Scholarly Teaching Fellows: Drivers and (Early) Outcomes. 

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Research and Development in Higher Education Vol. 41: [Re] Valuing Higher Education

July, 2018, 266 pages
Published by
Dale Wache and Don Houston
ISBN
978-0-908557-96-7
Abstract 

In Australian universities, the majority of teaching is now delivered by casual academics, engaged on short-term, hourly-paid contracts. Casual and continuing academic staff have worked actively through the national tertiary education union to limit casualization, defend the ‘integrated’ academic model of research and teaching, and to improve pay and conditions for casual staff. Since 2012 the union has moved to proactively define new continuing positions for casual staff, as ‘Scholarly Teaching Fellows’, designed to provide job security for casual teaching academics. This paper uses data from a selected range of Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (EBAs) to explore whether this relaxation of the union’s traditional insistence on the teaching/research nexus is successfully reducing precarity while avoiding the further disaggregation of academic work and careers.

Keywords: academic work, casualisation, job security