Precarity and illusions of certainty in higher education teaching

Introduction

The term ‘precarity’ has been used since at least the 1950s in theorising the nature of insecure employment relations (Millar 2017). Bourdieu (1998), for instance, used the term to refer to a specific set of conditions that constitute a labour regime, one in which workers face job insecurity, unstable working hours, low pay and so on. Standing (2011), meanwhile, applied the term to refer to workers who are ‘living in the present, without a secure identity or sense of development achieved through work and lifestyle’ (p. 16). He also offered an associated class category, the precariat, for those whose working conditions are characterised by precarity.

In recent decades, the global trend towards the marketisation of higher education has generally led to an increase in the level of casualisation in the working conditions of those who teach in higher education (Solomon and Du Plessis 2023). A growing proportion of staff across higher education are employed on a temporary basis as adjuncts or assistants, (Williams 2022). Heffernan (2018), indeed, suggested that, according to global estimates at the time of the study, the proportion of staff on sessional contracts varied between 16% and 70%, with an upward trend in evidence. The picture plays out quite in a varied fashion across different nations, even while it remains the case that the research on which these estimates are based was conducted within countries in the Global North. Casualised working conditions particularly affect early career academics, with women (O’Keefe and Courtois 2019) and minority ethnic academics (Read 2023) disproportionately placed in precarious roles. Specific areas of practice have also seen wider usage of sessional or short-term contracts, given increased usage of companies located in the private sector to support the delivery of online learning (Ivancheva and Garvey 2022), English-language support (Fulcher 2009) and so on. Finally, some of the working conditions which were once the preserve of staff employed on precarious contracts now affect staff in more secure positions, as contractual frameworks have weakened and so-called permanent contracts can be easily terminated.

It is clear, furthermore, that employing teaching staff on precarious contracts affects the nature of the teaching they provide. McComb et al. (2021, p. 97) argued that there has been a longstanding focus in the research literature on the relationship between teaching staff employed on a casual basis in universities and the quality of teaching, claiming that research has increasingly begun to focus on ‘disparities in working conditions as the key determinant of teaching quality’. It is not that such staff are poor quality teachers as such, but that their employment conditions pose a range of challenges. For instance, Leathwood and Read (2022) undertook a study involving email interviews with 20 academics in the UK on short-term contracts that looked at how configurations of time and space played out for these members of staff. The absence of an office within which to see students and the lack of time for tutorials was seen in their study to compromise the formation of relationships with students. Staff on more secure contracts are not immune to work patterns once associated with precarious employment, as exemplified by open offices becoming the norm, despite evidence of a negative impact on academics’ well-being and work (Van Marrewijk and Van den Ende 2018). There are clear implications here for teaching, in that Felten and Lambert (2020) argued that relationships between staff and students are central to student success at university.

Challenges also play out in relation to the integration of staff on casualised contracts into the academic community, another determinant of teaching quality (Hénard and Roseveare 2012). The review by Hitch, Mahoney and Macfarlane (2018, p. 296) considered evidence from recently-published studies around the professional development of university staff employed on short-term contracts, finding a set of structural issues that included ‘ad hoc communication, exclusion from departmental meetings and lack of pay for development activities’. Chalmers (2011) argued that sessional staff are excluded from many aspects of life in disciplinary communities within universities, limiting their scope for professional development. Klopper and Power (2020) similarly found that heavy workloads and competing demands made it difficult for sessional staff to engage in professional development activity. Challenges are particularly felt in relation to contributing to the development of curricula. A qualitative study undertaken by Lopes and Dewan (2014), for instance, found that respondents felt isolated from decision making and curriculum planning in their departmental settings. In addition, there are constraints around the capacity of casualised teaching staff to innovate in teaching, given that innovations typically involve additional preparation time. Leathwood and Read (2022) specifically saw ways in which teaching innovation was restricted for their respondents, given last-minute notification of teaching responsibilities and the lack of opportunity to teach the same material more than once. Severe constraints on one’s practice might well generate a sense of fatalism, although other responses are possible in principle. The global trend towards an increase in the level of casualised working conditions for those who teach in higher education would suggest that institutional and national policy makers have hitherto failed to respond adequately to research into the issues that are at stake. Marginson (1990), for instance, found some 30 years ago that female academics were likely to be keenly affected by an emerging trend towards casual contracts in higher education; and yet we find only recently O’Keefe and Courtois (2019) claiming that gender inequality is particularly problematic for women on casualised contracts. It is one thing to be aware that discrepancies in working conditions between different members of staff exercise a significant influence on teaching quality, but it is another thing altogether for this to translate into revised policy and practice in the face of a global trend like marketisation (Molesworth et al. 2010).

Pawson and Tilley (1997), indeed, argued that it is far from a straightforward matter to develop effective approaches to policy and practice where complex social interventions are in view, including those that pertain to education. They claimed that explanatory analysis that integrates attention to theory is essential if one is to develop a basis on which to formulate appropriate social interventions. Leathwood and Read (2022) thus identified a significant weakness in the field when highlighting the limited extent to which studies have sought to offer theoretical explanations for ways in which casualised employment influences teaching.

One way forward, in response to this situation would be specifically to develop further theorised accounts of the influence of different expressions of casualised employment on teaching in specific settings. However, a complementary line of reasoning within the research literature has been to seek to understand precarity itself more fully, alongside further exploration of its manifestation in given settings. Millar (2017) argued that it is helpful to distinguish a general condition of vulnerability (i.e. an ontological precariousness) from the precarity that characterises a labour regime. Such a distinction, indeed, is helpful in ensuring that precarity is not considered through a narrow lens that focuses exclusively on secure forms of work associated with wealthy nations in the Global North. Ettlinger (2007, p. 320) similarly argued that it is helpful to see precarity as ‘a condition of vulnerability relative to contingency and the inability to predict’, noting that this perspective would value a consideration of both macro-level structures and micro-spaces of daily life. Such reasoning would suggest that it would also be instructive to consider a range of forms of precarity in attempting to establish more effective policy interventions or new practices for teaching in higher education.

Even still, relatively limited attention has been accorded in the research literature on teaching in higher education to such wider understandings of precarity, although Read (2023) represents a notable exception in applying a spatial and temporal lens to develop a similarly broad understanding of precarity. In a way, the emphasis in the research literature on teaching and working conditions in higher education has instead been on practices and regimes that seek to establish certainty around teaching, whether pertaining to quality assurance, learning analytics, teaching excellence frameworks, standardisation, performance metrics and so on. For Ettlinger (2007), though, such strategies characteristically offer an illusion of certainty rather than any basis on which to transform conditions of precariousness. Such a framing of precarity also fails to recognise, and challenge, the gendered, classed and racialised implications of precarity. This is particularly the case when it comes to the less quantifiable aspects of precarity, for example its impacts on affects, emotions and identities (Lynch 2021).

Expanding the boundaries around precarity in teaching

This special issue thus seeks to expand the boundaries around precarity in higher education teaching, in the hope of opening up new ways forward for teaching in higher education. In doing so, we agree with Butler (2016, p. 45) that “Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life which is not precarious”. Some of the articles gathered in this special issue remind us, however, that as subjects who are gendered, sexualised and racialised, and who belong to given nations and ethnicities, the precarity of life affects us in various ways.

An inability to completely predetermine teaching

Perhaps counterintuitively, precarity may be seen to arise from a range of constraints, constraints that would seek to predetermine teaching. Wood et al. (2024) explored experiences of 13 teacher educators in Australia and New Zealand during the Covid-19 pandemic, looking at upheavals to academic practice. The study considered how the educators engaged in acts of resistance against managerial responses to the constraints imposed during lockdowns of the pandemic. As Waite (2009, p. 412) has pointed out, precarity can serve as a ‘possible rallying point for resistance’. Strategies were enacted by which to explore collegiality in the face of requirements for the participants to act in specific ways, in ways that sought to maintain pedagogies that depended on relationships with students and community connections. The open nature of teaching meant that a hegemonic neoliberal logic remained only seemingly totalising. Given collegiality and criticality, alternative approaches to teaching remained possible, including those that prioritised caring relationships.

Precarity as an occasion for disruption

Glover, Myers and Collins (2024), meanwhile, explored the experience of twelve tutors from business and law in the UK, as they undertook what the authors characterise as ‘extreme work’ in the early days of the pandemic. They saw that in these extreme conditions where practice could no longer be completed on the basis of established routines, the exercise of academic judgement and the expression of the voice of teachers were still essential if teaching was to occur well. The study highlights the value of a dialogue occurring between teaching staff and those responsible for the management of teaching. It was evident in the study that some participants in the study appreciated the opportunity of developing new teaching routines and taking on new forms of responsibility for their teaching, even if this was far from being universally the case for the participants in the study. What we see here is a pandemic providing the occasion for a disruption of established teaching routines. Even still, ‘long hours, confusion, and isolation’ were experienced across a wide range of members of staff, not just those on casualised contracts.

The basis for resistance

Even in the most extreme of circumstances, though, constraints that give rise to insecurity are not seen to be totalising. Oleksiyenko and Terepyshchyi (2024) undertook a qualitative study of the lived experience of 39 Ukrainian academics as they responded to the hardships of teaching within a hostile environment, namely in the midst of a war. The study highlights the value of academics in such an environment making contributions to university governance and taking a shared responsibility for academic life. Given real threats to social justice, it was seen to be important valuable for academics to take a concern for critical thinking and to give voice to resistance, regardless of a focus on one’s job security. The alternative was to participate in acts of collusion with invading forces or militant groups with an agenda to pursue. Reflexivity was seen to be critical to any empowerment of staff in vulnerable positions, to cultivate the critical thinking and reframing that make acts of resistance possible; as was the development of networks and informal collaborations.

The limits of a functional approach to teaching

Jiménez (2024) offers an essay that draws together a body of theory and practice on the precarious expressions of identity that teaching staff experience in the face of functional university environments. The argument claims that teaching is not something that can simply be locked down through restrictions on the performativity of teachers. It is argued that there is a tendency to reduce teaching to ‘an input that makes possible the learning of students’. It is argued that such a reduction results in a ‘professional desubjectivation’, in which one’s role as a teacher is predetermined rather than open to encounters with students and with knowledge. It is claimed, rather, that one’s identity as a teacher should emerge from activity.

The role that one takes on, though, plays a close part in shaping one’s identity. McCulloch and Leonard (2024) reviewed literature on the implications of precarious working conditions for university teaching, before going on to consider staff who support students’ capacity for academic writing. They point out that research has identified ways in which teaching is significantly influenced by ‘the structural conditions of the workplace, including policies and procedures, material contexts such as office space, workload allocations, and departmental and institutional cultures, which determine what academics can and cannot achieve’. The paper specifically identifies a set of challenges that arise when teaching is not undertaken by those with a full-spectrum academic role (see also McComb and Eather (2023)). It is not a straightforward matter, for instance, to adopt specific referencing standards or to understand norms around academic malpractice unless one also develops an appreciation of the disciplinary basis for those norms and standards. If one’s work is limited to a specific function, such as supporting academic writing, though, it can be difficult to appreciate the complexity of the learning that students face. It was also clear that it takes students extended periods of time to learn to write effectively, but that sessional staff typically have limited opportunity to see students develop. The analysis would suggest that there is value to be gained in reframing job roles in light of the developmental and relational aspects of academic writing.

Developing new forms of identity

Identity does have other sources beyond one’s functional role as a teacher. Crutchley, Nahaboo and Rao (2024) undertook a study of narratives produced by 14 early career teachers from across six continents, teachers who had moved away from the national setting of their upbringing to work in higher education elsewhere. They highlighted the challenges posed by seeking teaching appointments and validating one’s identity in what to the participants were novel cultural settings. They identified a dissonance between ‘individual and institutional expectations’ that made it difficult for participants to give expression to their own values and beliefs. These participants experienced a need to develop new forms of identity to cope with this cultural disorientation and dislocation, and to respond to norms that were seemingly designed to allow progression and inclusion for specific sorts of individuals.

Teaching as a means by which to take responsibility

Finally, Misiaszek (2024) completed an experimental autoethnographic piece as a point of departure for further research, constituting a reflexive account of a range of precarities experienced as a lecturer working within China, whether pertaining to geopolitics, emotions, health and so on. The bilingual Mandarin-English account highlights how uncertainty allows space for creativity. For instance, the experience taught that ‘every teaching moment holds the potential to be a new point of departure’, even in ‘conditions that lie beyond our control’. If the study sees the hardest part about teaching as ‘teaching the institution (about teaching students)’, then this is with a view to noting the value of seeing teaching as an act of taking responsibility.

Implications for revised practice and policy

Papers in the special issue confirm existing insights that there are many negative impacts on teaching that arise from precarious working conditions, while also recognising the structural constraints that come with extreme circumstances. Clearly, one could seek to make changes to employment practices in light of research on the negative implications of precarity. An institution may come to appreciate that the most appropriate way to provide for the needs of staff and students is only to offer extended contracts that reach beyond a single cycle of teaching; or to provide for its teaching needs on the basis of staff on permanent contracts. One might see changes to job roles to increase the spectrum of academic activity for which sessional teaching staff are contracted, in ways that reflect the complexity of the challenges faced by students and in terms of what supports professional learning. Access to professional development activity could be made freely available to all staff engaged in teaching in any given setting.

It is easy to suggest that university management teams should ‘do the right thing’ for their staff and students by reducing their reliance on casualised or sessional teaching staff, but, given the longstanding, structural nature of the problems, additional strategies that are closely connected to influences on teaching quality are likely to be needed for change to result. The studies in this special issue would suggest, indeed, that a response that targets the contractual terms of staff is far from the only way forward. There is value in considering creative responses that do not depend upon immediate shifts in employment relations. This creativity must come from tenured staff as much as from contract staff and from managers, given the relevance of issues to teaching in higher education that pertain to relationships, working space, integration into the academic community, curriculum development and so on.

Adaptive responses are possible for all higher education staff, even those working under tight constraints. Members of staff on short-term or casualised contracts will at times find it challenging to formulate such responses. Crutchley, Nahaboo and Rao (2024), for instance, found that the early career teachers in their study experienced difficulties in challenging the academic systems within which they worked. Nonetheless, the act of teaching occurs in a liminal space between the public and the private, rather than in a space that is simply one or the other. It is noteworthy that Ettlinger (2007) suggested that there is a tendency for people to seek certainty in response to the feeling that some aspect of life is precarious, with the strategy of keeping groups apart from each other to help ensure this; the antithesis of collegiality. Collegiality, for instance, offers realistic possibilities for staff to challenge normative discourses, as Wood et al. (2024) considered. Mountz et al. (2015), indeed, proposed a feminist ethics of care that is grounded in working together across a range of boundaries to ensure sufficient time is present to conduct scholarly activity. Course design has increasingly become to be seen as a collective endeavor in recent years, but there will be ways for teaching teams to develop as well, as McCulloch and Leonard (2024) found in relation to support for academic writing. Also concerned with a feminist ethics of care, Lynch (2021) called for collective organising. While unions and professional organisations have been a long-lasting influence in higher education in many countries, Lynch (2021) argued for the foregrounding of relationality and, ultimately for more care-centric academic cultures, where the care for each other becomes the primary driver of change. Such care-centric cultures would point to the value of a generosity on the part of permanent members of staff in ways that sidestep some aspects of performativity. The sector would benefit from new practices and forms of collective organising that give voice to staff in precarious contexts.

Studies in the special issue have also explored aspects of the basis on which such collegiality depends. It was clear for Misiaszek (2024), for instance, that reflexivity provided a significant basis for taking responsibility in front of precarious conditions, while Oleksiyenko and Terepyshchyi (2024) pointed to the value of a communicative reflexivity that takes into account the vulnerabilities of others. Ayebi-Arthur (2017), indeed, argued that communication constitutes an essential aspect of responses to crisis events, to enable considered responses to the associated disruption and uncertainty. Given the centrality of academic judgment in teaching, Glover, Myers and Collins (2024) were clear that scope is present for teachers, in dialogue with others, to find their voice even in extreme settings.

There is scope for shifts in policy and practice that address the collegial, critical and reflexive basis for teaching, as well as the contractual terms of staff. If transformation of the conditions of vulnerability of those who teach in higher education is to occur, it will be important to explore such considerations.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.