Educators given a voice

Paper charting way forward for wellbeing of accounting educators wins award

A lived experience study by academics at Avondale recommending how accounting educators can find value and enjoyment in their changing role has won a best paper award.

Avondale Business School Head Associate Professor Lisa Barnes presented lead author Dr Warrick Long, Professor Maria Northcote and Professor Anthony Williams’ findings at the 2020 Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand Conference.

The paper explains the use of role theory to determine if the heavy workloads causing role conflicts among accounting educators at Australian universities are also causing an imbalance in the relationship between life and work. They are.

It also introduces the TRAC (Teaching, Research, Accounting Educator Workload, Curricula) framework, developed to document what accounting educators perceive students and administrators expect of them and what the reality should be. For example, the perception of the educators participating in the study is that while students expect research to “help me in my career” the university expects “focus in areas that maximise funding opportunities.” The educator’s view is that students and administrators have “reasonable expectations of and support for me researching in my areas of interest.”

Based on these perceptions and views, Long and his colleagues proposed three recommendations to avoid the nocebo effect (where negative expectations create poor results). They recommended accounting educators: engage with administrations to find solutions (rather than being a “critic from the sidelines”); engage with students through new communication modes (in shorter and more focussed content “chunks”), and; share with students their passion for accounting.

How have these worked for Long? A former senior administrator for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, he understands the importance of bringing “potential solutions to the table in those discussions.” He enjoys engaging with students even though new communication modes are challenging. “I’ve been an early adopter of doing away with in-class lectures and instead uploading mini lectures for students to engage with in their own time and own way, but the mysteries of social media elude me.” And “pretty much every accounting student I’ve taught has no doubt whatsoever how much I love accounting.” A graduate even told Long that “if it weren’t for my enthusiasm and passion for accounting, she would never have passed.”

Long’s experience as a higher education accounting educator provided motivation for the study, which is an extension of his doctoral thesis. “I was a new academic and felt this would be a way for me to find out from my more experienced peers what I was supposed to be doing!”

The study is based on the lived experiences of eight educators from five Australian universities. The eight came from a pool of 42, which the researchers had selected from an initial 162 respondents.

Barnes and others presented papers online this year. With 530 members, the conference this year is the association’s best ever attended.

Photograph

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash.