the university.
The differentiation of the academic workforce is also occurring because of the rise of specialist teaching support staff who bring expert knowledge about learning in areas such as academic literacy, educational design or transferable skill development to the curriculum. As Celia Whitchurch has shown, the emergence of new roles is also blurring the boundary between professional and academic staff, creating what she has called ‘blended professionals’. 40 In all these cases the roles may be more specialized, but they require higher degrees of team work and team management. A teaching-focused academic in this context requires at least high order collaborative skills and often skills in distributed leadership.
In this increasingly complex context it is possible to imagine a range of teaching-focused career paths, ranging from the development of scholarly expertise in teaching and learning or in what Boyer calls ‘integration’, to leadership roles at the program or discipline level.
The greatest challenge facing teaching focused academics is to ensure that they are not seen as inferior members of the academic community and that teaching is recognized as being part of the intellectual spirit of a university. In the examples of the introduction of teaching-focused academics presented earlier there have been widely differing commitments to the concept of parity of esteem between teaching and research. Where they have been unwillingly designated teaching focused, as a penalty for failing to meet the university’s research targets, they are unlikely to retain the kind of self-motivation and enthusiasm that is critical to professional development. At the discipline or institutional level the separation of research and teaching are likely to be exacerbated, along with the status hierarchy between them. In universities where the introduction of teaching-focused roles has been defined as a strategic response to the challenge of providing excellent education, parity of esteem needs to be consistently expressed and enacted for it to counterbalance the tendency of research to dominate. For academics promotion is the litmus test of any rhetorical commitment. Structured career paths are yet to emerge in this relatively new area of academic specialization, but without them cynicism will prevail.
Footnotes
2 See, for example, Andrew Norton’s proposal for 2,500 teaching focused new appointments in 12 Australian universities in Norton, Andrew. Taking university teaching seriously. Grattan Institute, 2013. 
3 This discussion relates primarily to those higher education teachers who continue to have responsibility for course or subject content and design as well as teaching. The growth of many other more specialised supportive roles (for example in instructional design, learning support, tutoring in the traditional sense, and so on) raises other questions about relevant preparation and experience that need equal attention.
5 Ibid., 16.
6 The consultation draft for a new Proposed Higher Education Standards Framework contains more specific criteria for ‘Teaching Standards’, but continues to rely heavily on the concept of scholarship, Australian Government 2014.
7 In March 2008 the Labor government initiated a review of higher education (The Bradley Review) to examine the future direction of the higher education sector, its fitness for purpose in meeting the needs of the Australian community and economy. The review report Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System became the blue print for major reform across the higher education sector.
9 The Australia Government, The Bradley Review of Higher Education, March 2008.
8 The Australia Government, The Bradley Review of Higher Education, 124-6.
9 Central Queensland University, Academic Profiles Document, June 5, 2013.
11 Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered.
12 Ibid., 2-3.
13 Ibid., 55.
14 Ibid., 13.
15 Ibid., 27.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 27.
18 Ibid., 28.
19 Ibid., 23.
21 Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered, 18.
22 Ibid., 36.
23 Ibid., 25.
24 L. Richlin, “Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning
, no. 86 (2001): 57-68.
25 Teaching focused position descriptions have come to concentrate overwhelmingly on pedagogy and often of a general rather than discipline specific kind, rather than the pedagogical content knowledge that enables teachers to make ideas accessible to others.
29 University of Queensland, Report of the Working Party on Diversity of Academic Roles, March 2007.
30 Ibid., 12.
31 Appendix 1.
33 Appendix 1.
34 Bill McGillivray, personal correspondence to the author, November 27, 2012.
35 Wendy Carlin, Professor, Department of Economics,
36 The Department of Physics at
37 We are most grateful to Professor John Rice, Executive Director, Australian Council of Deans of Science, for sharing information about the growth of teaching focused positions in Mathematics and Statistics.
38 These are the 14 universities reporting over 15 per cent of their total teaching and research and teaching only staff as teaching only in 2012.
39 At