we're feisty

NFM and contingent academic labor issues cited in Australian academic blog, Music for Deckchairs. Love the blog title and being called feisty:

Miserably, the concession we make to flexibility is by casualising academic labour, so that we can manage fluctuations in demand with last minute hiring practices that pass on to the most precariously employed our own lack of ability to make plans in this churning market. The harm this is doing to the education profession is rightly the stuff of despair (see for example the excellent short documentary Degrees of Shame, being promoted by the feisty New Faculty Majority as part of Campus Equity Week this week.) ... from Trust Wipeout 

Read the read of the post too. It goes to budget, ed tech, ed biz incursions, governance, Campaign for the Future of Higher Education issues and more... a thoughtful "WhitherU" post that addresses a question, Can someone in universities please start thinking about cultures of trust and what creates them??, posed in yet another blog. 

Other NFM mission relevant points include the lack resources for professional development and increased weight placed on student evaluations

First, in an era of contracting budgets there’s an acute lack of resourcing for teacher development, experimentation or change management, particularly in relation to emerging technologies. Secondly, the rise and rise of student evaluation as a proxy for professional peer review means that we’re constantly beta testing in front of hostile judges. It’s not so much MasterChef as Dancing with the Stars, blindfold and on stilts.  In fact, it’s Wipeout, and about as much fun.

Posted via email from Academentia