Equity in higher education – An Australian researcher

Images and a chunk of text in this post has been copied directly from Co-pilot:

Microsoft. (2025). Copilot [Large language model]. https://copilot.microsoft.com/ 

First I tried to get a summary of ALL my publications but it was a bit off track as I have some “side projects” that were outliers and I think that’s what made it weird. Then I decided to do it in chunks. So the first one I did was the 4 publications that Sue Emmett and I have on social equity discourses. It made a lovely summary and the infographic was pretty cool but full of incorrect spelling so I’ll leave it out.

The summary of the 3 articles from the Wellbeing SIG was pretty interesting too – you might have to overlook spelling here as well!!!!

🧭 Overview of the Three Works

Title	Focus	Methodology	Key Themes
Larsen et al. (2025) Student Support, Beyond Empty Signifiers	Defining and enacting student support in Enabling programs	Collaborative autoethnography	– Complexity of student needs – Institutional frustrations – Facilitators of effective support
Olds et al. (2023) Stop the Clocks: Enabling Practitioners and Precarity in Pandemic Time(s)	Precarity and time pressures during COVID-19	Collaborative autoethnography	– Neoliberal time economy – Emotional labour – Workplace precarity
Jones et al. (2023) Looking into the “Dark Mirror”	Change fatigue and wellbeing of enabling educators during COVID-19	Collaborative autoethnography	– Change fatigue – Technostress and Zoom fatigue – Emotional labour and wellbeing

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🔍 Comparative Insights

1. Shared Context: Enabling Education

All three studies center on educators working in Enabling programs—preparatory pathways for equity students. These educators often serve as frontline support for students facing academic, emotional, and socio-economic challenges.

2. Methodological Unity: Collaborative Autoethnography

Each paper uses collaborative autoethnography to foreground the voices of practitioners. This method allows for rich, reflective, and emotionally honest narratives that challenge institutional silencing and highlight systemic issues.

3. Recurring Themes Across Studies

• Emotional Labour: All three works emphasize the intense emotional demands placed on educators, often unrecognized and unsupported by institutions.
• Neoliberal Constraints: The studies critique the neoliberal university’s emphasis on efficiency, productivity, and economic rationalism, which undermines care-based pedagogies.
• Workload and Time Pressures: Unrealistic workload models and time compression are central concerns, especially during the pandemic.
• Wellbeing and Burnout: Educators report fatigue, guilt, and burnout, often prioritizing student wellbeing at the expense of their own.

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🧠 Unique Contributions

Larsen et al. (2025)

• Argues for a clear, consistent definition of student support.
• Identifies three domains: complexities of student needs, frustrations in delivering support, and facilitators of success.
• Advocates for workload recognition and training tailored to emotional and academic support.

Olds et al. (2023)

• Explores how pandemic conditions intensified precarity and disrupted time boundaries.
• Uses Butler’s concept of precarity and Adam’s “machine time” to theorize the emotional toll of neoliberalism.
• Emphasizes solidarity and collective resistance through storytelling.

Jones et al. (2023)

• Introduces “change fatigue” as a superordinate theme.
• Highlights the interdependence of student and staff wellbeing.
• Uses the metaphor of the “dark mirror” to critique the alienating effects of digital surveillance and technostress.

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Would you like a visual synthesis (e.g., a thematic map or comparison chart), or a deeper dive into one of the studies for use in your own research or writing?

Absolutely, Ana. Here’s a concise synthesis of the two articles—Olds et al. (2023) and Jones et al. (2023)—which both explore the lived experiences of enabling education practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic:

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🧭 Summary: Practitioner Wellbeing and Precarity in Pandemic Times

🎯 Central Focus

Both articles use collaborative autoethnography to explore how COVID-19 intensified precarity, emotional labour, and burnout among enabling educators—those supporting non-traditional and equity-group students in Australian universities.

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🔍 Key Themes Across Both Studies

1. Time Pressure and Neoliberal Workload Models

• Time emerged as the most dominant theme.
• The pandemic accelerated “machine time” and “network time”—terms used to describe the relentless pace and blurred boundaries of academic work.
• Enabling educators faced compressed workloads, unrealistic expectations, and constant availability demands, especially in online environments.

2. Emotional Labour and Moral Injury

• Practitioners were deeply committed to philosophies of care, social justice, and student flourishing.
• The emotional toll of supporting vulnerable students—often without adequate institutional support—led to moral injury, where educators felt unable to meet their own standards of care.
• Emotional labour was intensified by digital surveillance, isolation, and the need to mask personal distress while supporting others.

3. Change Fatigue and Technostress

• The rapid shift to online learning created technological fatigue, especially through videoconferencing (“Zoom fatigue”).
• Practitioners experienced change fatigue—a state of exhaustion from constant adaptation and uncertainty.
• The neoliberal university’s focus on efficiency and output exacerbated these pressures.

4. Gendered and Unequal Impacts

• All participants in Olds et al. were women, many juggling caregiving roles alongside academic responsibilities.
• The pandemic magnified gendered precarity, with female staff disproportionately affected by work-life imbalance and emotional strain.

5. Wellbeing Interdependence

• Jones et al. emphasize the interdependency between student and staff wellbeing.
• The quality of student-practitioner relationships—marked by care, empathy, and presence—was critical to student success, especially in online learning.
• Institutional wellbeing initiatives often felt tokenistic, failing to address systemic causes of burnout.

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✨ Methodology

• Both studies used collaborative autoethnography, allowing educators to reflect on their own experiences and collectively analyze patterns.
• Thematic analysis revealed recurring motifs: time, emotional labour, online fatigue, and wellbeing.

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💡 Implications

• These articles call for:
  • Recognition of enabling educators’ emotional and pedagogical labour.
  • Reimagining workload models to reflect the realities of care-based teaching.
  • Embedding cultures of compassion and equity across university systems.
  • Prioritizing staff wellbeing as integral to student success.

(Microsoft, 2025)

Well that was a morning well spent I think! I learnt some more about using CoPilot and ended up with a nice summary or two.

In other news I have had 1 article accepted recently. It is from an old project that I actually withdrew from a while ago. We were looking at staffing rural schools and how rural placements impacted that. The team did a follow up where they did a content analysis sort of thing on how the universities marketed rural placements to potential students. I really don’t feel like I did a lot on the project – certainly not a lot in the writing up. I did some parts of the literature review and I was certainly there, contributing, at all the meetings and discussions as we conceptualisedand then refined the project. Anyway they were kind enough to include me in the list of authors and it has been accepted into the The Australian Educational Researcher – a well ranked journal. I’m rather happy about that!

The other news is the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice but that is a big deal so I think I’m going to create a separate post so it gets the attention it deserves!