Poetry has the potential to build communities and provide shelter for people who otherwise feel isolated. Whether using poetry as a method of spiritual and mental healing in palliative care or being used to foster community development and positive change, poetry has the power to heal, support, and engender action. Similarly, community engagement projects such as Talking Wellness and The Good Listening Project have been designed to develop social capital and enhance community engagement for often marginalised communities, encouraging participants to reduce the stigma around mental health and wellbeing by talking about it through poetry.
As a way of trying to address this gap, and to explore the potential for helping those working in higher education, we set up Learned Words as an anonymous repository of poetry; a place to curate the poetic reflections of people from around the world who support learning and teaching in higher education.
Whether it be the exclusivity evidenced in ‘Barred Doors’:
I know whiskey when I smell it Down the hall and through the corridors The chosen scent of patriarchy Accept it or the doors are barred
Or the lack of institutional support discussed in ‘Imposter Syndrome’:
Is it imposter syndrome When I strongly believe I should be here Yet You tell me I don’t belong.
Learned Words was set up so that readers might reflect on their own experiences and find solace and hope in the words of others. Poetry has the capacity to lay bare that which cannot otherwise be said, providing a frame for reflection, recognition, and perhaps even reconnection. We acknowledge that each poem will be encountered differently to each reader, and that what might resonate for some will contend for others; such is the subjective nature of the medium. In presenting these poems we also hope to provide some creative playfulness to complement the profound; something which readers might find in these lines from ‘Inner Monologue at a Conference’:
Free wine and coffee combine to create An atmosphere of compulsory enjoyment; Conference assistants and helpers tell me: This is the friendliest conference in humanity. I see a former colleague and bow my head, We pass like kidney stones in the night.
We welcome poems from anyone working in the higher education sector; there is no gatekeeping with regards to aesthetics, reputation, or succinctness of thought. Rather, we want to create a space were everyone is welcome to read, to write, and ultimately to belong.
Dr Sam Illingworth is an Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University, whose research centres on using poetry and games to help develop dialogue between communities. You can find out more about his research via his website www.samillingworth.com and connect with him on twitter @samillingworth.
This blog post draws on research conducted as part of an ongoing study of the role of heads of department (HoDs) in universities in the UK. In particular, we are interested in the key factors influencing how the role of HoD is experienced and enacted, including disciplinary contexts, institutional structures and type of university. The project is concerned with the extent to which current leadership and management programmes provide adequate preparation and support for the role, which may be particularly vulnerable to work-related stress. It is also concerned with the creative and critical leadership responses that HoDs are adopting in response to the present changing and uncertain higher education environment. Our findings are based on a sector-wide survey and 18 in-depth interviews conducted in 2019, but are also informed by two earlier research projects that explored the role of HoD in teaching-focussed and research-intensive universities (Creaton and Heard-Laureote, 2019).
Uncertainty, change and lack of preparation: becoming
a HoD
It is a
particularly challenging time to become a HoD in UK higher education. In the
external environment, HoDs have to grapple with growing sectoral-level demands
and new forms of accountability – while the REF has been in place in one form
or another since 1986, TEF, APP and KEF have brought new demands and targets.
These are compounded by huge financial uncertainty given the possibility of a
change to fee structures following the Augar review and continuing uncertainty over Brexit. The
latter is likely to have consequences in future for: the presence of European
staff and students at UK universities; the possibilities for student mobility under Erasmus+; and European
research funding. Within institutions, HoDs spoke of experiencing continuous
restructuring and centralising, an exponential rise in demands from above and
below, limited institutional power and authority compared to the past, and
tensions between their academic and managerial identities. It is also worth
noting that markers of esteem (Kandiko-Howson and Coate, 2015) – prior to
taking on the headship – had been based on academic success indicators which do
not translate easily into necessary skill-sets and areas of expertise required
for the role. Some HoDs had received no preparation or training for the role
and there was considerable variation in what had been received. One HoD took
part in an innovative co-created developmental programme with other new HoDs,
some participated in generic leadership programmes (which were generally
considered to be ill-suited to the specific HE context), and others in formal
or informal coaching and mentoring arrangements.
Wellbeing and work-related stress: the lived
experience of being a HoD
The
importance of staff and student mental health and wellbeing has been a high
profile issue in the HE sector over the past few years. Reports from Universities UK, Healthy Universities, Wellcome Trust, and HEPI have indicated high levels of depression,
stress and anxiety in universities and recommended institution-wide approaches
to tackle support the mental health of their students and staff. In response,
many institutions have developed mental health and wellbeing strategies.
However, for many HoDs, this has simply added another layer of responsibility
for staff and students within their department without addressing the issues
which may affect their own mental health and wellbeing. Our interviewees
identified the sheer quantity and breadth of daily demands on today’s HoDs. At
the micro-level, HoDs were booking rooms, arranging chairs and chasing up Estates
and at the macro-level, HoDs were contributing to high-level management
committees and strategy development. And for many the most time-consuming and
stressful elements of their role related to managing challenging colleagues,
which took up inordinate amounts of time and energy.
The HoD
job specification often seemed to include responsibility for everything that
happened within the department. An expectation that the HoD is also responsible
for the mental health and wellbeing of all their students and staff may locate
the deficit with the HoD rather than with some of the wider structural and
societal factors. While some were able to thrive in this environment, others
could not help but be affected by the huge pressures they were operating under.
“There’s an emoticon on Skype for
Business which is banging my head against a brick wall. … But it’s not always
like that”
(Interview with HoD, 2019)
Some
HoDs had clearly developed effective coping strategies and support networks
inside and outside their university, others spoke of loneliness and isolation
including wakeful periods in the night and the constant flow of emails at every
hour of the day and night.
‘The sense of shouldering the burden in the sense that
it’s all consuming never goes away. You occasionally get called up in the
middle of the night …’ (Interview with HoD, 2019)
What might we mean by creative and critical
leadership in challenging times?
A quick
Google search yields a range of approaches under the ill-defined notion of
creative leadership. The fluidity of the term clearly allows rather liberal
interpretation. At one end of the spectrum, we see evidence of the notion of
creative leadership being co-opted as part of the discourse of the neoliberal
university, providing a smokescreen for ever increasing demands on HoDs in face
of the increasing metrification of higher education. A different approach to
creative and critical leadership also came through in our research, where
creativity lay in finding effective ways to subvert institutional expectations
and norms. Some HoDs spoke of gate-keeping and others translating up and down
the messages that were coming from the senior leadership as well as their
departments, others made choices as to what to do and what to ignore.
‘There’s a translational bit, where I speak
two languages, and then on either side they only speak one.” (Interview with HoD,
2019)
One of
our HoDs highlighted their commitment to emphasising the intrinsic values of
higher education and community as a counter to the ever-greater focus on
metrics and accountability, with another purposefully prioritising
relationship-building over emails. And finally, perhaps the most radical of all
were the HoDs who insisted on prioritising self-care, modelling good work-life
balance and ensuring informal support networks for themselves to enable them to
flourish in their roles.
Jane Creaton is Associate Dean (Academic) for the
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and a Reader in Higher Education at
the University of Portsmouth. She has been a member of the SRHE Governing
Council since January 2019. Claire Gordon is Director of the LSE Eden Centre
for Education Enhancement at the London School of Economics and Political
Science.
References
Creaton, J and Heard-Laureote, K
(2019) ‘Rhetoric and reality in middle management: the role of heads of
academic departments in UK universities’, Higher
Education Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-018-00128-8
Kandiko-Howson, C
and Coate, K (2015) The Prestige
Economy and Mid-career Academic Women: Strategies, Choices and Motivation,
Paper presented at the Society for Research into Higher Education Annual
Research Conference, Newport, UK.
This is the second in a ‘virtual symposium’ series which
began on with Jane Creaton’s blog on 28 February 2020: Leadership in a
Changing Landscape.
