Producing the global graduate: academic labour and imagined futures in critical times

ABSTRACT

The contemporary university works to produce an imagined global graduate who can demonstrate competencies such as mobility, intercultural awareness and global citizenship. In Australia and New Zealand, teacher education academics are charged with the production of graduates who can display and transmit such competencies, but the labour and lived experience of these academics stands in contrast to the unrestricted imaginary of those graduates. They are increasingly subject to an institutional focus on performance against time-related outcomes and productivities as well as by affective complexities exacerbated by institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper draws on a research project that seeks to understand teacher education academics’ experiences and understandings of teaching and producing the global graduate during critical times. It considers some of the findings of this project to explore the temporal and affective complexities inherent in the production of the global graduate within teacher education. We seek to build a mosaic of the textures of time and affect within the experience of teacher education academics at a critical time for the academy, while recognising that it remains an incomplete mosaic, one that points to the disjunctures and disjointures of that experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporality
• affect
• higher education
• teacher education
• global graduate
• academic labour

Producing the global graduate

The incessant creep of the marketisation, commodification and metricisation of higher education has been widely documented and discussed over the past decade, as have the competitive cultures of entrepreneurialism and consumerism that have become entrenched within the sector. Forces and cultures such as these mean that individual universities are grounded in a particular context but serve a global education market. They are also driven by global imperatives that are inter-imbricated in the business of higher education, a business that is concerned with producing what is frequently termed the global graduate.

The production of this archetypal graduate is central to the purposes of the contemporary university, with competencies such as mobility, global mindedness, intercultural awareness and global citizenship frequently identified as desirable graduate attributes (Black, Charles, and Keddie 2020; Borkovic et al. 2020, 464). In Australia and New Zealand, as in other Anglophone countries, universities aim to deliver a range of internationally infused curricula and pedagogies designed to foster these attributes, including immersive international experiences, voluntourism, language programs, summer schools, student exchanges and internships.

The intended product of these educational interventions is often described in economic terms as an elite transnationally mobile actor, a ‘“postnational” globally savvy citizen […] of the world’ (Cheng and Holton 2019, 615) who is ‘readily employable in a variety of cultural contexts’ (Aktas et al. 2017, 67) and can access ‘limitless’ opportunities as well as extensive geographical reach and influence’ (Brooks and Waters 2023, 6–7). An alternate imaginary of the global graduate has strong moral and critical dimensions. It describes a graduate who is imagined to be pedagogically produced by higher education programs, including teacher education programs, that ‘foster the good life for humankind’ (Kathleen, Heikkinen, and Huttunen 2019). This discursively constructed graduate possesses the ‘knowledge, capabilities and disposition to appreciate diversity and address social injustice’ (Borkovic et al. 2020, 1106). They are motivated by a ‘transformative cosmopolitanism’ (Salter and Halbert 2017, 696) and committed to ‘improving tolerance, respect and harmony between nations and cultures’ (Auld and Morris 2019, 677). At their most transformative, they are an agent of change who can facilitate ‘societal development and progress’ (Brooks et al. 2021, 1375) and ‘usher in a new cultural and economic order wherein mobility and global connectedness are the norm’ (Farrugia 2020, 237).

Recent discourses of teacher education reflect this more transformative imaginary, supported by the OECD’s addition of Global Competence to the (PISA) Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD 2019). In addition to measuring school students’ reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills, PISA now measures students’ capacity to ‘examine local, global and intercultural issues, to engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions with people from different cultures, and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development’ (PISA 2022). Similar notions emerge from many university teacher education programs. Despite continued debate about how global competencies are realised through such policies and school practices (Neoh 2020; Fozdar and Ann Martin 2020), and, indeed, despite challenges within this journal to the affective ideologies that frame and promote the OECD global competence framework (Zembylas 2023), it is increasingly expected that teacher education academics foster such competencies in their preservice teachers, competencies which in turn form the seeding ground of those teachers’ own classroom practices and pedagogies (Yemini, Tibbitts, and Goren 2019).

Temporality and affect in the work of teacher education academics

Zembylas’ recent critique (2023) points to the affective complexities that attend the production of the global teacher graduate, which we discuss in greater detail later in this paper. Other recent research highlights the temporal complexities of this work. The academic labour which underpins the assemblage of the global graduate responds to spatial ideas – the idea of the global – but it can also be understood as twisted by temporal forces that have been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that include a strong focus on the future. As Biesta has recently argued in this journal, ‘education is a matter of preparation: preparation for work, pre-paration for life, preparation for more education, preparation for citizenship, preparation for eternity but, in all cases, preparation for something that will occur later’ (2023, 3, original emphasis). Higher education as a sector has long been subject to guiding narratives that project and describe these anticipated futures and, more recently, to the imposition of performance-based measures, practices and pedagogies that are strongly time-based (Dollinger 2020; Brooks et al. 2021), but the pandemic has seen their significant intensification, with direct implications for academics and their work (Burke and Manathunga 2020). Within the discipline of teacher education, this is coupled with particularly strong future-oriented discourses of growth, improvement and capability that shape the labour of teacher education academics, the pedagogies they employ, and the work of the teachers they educate (Ramiel and Dishon 2021).

In response to this escalation and against the backdrop of the pandemic and its effects, we have conducted a research project which has sought to understand Australian and New Zealand teacher education academics’ experiences and understandings of teaching and producing the global graduate during an historical period when the purposes of higher education broadly and of teacher education specifically are being called into question (Blackmore 2020). In this paper, we consider some of the findings of this project, drawing on that project data which evokes issues of temporality and affect to examine the ways that these forces intersect with one another in the work of teacher education academics. We begin by outlining the research project and its methods before discussing our theoretical tools and drawing on these to make sense of our participants’ accounts of the production of the global graduate during critical times.

The research project

The research project from which this paper arises focused on teacher education academics in Australia and New Zealand. As researchers, we wished to investigate the emergent impact of the pandemic on the teacher education academic cohorts within which our own academic labour is located. In addition, both nations share a strong policy and curricular emphasis on the preparation of global graduates, and both experienced particularly stringent COVID-19 lockdown and border closure policies during 2020 and 2021 that prompted rapid changes in institutional and pedagogical practices and created a compelling context for our research. In both nations, preservice teachers may be undertaking their first, undergraduate qualification or may be enrolled as postgraduate students who already have a degree.

The project involved semi-structured interviews with 13 teacher education academics who were employed within a university faculty or school of education at the time of the interviews, nine from Australian universities and four from New Zealand universities. These academics were identified for recruitment because of their involvement in the design and/or delivery of undergraduate and/or postgraduate teacher education programs with a strong pedagogical focus on fostering global competencies in both preservice teachers and their eventual potential students and/or their track record of publishing research that is centrally concerned with the production of such competencies. They were identified through web searches for such programs and research and through their public academic profiles which were accessed via public-facing online contact pages provided by their school or faculty.

Each one hour interview involved an individual participant and two members of the research team. A series of common questions, prompts and scenarios were used to ensure continuity across the interviews. These were designed to ‘generate complex, nuanced thoughts and descriptions’ (Bearman 2019, 4) as well as to encourage and allow free-ranging conversations within which participants could pursue their own lines of thought and discussion Roulston and Myungweon (2018). Participants were also invited to view a short video or montage which drew on Critical Videographic Research Methods to present images that depicted the imaginaries of the global graduate that we describe earlier and the purposes for which that graduate might be produced. This inclusion of visual language was intended to shift the researchers’ reliance on ‘talking’ as the only means of gathering data and to invoke ‘diffractive apertures to produce a sense of interference patterns manifest in the research’ (Thomas and Moss 2018, 88), patterns that might also yield insights into participants’ affective engagement with the ideas presented by the video.

The analysis of the interview data involved a process of reflexive thematic analysis as expounded by Braun and Clarke (2019, 2021) and comprehensively explained by Braun et al. (2019). The initial coding process drew on themes identified from a literature review while subsequent coding was inductive and iterative, involving the review and revision of coding to identify broader thematic patterns across the data based on logic and coherence while streamlining overlapping coding to delineate meaning where possible. This recognises and reflects Braun and Clarke’s view that ‘qualitative research is about meaning and meaning-making, and viewing these as always context-bound, positioned and situated’ (2019, 592) and their emphasis on researcher subjectivity as an analytic resource (2021).

In this paper, we draw on the accounts of six Australian and three New Zealand participants, using the pseudonyms chosen by those participants. These accounts have been selected because they have yielded data coded in relation to the themes of temporality and affect. We have read and re-read this data, referring to the original interview transcripts and to other thematic data as needed for context. We have discussed, debated and iteratively reviewed the transcripts, considering the intersections between theory, what our participants say, and the broader discourses associated with the global graduate.

Understanding time and academic labour

Time has held a fascination for the sociology of education for some years (see Lingard and Thompson 2017). An emergent body of scholarship suggests that time within higher education can no longer be understood outside of context. Instead, it argues that this time is ‘institutionally structured’ (Bennett and Jane Burke 2018), 2), cut loose from previous traditions and continuities and ‘shaped by the future’ (Decuypere and Vanden Broeck 2020, 603). Much of this scholarship has also emphasised the ways in which time structures individual and collective experiences and actions within higher education.

Leaton Gray (2017) has suggested that three categories of time operate within higher education: ‘fixed time’, also known as ‘clock time’; ‘biological time’, which manifests in students’ developmental ages and stages; and ‘social time’, which involves those mechanisms that contribute to the social construction of time such as the academic year. Of these, clock time has gained significant traction within studies of higher education, reflecting a recognition of the incessant concern for the hegemony of clock time in education and how this has been reinforced and accelerated by neoliberal-infused globalisation, with its focus on productivity, competition and performance against time-related outcomes and productivities (see Thomas and Jay Whitburn 2019 . Others argue that clock time alone, with its linear and progressive overtones, is no longer an adequate tool with which to characterise the increasing velocity of time in higher education. They highlight the sector’s normative temporal discourses of growth, improvement and meritocracy as well as the sectoral climate of accelerationism that drives it onward Bennett and Jane Burke 2018; Shahjahan 2020; Vostal 2015).

Accelerationism is a ‘multifaceted theoretical movement concerned with relations between capital, technology and time’ (Sam and Cole 2017, 39) that has direct implications for the labour of academics. As Shahjahan argues, ‘the ways in which one relates to and makes sense of time, deeply inform the way we live and make sense of life, including our institutional lives in higher education’ (2018, 1). These institutional lives are increasingly subject to an unprecedented temporal squeeze that is occurring against a background of the erosion of employment conditions and security coupled with a dramatic loss of work-life balance.

The work of Barbara Adam is particularly useful in making explicit the impact of time in the contemporary university. Adam offers what they term the five Cs of temporality post-enlightenment: creation, commodification, compression, control and colonisation (Adam 2003). While we recognise the interrelated scaffolding that binds these five concepts together, this paper makes selective use of these notions, drawing on the latter three: compression, control and colonisation.

What Adam describes as the compression of time intensifies with pace under the guise of flexibility wherein speed ‘is valorised as an unquestioned and unquestionable good’ (2003, 67) and ‘overshadows other social and environmental considerations’ (66). Speed becomes a marker of independent value, pushing and compressing what is possible within a given segment of time, inevitably truncating depth and sophistication in the service of pace. One effect of this compression is that academic labour has become regulated by ‘pre-set temporal milestones’ (Whitburn and Krehl Edward Thomas 2021), 104) that frame what should be taught, learned, achieved and performed within tight temporal terms. Another effect is that academics increasingly describe themselves as time poor (Vostal 2015) to the point of burnout (Watermeyer et al. 2021). Adam’s work also captures the unexamined, almost invisible nature of this compression for many academics, where to ‘be “modern”, “progressive”, even “civilised” means to embrace an industrial approach to time’ (2003, 71) and where ‘(time = money, speed = profit, increased speed = unmitigated good thing)’ (69).

Adam’s work also enables the analysis of the ways in which time is controlled and colonised within higher education. For Adam, the control of time is partly concerned with the speeding up of time while the colonisation with/of time ‘borrows from the future to finance the present’ (2003, 73): it seeks to shape the future based on regulation determined in the present. It is pre-emptive, anticipatory and precognitive, determining possible futures through a managed present. This locks the academic into a cycle of future thinking and planning, forcing them to ‘horizon-scan and adjust their work to fit the changing landscape’ (Page 2020, 594).

Understanding affect and academic labour

These temporal forces are attended by affective experiences. In fact, as recent scholarship suggests, temporality and affect are entwined or entangled within the contemporary academy (Poutanen 2022; Mannevuo 2016; Shahjahan 2020; Bosanquet, Mantai, and Fredericks 2020). Valovirta and Mannevuo note that ‘th[e] promotional discourse of the entrepreneurial university abounds with temporal rhetoric’ (2022, 1311), but it is a rhetoric that also plays itself out in the felt experiences of the academics who are the subjects of this entrepreneurial university. The relentless futurity that characterises the contemporary academy places pressure on academics to craft and curate a future academic self, locking them into what Shajahan has called modes of ‘anticipatory acceleration’ (793) and cajoling them to produce more within each unit of time. This is what Page terms ‘becoming calculable’ (2020, 586), the process of becoming ‘transmogrified into units of resource, an amalgamation of outputs and practices that can be measured and audited through evaluations of pedagogy and research’ (2020, 587–8), with little concern for the effect over time of such processes. These processes, they argue, are beyond the power of an individual academic to refuse or resist: they are processes of inculturation into a professional temporal context that are driven by affective pressures including guilt and ‘shame logics’ (Shahjahan 2020, 787).

A growing conceptualisation of affect follows the work of Ahmed (2013) and of Fox (2015), who draws on Ahmed and on Deleuze and Guattari (1988) to consider affects as ‘becomings’. This strand of affect theory understands affect as a force that ‘shape[s] what we see and ignore, and discursively position[s] people’ (Olson, Bellocchi, and Dadich 2020, 157). It recognises that ‘feelings do things, materialising realities in different ways’ (Mehrabi 2020, 155, original emphases). It also challenges what Ahmed describes as ‘the presumption of interiority’ (2013, 8) or the presumption that affect is a purely private and individual response. Instead, it highlights the relational and situated nature of affect as something that involves ‘(re)actions or relations of “towardness” or “awayness”’ (Ahmed 2013, 8). It also recognises that affect may encompass visible manifestations as well as ‘subterranean tensions, pleasures and discomforts’ (Morley, Roberts, and Ota 2021, 768).

Our analysis in this paper is informed by these insights. It is contextualised by a body of recent related scholarship which describes the affective investments tied up in academic labour (e.g., Brunila and Valero 2018; Morley, Roberts, and Ota 2021; Poutanen 2022; Mannevuo 2016; Shahjahan 2020; Bosanquet, Mantai, and Fredericks 2020). It is also inspired by an emerging literature which describes the ways in which the pandemic has served to highlight and amplify these temporal and affective tangles (e.g., Guglielmo and Skelley Jordan 2022; Watermeyer and Tomlinson 2022; Valovirta and Mannevuo 2022). This literature reveals widespread anxieties not only about the current nature of academic labour but about what the post-pandemic university may look like, including concerns about what Bakhtiar terms the ‘atomisation’ of the university as an academic community (2020, 3), a destabilised, irrevocably altered state in which performance and compliance are held in concert with precarity.

Our interest here takes its lead from these concerns as well as from the suggestion by Gannon and Taylor that, particularly in the wake of the ‘strangely full half-life of [the] COVID-19 lockdown’, academic labour should be understood as ‘a dynamic and continuous assembling of affects and materialities, habits and microworlds that are temporally and spatially extensive’ (2021, 1161–2). As they argue, it is important for us as education researchers to highlight the ‘affective intensities’ of academic labour (Susanne and Taylor 2021, 1163), particularly in the wake of the temporal shifts produced by the pandemic, and to highlight the mosaic of ‘assemblages, entanglements and relations’ that attend that labour (Taylor and Gannon 2018, 465). In the following sections of this paper, we consider the ways in which time and affect are implicit in the work of the teacher education academics whom we interviewed, especially the work of producing the global teacher graduate, and highlight the complex and often disjointed relationship between time and affect within their experience.

Collapsing time and space: the compression of academic time

Our interviews with our academic participants included questions, prompts and scenarios that encouraged them to describe the kind of graduate teacher that they sought to produce, the practices and pedagogies that they employ to help produce that graduate, and the hopes for those graduates which inform those practices and pedagogies. One theme that consistently emerged from these discussions was the discrepancy or disjuncture between the expansive imagined temporal experiences of the global graduate and those of the academics charged with their production. One of our participants, Bella, described the realities of academia as feeling ‘like you didn’t go home, that work was with you all the time’. Another, Corinne, described ‘the incredible creep on our time’ and ‘the collapse of time and space’ which means that ‘any space is now taken up’. As Corinne explained:

[I’m] constantly thinking: I have to go now, I’ve got our Board of Studies meeting and then I’ve got this and then I’ve got this and oh my goodness, I gotta mark all those assignments. … I am driven by my diary, my timetable.

Here the compression of time described by Adam reaches its zenith, in the ‘mastery of time and the control of rhythms’ of academic life (2003, 69). Our participants’ accounts also capture the temporal liquidity described by Gannon and Taylor, where academic labour becomes ‘porous’ and prone to ‘seepage into all sorts of times and spaces’ (2021, 1162). Under this liquidity, what they term the ‘flexible time economy’ of contemporary academic work breaks down the boundaries between work and home life, creating a disruptive mosaic of ‘space-time patchiness’ (1173). This shows itself in numerous ways in the lived and felt experiences of our participants. Fred described the global academic mobilities that they had been able to access before the advent of the pandemic, such as Visiting Scholar roles in overseas universities, before noting their worries that changing workload and other management models were now ‘constrain[ing] the possible’. These worries affected them bodily as they expressed their mounting concerns about the future of the academy:

… as universities become much more managerial and bureaucratic in the way they run things, those open spaces that you might have had as an academic in the past are reduced and reduced and reduced. So, when was the last time I saw someone just reading a book? Doesn’t happen, you know, everybody’s so busy with marking or coordinating.

Stan, too, expressed their anxieties about time-compressed academic labour in the contemporary university and its implications for teacher education and the teaching profession going forward. They expressed a commitment to the work of ‘continuing to build on the global discussions of what it means to be a global citizen’, but they were also concerned about the constraints that may curtail that work:

I want to really encourage [my graduates] to think about … what the profession could look like, what pedagogy could look like, how we enable knowledges and its transmission and its impact for communities. … I’m keen to think about these and more in terms of reimagining the way that our profession could look like, the way that we do things. But I’m also concerned that we will go back to keeping the things that we can control, that are easy to measure, or, you know, we will go back to those things that the institution values.

Stan’s observations here recall the suggestions by Valovirta and Mannevuo not only that ‘time management is affective’ (2022, 1318) but that ‘anxiety is the affect of neoliberal academia’ (2022, 1313, original emphasis). In Stan’s case, temporal anxiety takes the form of concern that there may be a missed opportunity for new academic practices and cultures in the wake of the pandemic and a return to past norms that work against the idea of the global graduate which they wish to promote. The later sections of our paper explore this anxiety more fully, as well as the other affective dimensions of the contemporary academic experience.

Borrowing from the future: the control and colonisation of academic time

The labour of the teacher education academics we interviewed was therefore subject to increasing forces of time compression. It was also subject to growing temporal control and colonisation. Adam wrote presciently in 2003 about the ways in which ‘the combination of instantaneity of communication with simultaneity of networked relations no longer functions according to the principles of clock time’ (69). With the advent of campus closures and social distancing measures in response to the pandemic coupled with a widespread shift to online teaching and remote learning, academics have become more distanced and isolated from their sites of work, their students and one another but even more digitally connected in ways that exacerbate the colonisation of their time. This has very specific temporal impacts for southern hemisphere academics, as Corinne explained:

We’re having zoom meetings at one o’clock in the morning, because it’s one o’clock European time or whatever. And nobody stops to think that actually we really don’t want to get up at one o’clock in the morning. And then we can’t get back to sleep. And then we’re doing the whole day’s work after that.

For Corinne, contemporary academic life and labour is also subject to darker forms of temporal control, which is once again made possible by the explosion of digital mechanisms and forms of monitoring fuelled by the pandemic. Bosanquet and their colleagues have argued that ‘time in the university is experienced in specific ways that constitute what it means to be or become an academic and to do academic work’ (2020, 746). Corinne described a working life where teacher education academics, like those in other disciplines, are ‘under constant surveillance’:

And here we are, you know, everyone can now check when I turned on my computer and how many meetings I’ve had and who I’ve had meetings with, because they’ll be able to trace all of it. It’s like, whoa, Brave New World. Yeah, 1984. All of those. All those dystopian novels have come to pass.

This colonisation of academics’ time is not limited to the present: it is also implicated in what Adam calls ‘the econopolitical reach into, as well as the ab/use of, the past and future’ (2003, 72). While, as we will discuss shortly, the production of the imagined global graduate is often imbued with hope, the imagined future for our teacher education academics’ own trajectories is troubled by the assumption that academic constraints and contractions will only continue to increase. As Caleb noted, ‘I think that will be a challenge going forward, that we will be increasingly faced with larger and larger cohorts, fewer and fewer resources to support those students and the challenges of not becoming sort of too jaded or cynical in the work along the way’.

This temporal control and colonisation also illustrate what Shahjahan has described as ‘the interconnections between affect, academic work, and temporality’ (2020, 1). They relate not only to the pressure to achieve more with less but, in Colin’s words, the pressure to ‘be all things to all people’: the renaissance scholar, who can do it all without institutional responsibility or support. As Colin explained:

So not only do you have to be this top-notch researcher, but you also have to be a fantastic teacher, you also have to be a course designer, you have to be an advertiser for the course, you have to be engaged in the community. It’s not surprising that so many academics report feeling, you know, burnt out.

Gidget, too, described the tensions and disjunctures that defined their work as a teacher education academic caught between disjointed and conflicting forces and demands:

… a couple of colleagues and I wrote an article … which was about the role of a teacher educator and how difficult it is between the different aspects of what people expect of you. … I keep thinking about here I am trying to be a global person, but I’m trying to also be a local person, and I’m trying to teach this and do that.

These accounts from our participants describe a vicious cycle: the colonisation of their time breeds worry or pressure, and that worry or pressure creates the conditions for the further colonisation of their time. This intertwined affective and temporal process may not always be fully evident to the teacher education academics who are subject to them, however. We referred earlier to the way that Adam characterises the invisible ways in which time may be compressed, controlled and colonised in the contemporary era. Gidget’s desire to control both how they are seen and understood leads to a struggle over the control of their own time, in time, yet they framed this struggle chiefly as one between their local context and global commitments. Gidget made no direct reference to time, even though it was the underlying force that shaped their academic labour and experience.

The global graduate and affective investment

We refer earlier in this paper to the affective investments which the teacher education academic may have in their graduates and in the academic labour which is intrinsic to their production. The more economic framings of the global graduate which we describe in our introduction are hopeful in so far as they hold out the promise of future employability and competitiveness for that graduate. The more moral or transformative framings of that graduate which we also describe are imbued with a different kind of hope: the hope for a better future. What emerges from our participants’ accounts is the degree to which they are affectively invested in this second, moral imaginary of the graduate and its inherent themes of boundlessness and change.

Corinne, for example, described their hope that their teaching work would produce ‘well-rounded, humane, compassionate, thoughtful, engaged’ graduates who ‘are willing to stand back and say, actually, the world is in a perilous state at the moment, whether it’s COVID-19 or climate change or war and conflict and forced migration’ and who are prepared to act ‘in order to save this world’. The pedagogical approaches Corinne brought to their work as a teacher educator were informed by a desire to foster graduate teachers capable of ‘learning to understand others, to be tolerant, to be compassionate, to be a citizen of the world’. In their words, such imagined graduates are ‘a hope for the future’. For Gidget, too, the imagined graduate teacher was one who takes up a globally activist stance:

And I keep saying to them: you know, you’re going to change the world, this is you - you go out there and change the world. And think of something, you know, like try to give them ideas as to how they could make a difference. I think that they need to have that passion.

This imagined graduate teacher also has strong temporal dimensions. When we asked Gidget to elaborate further about the hopes which they held for their teacher graduates, they described the creation of a moral legacy that could span generations:

I wish that they could be peacebuilders. You know, they could work across different groups. They would have their antennas up to see how someone might think differently to them, that every child they teach can make a difference to the world as well.

Bella described a similar commitment to the education of a cohort of graduate teachers who she envisioned as ‘21st century citizens, 21st century graduates’ who were ‘globally minded’, ‘adaptive … critical, creative thinkers’ and who had the ‘ability to understand and act on their values on issues that are significant’. She also described the pedagogies which she employed and promoted to produce this graduate teacher:

I suppose I’ve always been drawn to the idea of inclusive pedagogies, because having an interest in cooperative learning from a very early age as a teacher, like a young teacher, seeing how powerful that was, and how knowing that that’s going to be a pedagogy that is an inclusive pedagogy, that is a culturally responsive pedagogy, because all cultures can kind of learn from each other.

Like Corinne and Gidget, Bella’s academic labour is driven by a strong moral and future-oriented stance: ‘you are just trying to produce someone that isn’t going to be a narrow-minded teacher that just thinks in one way, thinks the way that they were brought up’. Similar themes emerged from Tiffany’s account of an imagined graduate teacher who would ‘develop empathy in terms of those dispositions towards understanding one another, understanding themselves a little bit more, and tackling challenges at a local or glocal level’. For Colin, too, ‘active and informed citizenship is an essential attribute of a global graduate’. The overarching purpose of Colin’s work as a teacher educator was ‘education for the public good’, ‘to educate people to live together’.

The affective complexities of producing the global graduate

As we indicated earlier, however, these hopes and aspirations also come with concerns about the purposes for which the contemporary university constructs and produces the global graduate. Drawing on Ahmed’s theory of affect, Fox suggests that ‘we look not at what emotions are, but what they do’ (2015, 302). In a recent study of Australian academics, Bosanquet and their colleagues describe their participants as being in ‘a deferred state of waiting for academic careers and working conditions that are yet to come’ but also as ‘hoping for a better future’ (2020, 746–747). For our participants, too, the temporal and affective mosaic that accompanied their work was often bound up with both hopes and anxieties about the future of their labour and the purposes to which that labour is put.

One of Carl’s key concerns relates to the effectiveness of existing teacher education curricula and pedagogies to foster the globally minded graduate teacher. Carl argued that in Australia, higher education had ‘really ramped up the rhetoric of global citizenship and global competencies and all those sort of things’ but had simultaneously ‘created structures that do completely the opposite’. They went on to explain:

So while the rhetoric of global citizenship is very strong, while the selling of the globally minded, internationally minded person is very strong, that rhetoric is not being translated into any meaningful practices. In many ways, we did much more before the rhetoric of global minded citizen came along here, by simply getting people to think critically and think historically and reflexively.

For Bella, there were critical questions about ‘the way the way we sell the global graduate, the more neoliberal discourses around it’, while Corinne was concerned that in the ‘push for a certain type of global citizen’, one ‘who can speak several languages travel widely, cross borders and that sort of thing’, the contemporary university had ‘left out that moral affective emotional dimension and social justice dimension’. Gidget shared similar concerns, explaining that ‘in our university anyway, it’s about getting internships and global places and therefore going on your CV, and it will be financially good for you if you do this’. Colin’s responses reflected a similar tension, highlighting the disjunctures between the institutional rhetoric of the global graduate and the ideal of the moral global graduate to which they remained committed:

… of course I’m on board with the idea of developing global graduates, I’m on board with the idea of having a much broader notion of the global citizen rather than that old fashioned political social definition. But to me it’s all about how you do it rather than why you do it: the devil’s in the details.

The devil for Colin stemmed from ‘the neoliberalisation of the Academy’ and the individualistic culture that this perpetuates both for the teacher education academic and for the graduate teacher that they labour to produce:

… it’s one of my real bugbears about education at the moment that it leans itself far too heavily, I think, towards individualistic notions of what it means … to be a graduate. You know, a graduate can do this, a graduate does, that a graduate has these skills. And often those individualistic notions, I think, drift into areas of employability.

Caleb, too, warned: ‘that sort of reified, globally mobile, highly educated, skilled worker, we must treat that with real caution’. Caleb was deeply concerned about the way in which their university increasingly emphasised the ‘individual capacity [of the graduate] to earn more money, to have more job opportunities individually’. They were also keenly aware of the economic dimensions of their own labour and of the tensions between these and their pedagogic commitments:

We can think about [the idea of the global graduate] pedagogically: we can think about it for our students, in terms of what benefits our students. But I think the most common driver or fact that’s considered, unfortunately, by universities is its economic component. You know, is this going to reduce costs and increase our market share?

Black and Walsh have noted ‘the affective complexity which the imagined future evokes’ (2021, 437). Against a background characterised by complex temporal pressures, the production of the global graduate also sets up more than one affective complexity for the teacher education academics we interviewed. Their aspirations for their graduate teachers are acutely moral: they are driven to provide the pedagogical tools to build extraordinary human beings. They are also concerned with educational questions about how this work can be achieved in the current climate of their universities. Corinne asked: ‘what kind of curriculum is going to lead to that – my idea of a global graduate?’ while Fred wondered ‘how much energy are [teacher educators] really able to put into developing and designing a curriculum and a learning experience that’s going to enable some of the ideals of the global citizen’?

The lost joy of being an academic

There is a further affective and temporal complexity, too, which emerges from our participants’ accounts. We have already noted the discrepancy between the imagined temporal experiences of the global graduate and those of the academics charged with their production. A similar discrepancy emerges in relation to the affective dimensions of those experiences. In the accounts of most of our participants, hope for the imagined future stands in marked contrast to the more complex affective experiences associated with the perpetual present as it expresses itself in their academic labour.

There is a body of scholarship that cautions against the portrayal of the ‘emotional state of academic labour’ as a series of ‘“crisis” accounts’ (Chubb, Watermeyer, and Wakeling 2017, 555). For Chubb and their colleagues, contemporary academic work combines ‘despair or despondency’ with ‘a sense of commitment and/or love of what [academics] do’ (2017, 556). This view is supported by Morrison, for whom a love of knowledge, care for students and a sense of collegial comradery comprise the ‘unquantifiable core of academic labour’ (2022, 204). Other scholars have argued for the importance of documenting the ‘moments of joy’ (Kern et al. 2014, 835) or even ‘micro-moments of joy’ within academic labour (Gannon et al. 2019, 49), ‘the small joys of academic life’ which often go ‘unacknowledged, unrewarded or unrecognised’ (Susanne and Taylor 2021, 1173).

At the same time, there are concerns that a persistent nostalgia portrays academic work in what are in fact romanticised and historically inaccurate terms – as ‘unsullied by the demands of the market, of industry, of policy drivers’ (Page 2020, 589). Charteris and their colleagues warn of a flimsy ‘romantic re-investment in past places, practices and subjectivities; an impossible return to the past’ (2016, 43). This hearkens back to Fox’s argument that affect is inescapably bound up with ‘memories, experiences or social formations’ (2015, 307), even where these memories, experiences and social formations are more imagined than actual.

For some of our participants, this nostalgia emerged as a driving temporal and affective dimension of their labour and identity. In their accounts, the joys of academic labour mostly inhabited a lost past, where time itself worked differently. Corinne captured this imaginary when they described a teacher education academic as:

Somebody who has time to engage in thoughtful conversations and debate. Time to actually read all the latest research. Time to sit around with colleagues or a group of postgraduate students and actually talk about the issues that matter.

Corinne went on to explain what has been lost in the harried and hurried present in which such time is unavailable:

I think what has been lost, is the joy of being an academic, that the joy that you had, of finding a niche, a passion for something that you wanted to write about, teach about research about and so on … the joy of thinking about new ideas and wandering around with it all in my head.

The nostalgia described by Corinne speaks to the continued veracity of the view that ‘the emotional ties to academic labour are binding’ (Chubb, Watermeyer, and Wakeling 2017, 556). Our participants had a strong affective tie to a certain kind of academic labour, one that they clearly felt had been subsumed by present institutional practices and cultures. They were also caught up in a temporal cycle in which they both ‘borrowed’ time from evenings, weekends and holidays in the hope of a better individual and collective future and drew on a romanticised past to offset a temporally pressured present. This second temporally affective behaviour may be the most insidious, prefiguring other possibilities and making a ‘parasitic use of the future’ (Adam 2003, 73).

Conclusion

One of the key insights to emerge from our discussion in this paper is the recognition that for the teacher education academics charged with and committed to the production of global teacher graduates, this production is both temporally and affectively complex, a mosaic of experiences characterised by multiple disjunctures and disjointures. This is due partly to the contradictory constructions of the global graduate within teacher education, partly to institutional and cultural forces within higher education as a whole, and partly to the vocational relationship that teacher education academics may have to their labour. This vocational relationship is not a solitary or isolated experience: rather, as Barcan explains, ‘an individual academic’s imagined pasts and futures are tangled up with those of his/her colleagues and the wider society that universities are envisaged as serving’ (2018, 114). They are tangled with the collective affective climate of the academy as a whole: as Valovirta and Mannevuo observe, ‘the university is a working community with its own affective atmospheres, which may be individualised but are not solitary’ (2022, 1315). They are also tangled up with the temporal discourses that attend the construction of the global teacher graduate.

At their most transformative, as we discussed earlier, that graduate is discursively constructed as temporally unrestricted: unlimited, unbounded, untethered, dynamic, enabled and young. By contrast, the teacher education academic charged with their production increasingly experiences their labour and identity as temporally constrained, contextually bound, measured, timed, instrumentalised and enfeebled. The labour of producing that graduate is inescapably temporal: it is informed by the past, it takes place in the present and it works towards an imagined future. It is also inescapably affective.

Our participants’ accounts provide evidence that the pandemic has further exacerbated these temporal and affective entanglements. Cobb and Couch noted before the advent of the pandemic that ‘it might be said that the only certainty in the future of education is its uncertainty’ (2018, 1): this has only become more true since that time. As (Thomas and Whitburn) observe, the pandemic has seen teacher education academics ‘inhabiting a temporal holding pattern, Arendt’s “not yet”’ (Under Review), circling in a state of suspended animation: desperately busy and held in place, alternating between hope, anxiety and the diminishment of joy in their work.

These academic experiences may reflect the complexities arising from the pandemic, but they are also, as we have suggested, a product of institutionalisation, which means that they are potentially subject to challenge. If as Decupeyre and Broeck note, ‘education has always been a matter of time and change’ (2020, 603), then our research supports the recognised need to ‘rethink time’ (Bengtsen, Sarauw, and Filippakou 2021) both within the field of teacher education and the wider project of higher education. Pre-pandemic studies such as that of Mahon and their colleagues argued that the kind of transformative or critical pedagogies to which many of our participants are committed are increasingly constrained by issues of time and time-based productivity within the contemporary academy Kathleen, Heikkinen, and Huttunen (2019). Our findings suggest that this may be even more the case since the advent of the pandemic. They also suggest that there is a need to keep asking, as Stan does, ‘how do these uncertainties enable us to reimagine what the profession could look like, what pedagogy could look like’ and how can teacher education academics continue to promote pedagogies or ‘knowledges that matter to people’?

We hope that understanding the experiences of teacher education academics as both temporal and affective may assist in this process. What can we know of the future of academic labour and the academy if we draw only on ‘projections about the future on the basis of a known past’ (Adam 2003, 72)? Questions such as this are ontological by nature. It may be that by contemplating them, teacher education academics can gain insight into how time affects their labour and identities. These insights may in turn become recursive affects (Fox 2015) that enable such academics to de-compress, de-colonise and take control of time. If, as Fox argues, we should consider affects as ‘becomings’, then they may also inform what the labour of teacher education academics, and of graduate teachers, may become in time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.