Prelims

Academic Resilience

Surviving and Thriving in Academia provides short, accessible books for navigating the many challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities of academic careers. The series is particularly dedicated to supporting the professional journeys of early and mid-career academics and doctoral students but will present books of use to scholars at all stages in their careers. Books within the series draw on real-life examples from international scholars, offering practical advice and a supportive and encouraging tone throughout.

Series Editor: Marian Mahat, The University of Melbourne, Australia

In this series:

Women Thriving in Academia

Edited by Marian Mahat, The University of Melbourne

Coaching and Mentoring for Academic Development

By Kay Guccione & Steve Hutchinson

Getting the Most Out of Your Doctorate: The Importance of Supervision, Networking and Becoming a Global Academic

Edited by Mollie Dollinger, La Trobe University, Australia

Achieving Academic Promotion

Edited by Marian Mahat, The University of Melbourne, & Jennifer Tatebe, University of Auckland

Academic Resilience

Personal Stories and Lessons Learnt from the COVID-19 Experience

Edited by

Marian Mahat

The University of Melbourne, Australia

Joanne Blannin

Monash University, Australia

Caroline Cohrssen

The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

And

Elizer Jay de los Reyes

National University of Singapore, Singapore

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Editorial matter and selection © 2022 Marian Mahat, Joanne Blannin, Elizer Jay de los Reyes and Caroline Cohrssen. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Individual chapters © 2022 the authors. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters' suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80262-390-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-387-1 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-389-5 (Epub)

Tabassum Amina is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her current project is focused on developing CoMEIn – an online mentoring space for improved and active mentoring. Her research interests are in mentoring, online informal learning, technology in education, MOOCs, and women in online spaces.

Joanne Blannin is Senior Lecturer in Digital Transformations at Monash University. Her research focuses on effective digital pedagogies and change leadership. She has taught in four countries, and in three languages. Her research focuses on the impact of technologies on learning and learners and the equitable access of learning technologies in education.

Daniela Francisco Brauner is an Associate Professor in Information Systems at the School of Management, Director of the Centre for Business Studies and Research at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and SOS-MSMES project coordinator. Her research focuses on open innovation, entrepreneurship education and data science.

Lisiane Closs is an Associate Professor in Human Resources at the School of Management, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). She currently leads research projects on Learning Environments and Teacher Education. Her research interests are in teaching and learning, teacher education, learning environments, careers, and creative territories.

Caroline Cohrssen is an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong and an Honorary Fellow at The University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on proximal influences on child learning and development in the years prior to school: the home learning environment, early childhood pedagogy (in particular, STEM-related teaching and learning), initial teacher education, and in-service teacher professional development.

Sofia Gelain da Cunha is a Researcher and Marketing Professional with a career in communication planning and market research. Her research focuses on place studies, including place branding, community engagement and local development. She holds a Master's in Management from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

Elizer Jay de los Reyes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore. Jay's current work examines transnational connections between migrant Filipina domestic workers in Singapore and their left-behind families in rural Philippines through the lens of what he calls “global spectating”.

Matthew Harrison is an Educator, Researcher and Digital Creator with a keen passion for utilising technology to enhance social learning and inclusion. He currently coordinates the Autism Intervention program and created the digital Access and Inclusion Hub at the University of Melbourne's Graduate School of Education.

Raquel Janissek-Muniz is an Associate Professor in Information Systems at the School of Management, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and Director and Researcher at IEAFutureLab. She leads Strategic Foresight and Scenarios Future projects, with research interests in strategic foresight, collective intelligence, methods for anticipative intelligence, and weak signals.

Marian Mahat is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on learning environments, with an emphasis on co-designing curriculum and pedagogy, teacher-led inquiry, and professional development of teachers in different educational contexts. She is series editor of the Surviving and Thriving in Academia.

Bárbara Fernández Melleda is Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Her work centres on the study of contemporary Chilean literature – poetry and narratives – through a neoliberal critique. She received her PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 2019.

Raj Mestry is Emeritus Professor at the University of Johannesburg. His research focuses on Education Leadership and Financial and Human Resource Management in education. In 2012 he was awarded the Research Medal and in 2017, received the Medal of Honour awarded by the Education Association of South Africa.

Bairbre Redmond is the retired Provost of Universitas 21 [U21]. She has a particular research interest in the advancement of reflective learning and critical thinking in higher education and is particularly committed to the advancement of women in academia. She is Full Professor Emeritus in Higher Education at University College Dublin and now works as an independent higher education consultant.

Fernanda Maciel Reichert is an Associate Professor in Innovation at the School of Management at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), researcher at Nitec Innovation Research Center, IEA FutureLab and Parent in Science. She leads the Women and Innovation project. Research interests include firm innovation capabilities and women and innovation.

Kathleen Riach is Professor of Organization Studies and Responsible and Sustainable Management Lead in the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. Her research explores forms of inequality in and around the workplace, with a particular focus on age and gender. Her work regularly features in national and international press, and has been presented in policy arenas including the Scottish and UK government and United Nations.

Unlike most of the book's authors, I experienced the pandemic in the last year of a long, academic career. This fact certainly put paid to any earlier fears I might have had that my final year as Provost of Universitas 21 [U21] was going to be just ‘more of the same’. However, my own experiences of academic resilience during 2020–2021 had a great deal in common with those contributing to this excellent collection, developing swift and innovative responses to the unprecedented crises created by COVID-19.

As the book's authors demonstrate, academic resilience as a concept is frustratingly difficult to define, as it requires academics to find solutions and successes within often convoluted institutional dynamics, while dealing with their own professional and personal life trajectories. When the seismic impact of COVID-19 was added to this mix, the resulting complexities for academics were prodigious and, for some, touched by considerable personal stress, grief and loss. What the authors in this volume have individually and collectively demonstrated is that academic resilience during the pandemic was largely about surviving a series of complex and emotive challenges and emerging with positive outcomes for academics themselves, their students, colleagues, and communities inside and outside the university.

As with earlier books in the series, this collection shines a focus on the personal and professional experiences of international academics across varying career stages. This includes the many challenges that they face negotiating their way to success through often labyrinthine university systems, governed by standards that can, at times, be somewhat less than transparent. This volume provides an important exploration of the additional effects of the pandemic on these academics. It showcases how different academics seized opportunities and became involved in new initiatives when the pandemic brought significant changes to their own lives and the daily business of their universities. Some made important contributions to all-university crisis planning or were able to draw on their advanced digital skills, advising and guiding more senior colleagues who were moving their teaching online. Others contributed to the creation of new international online conferences as well as establishing new outreach roles for their university and with the local community.

What the different narratives illustrate is that taking on such important new resilient roles was of significant value, in very challenging times, not only for the individuals themselves but also for their institutions. It is to the credit of the joint Presidents of the 27 U21 universities that, early in the pandemic, they encouraged U21 to provide online international leadership training workshops, recognising the need to support an emerging new cohort of innovators and leaders at an international level, many at earlier stages of their careers. However, it will also be important to monitor how well these new roles will be recognised for institutional advancement, in the longer term. Universities will need to ensure that promotional and reward criteria can recognise the very different and resilient academic contributions during COVID-19 in a fair and equitable manner.

Hopefully we are almost at the beginning of the end of COVID-19, and a review of the pandemic's longer-term impact on higher education, both locally and internationally, is needed. The changes wrought by COVID-19 on universities in general, and teaching in particular, have shown that the Academy has a great deal more capacity for swift transformation and flexibility than would ever have been imagined. Retaining and further developing areas where the pandemic revealed successful new systemic approaches for university staff and students will be important for the future of higher education, as will be learning from individual experiences of survival, as typified by the narratives in this book. They offer excellent examples of how strong and resilient academics found ways to go beyond the endurance of a global crisis and created innovative solutions with the capacity to support lasting positive change. The book's editors are to be congratulated for collecting and curating these very important stories.

Dr Bairbre Redmond

Professor Emeritus for Higher Education, University College Dublin

As you will explore in this book, being productive during a global pandemic is not easy. Writing a book and running a research project between three countries, with participants from 17 countries, could have been impossible. The fact that this book has been published is a tribute, then, to the many resilient and generous people in academia who supported us and our desire to better understand how the pandemic life was treating academics around the world. Indeed, the bamboo plant on this book's cover represents the strength and resilience of many of our colleagues – flexible, bending with the wind, capable of adapting to any circumstance – even when the pandemic attempts to break our plans.

What began as a question about how we turn the experiences of 2020 into a positive outcome has developed into a network of collegiality and shared stories from around the world. What struck us most was the cohesive narratives of support, a desire for social connections and a willingness to explore new ways of seeing the world. With that in mind, we would like to thank everyone who contributed to the research and, in turn, to this book. Despite this particularly challenging period, we have been able to develop new insights, new ideas and a shared understanding of the academic world. Thank you.

Joanne, Caroline, Jay and Marian

Joanne

Caroline

Jay

Marian