Teaching Specialist positions: creating elite teachers or an academic under-class in Australia’s research-intensive Universities

Teaching-specialist positions, with workloads between 60% - 100% of teaching and teaching-related duties, have become increasingly prevalent in the Australian academic workforce in the 21st century. These positions represented a worldwide trend towards the “fragmentation”, “unbundling”, “segmentation” and “specialisation” of academic work. This webinar presents research that used narrative and thematic history approaches based on publicly available documentary resources to examine the commitment to teaching quality in Australia’s publicly funded research-intensive universities (Go8). Critical analysis focused on globalisation, neoliberalism, New Public Management, and Australian Government higher education policy. Go8 universities claimed that they offered opportunities for scholarship and leadership, which suggested that they were of equal value and reward to teaching-research roles. This research sought to assess why Go8 universities adopted teaching specialist positions and whether they delivered the benefits that were claimed.