Keywords

1 Introduction

As the landscapes within higher education continue to move, it is apparent that the ways leadership is conceived and demonstrated inside these institutions are changing. Over the last three decades, there has been a continual shift to managerialism and new public management across public servicing institutions and services; however, scholars have also mounted a significant pushback against the managerialist perspective that has come to permeate universities (Barcan, 2013; Connell, 2019; Davis, 2017; Selkrig et al., 2021). For example, Barnett (2018) maintains several ecological zones exist in higher education beyond narrow economic agendas: knowledge, economy, learning, culture, natural environment, social institutions, and human subjectivity. He asserts that we need to imagine the feasible possibilities of how those zones intersect to reconceive higher education and assist in returning to and advancing the public realm. Our chapter is entangled in this space of how we might reconceive higher education and the work we do.

To contextualise our narrative, the authors of this chapter were identified by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE), in which we work as a core group of faculty and administrators to form a short-term ‘Digital Taskforce’ (DT) to support the Graduate School in progressing rapidly to remote and online teaching. The DT membersFootnote 1 initiated a series of deliverables approved by MGSE ExecutiveFootnote 2 in April 2020, one of which was to develop a Digital Learning and Teaching Strategy for MGSE. This strategy, which captured the momentum and legacy of the changes in direction and practises of teaching and learning as new digital spaces emerged, was approved in 2021. Over the remainder of 2020, the DT worked swiftly and effectively to organise a multi-tiered approach to supporting MGSE’s teaching staff technically and pedagogically as they developed and delivered their subjects through emergency remote teaching. The DT also explored and adjusted existing protocols for the Learning Management System (LMS). In this chapter, we reflect on the ways in which we operated as a leadership team and what assisted us in laying the solid foundations in a brief time for a significant shift by Graduate School in approaches to and understandings of teaching online, as well as acting a catalyst for staff to consider the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). We draw on literature related to leadership, higher education, health promotion, and frameworks of new and old power to analyse and reflect on our work with Graduate School colleagues and the outcomes we achieved during that liminal time that will guide the Graduate School to other ways of working.

2 Leaderships for Turbulent Times

Within discussions that neoliberal agendas have gone too far, there is a view that universities may have lost sight of their purpose and issues of social value. In providing a standpoint not too dissimilar from Barnett’s (2018) perspectives, while also drawing on the work of Saul (2005), Grant (2021) maintains that universities and those who work in these institutions are in a liminal period and at a crucial point in recognising “that the current system is broken, and we need to use the ‘in-between times’ to develop a new model” (p. 115). As part of this model, Grant (2021) argues that we need to consider how universities can engage with ‘new power’ values and practices rather than ‘old power’ ways of operating. The concept of ‘new power’ as introduced by Timms and Heimans (2018), brings together the strategies of social movements, community organising, and citizen participation, examining these strategies through the network affordances of social media and other internet connective spaces. Disruptions to different sectors: movements (#BlackLivesMatter), companies (Airbnb, Uber), and news (Guardian UK crowd sourcing politicians’ expenses) are all examples of new power. Building on Timms and Heimans’ (2018) ideas, Grant (2021) mounts a manifesto for universities to return to their original values of strong social purpose along with applying new power values and skills such as open-source collaboration, crowd wisdom, and sharing. In considering these values and notions of power, we connect our experiences of leadership as social process where interaction between groups and individuals is much more than the actions and thoughts of an anointed individual leader (Spillane et al., 2001). Leadership is therefore the practices and processes that emerge in social sites through interaction, communications, and relationships between those involved and local structures (following Uhl-Bien, 2006). As such, leadership takes a distributed form.

Distributed leadership is distinguished from similar conceptions of leadership, such as shared leadership, because it emerges from the interactions of a network of individuals; conjoint as opposed to individual agency (Ho et al., 2016). Further, leadership in action is integrated across multiple activities, roles, relationships, and systems (Bolden et al., 2009). In frameworks that consider these approaches to leadership, Gronn (2002) suggests that distributed leadership becomes greater than the combined sum of individuals leading action. With such a form of leadership, the collective agency to bring about change can be usefully directed simultaneously to points of need (Outram & Parkin, 2020). It is becoming increasingly clear that leadership has a lesser focus or interest about those who occupy formal positions of power, instead, the perspective is that leadership occurs at all levels within an organisation and more broadly across systems (Dickinson & Smith, 2021).

Lingard (2003) discusses less hierarchical approaches to educational leadership such as productive leadership that highlights a collective responsibility and ethos. In these circumstances, dispersed leadership can focus on domains such as pedagogy; management structures and strategies; culture of care; professional development and supporting professional learning communities; commitment to change; currency of knowledge both in terms of political climate and pedagogy; dispersal of leadership; and relationships with the teaching and learning community (Hayes et al., 2001). These domains could also be seen as ecological zones as described by Barnett (2018) where the interplay between these domains is also crucial. Similarly, the notion of generative leadership described by Edwards-Groves and Rönnerman (2013) entwines leading and professional learning that is focused on student learning as well as educators’ own learning. When these situations are created an ecological and relational dimension between professional learning practises and leading practises can emerge. These situations seem to be ideal for engaging in SoTL. While there can be different interpretations of SoTL, in this chapter we draw on some of the characteristics described by Waller and Prosser in The Rapidly Changing Teaching and Research Landscape: The Future of SoTL and the Teaching-Research Nexus, Ling (2020), and Selkrig and Keamy (2015), where SoTL involves identifying an inquiry, engaging with literature, research, theory, and evidence while also being critical and collegial to reflect on teaching practices.

As a dialogic endeavour, leadership is also moulded by the qualities and values of the individuals who are involved and how these are conveyed (Kraemer, 2011). The mission of the university has traditionally espoused a service to public good, and in arguing for bringing new power into the university, Grant (2021) identifies the call for aligning the values of collaboration as a way of meeting the values of the generation of students that are currently being served. Grant (2021) draws on University of Pennsylvania president, Amy Gupman, quoting “a university is first and foremost a social undertaking to create social good” (Grant, 2021, p. 75).

Formation of the Digital Taskforce (DT) did not follow the traditional old power structure of leadership residing with top levels of faculty and administrator ladders. Often, leaders responsible for making decisions and implementing change are less directly involved in the day-to-day teaching work. The DT members had a wide range of teaching or teaching-related responsibilities distributed across the Graduate School which resulted in a new power structure with a robust understanding of the experiences across MGSE. Members of the DT included faculty and administrators as well as ‘third space workers’. Whitchurch (2015) uses the term ‘third space worker’ to describe those who blur the binary divide of academic and non-academic in the work they do by operating in a “discursive space that is neither ‘managerially’ nor ‘ideologically’ constrained” (Whitchurch, 2012, p. 143). Grant (2021) argues that third-space professionals provide a crucial spine within a university and are acting out and applying several of the “values that are critical to the success of the new power university” (p. 119). The shift to blended and then online learning presented such a discursive space and resulted in this new power structure informed by and collaborating with different level and groups across the Graduate School. Recently, and as a reflection on the global pandemic, Fernandez and Shaw (2020) contend that there are three areas of leadership best practise for navigating challenges that emerge from unpredictable circumstances. These practises involve connecting with people, distributed leadership, and communicating clearly. Circumstances core to the challenges facing universities before and during the pandemic which contextualise the call for leadership that we discuss in this chapter include recognising some of the issues of anxiety and the threat of comparatively poor mental health (Grant, 2021) where the changes in practise are rapidly required. Along with aspects of leadership, we have also indicated that the ecologies that interact within higher education are also complex (even without the uncertainty of the pandemic). In the following section, we outline how a framework from the health sector offered us a way to work within this time of uncertainty.

3 Health Promotion Principles to Consider Living Through Change and Uncertainty

To frame the actions that were required by us in leading the shift to fully online teaching and learning during the pandemic, we draw on health promotion literature and theory, particularly on the legacy of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (WHO, 1986). Facing the global health emergencies and disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic added layers of complexity to understandings of health promotion, not the least of which was the need for rapidly building capacity, confidence, and connection (Levin-Zamir et al., 2021) in unfamiliar digital spaces. The original Ottawa Charter (WHO, 1986) introduced the three strategies of enable, mediate, and advocate, which were considered quite radical at the time due to the agency it ascribed for the ordinary citizen in determining their well-being (Scriven & Speller, 2007). Awareness of the need to embed initiatives for connectivity and care for staff and students within the work of the DT, the Ottawa Charter provides a way of considering our actions within such health-promoting initiatives.

Informed by an “active and interactive” comprehension of health and wellbeing (Kickbusch, 2007, p. 9), the Ottawa Charter provides a vision for wellbeing that focusses on partnership across sectors. The Ottawa Charter seeks to address injustices (Bharmal et al., 2015) with an agential approach to individual and community skill development and engagement in health. Essential actions include consideration of public policies, supportive environments, personal skills, community action, and a reorientation of services (WHO, 1986).

In the 30 years since the establishment of the Ottawa Charter, there has been a revisiting of the enable, mediate, and advocate strategies. For example, there is some suggestion that advocacy should be replaced as a term in the use of the Ottawa Charter and the work of health promotion. Advocacy is sometimes conceptualised as inappropriate, even unprofessional, because of concerns about upsetting leadership (Stoneham & Symons, 2019). Shifts in approaches to activism have seen universal (McGuire et al., 2006; Seale, 2017) and co-design (Ellis et al., 2015) approaches to advocacy that enacts and create social and physical spaces conducive and accessible for all. This highlights how enactment of the charter has tracked in the same timeline as the emerging new managerialism. We argue that this reflects a struggle between old power and new power agendas.

‘Enable’ has also been critiqued as perhaps the most controversial of the three ‘verbs’ of the Ottawa Charter, the argument being that ‘enable’ suggests a hegemony might now be surpassed as agents gain direct political voice to influence social decisions. This requires revision of structures and processes of leadership where groups are more demanding and insistent, making it much less comfortable for traditional power holders (Saan & Wise, 2011) and we argue this process exemplifies an emergence and need for structures of enabling new power. Enabling a secure foundation in a supportive environment, access to information, and opportunities for making healthy choices is a key to achieving well-being. Technology and changes in communication have enhanced citizen control of information, affected the time and pace of work, and flattened models of authority (Woodall & Freeman, 2020), which suggests modes of reciprocal and discursive partnerships toward sharing skills and knowledge.

Therefore, in this chapter, we reconnect to the radical elements of the health promotion strategies (advocate, enable, and mediate) in the face of a crisis where human capital and care were directly challenged by threats to budget lines in the institution. We analyse the work of the DT through the lens of the three strategies to demonstrate how leadership in this crisis was mindful of the need to support change at points of need, and to influence key administration outcomes such as strategy and protocols. We also see this work as providing some clearer foundations and opportunities for discussions and practices about the possibilities of SoTL to emerge.

This chapter is as much an ‘outcome’ of a distributed leadership style that draws from the Ottawa Charter (WHO, 1986) as is the protocol we developed. The co-produced set of reflections we provide in this chapter also acts as an opportunity to share insights of the individual experiences of leadership within the shared endeavour as we worked across a range of ecological zones at both a Graduate School and university level. As a collective and critical reflective narrative, this chapter draws on many of the characteristics of SoTL mentioned earlier and aligns with the genre of writing known as Scholarly Personal Narratives (SPN), which Nash (2004) argues is a legitimate and valuable form of scholarship of teaching and learning. We also draw on Grant’s (2021) representations of old and new power (see Table 5.1) as a conceptual device to assist our analysis of the work of the DT during this time of flux in the institution.

Table 5.1 Contrasting old and new power (adapted from Grant, 2021, p. 12)
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What follows are three vignettes that have been crafted from reflections on our actions and experiences supporting staff in their pivot to emergency remote teaching. We then turn to examining these within the conception of new power and distributed leadership that emerged during the turbulence of change. We posit that this could serve to conceptualise and imagine leadership structures that may best service future higher education.

3.1 Advocate: Leading for Access and Inclusion

Embracing the challenges mounted against advocacy in health promotion (see Stoneham & Symons, 2019), we reclaim the word ‘advocate’ in the spirit of working to be informed about and in consultation with community to forward an inclusive change agenda. In the rapid pivot to online learning and teaching, we advocated simultaneously for the interconnected needs of staff to swiftly develop skills and knowledge to use new online tools and digital spaces while also being mindful of ensuring these new skills and digital spaces were supporting the needs of the students. Our activities to support this work spanned from designing and facilitating online learning showcases for staff, regular newsletters, curating living examples of digital practices taking place in the Graduate School that were highlighted via the LMS, and developing digital support materials informed by principles of access and inclusion to enable teaching staff to ensure all students were able to study online.

While desired and beneficial to many in the learning community, affording high-quality learning experiences for students with disabilities and neurological differences has not always been easy. Accommodations have often been reactionary and retrospectively planned. Despite the advocacy of the teaching staff and the student support services, they have often been subject to the limitations of the established instruments and artifacts of teaching and learning. For example, students who are deaf report often arriving at classes to discover that a particular learning space was not equipped with a functioning hearing loop, or that activities had been designed in a way that precluded or minimised their capacity to access these experiences on an equal basis to their classmates.

Emergency remote teaching presented opportunities to reignite and advocate an agenda for inclusive education which we hope underpins all educators’ approaches to SoTL work. Technologically enabled universal design of our online spaces was a key component of this re-imagining of business of usual, with the push for a rebalancing the relationship between agency, access, and the mediation of teaching and learning. Members of the DT who had to traverse various ecological zones within the university and took responsibility for supporting staff in creating inclusive online spaces saw automatic captioning as challenging the exclusionary norms of the existing tools and practices. If every Zoom meeting or Kaltura recording was automatically subtitled, then we meet needs and create additional access points to learning. Additionally, all learners benefit from simultaneous processing of complementary auditory and visual stimuli (Cuevas & Dawson, 2018). In other words, universal captioning provides effective and inclusive digital pedagogy.

3.2 Enable: Leading to Remain Connected

Building on our advocacy work to support staff and students with digital learning and teaching, we undertook a range of initiatives designed to ‘enable’ all concerned to achieve their fullest potential. The affordances of digital technologies were shared in more instructional, workshop-style activities that supported the development of general and specific technical knowledge and skills for teaching. We scheduled more regular opportunities for professional learning in the form of weekly drop-in sessions called MGSE Staff Virtual Lounge to support all staff (particularly sessional staff) needing assistance, feedback, and advice. In some instances, these activities took the form of working closely with individuals and groups within the Graduate School; collectively, we provided technical and/or pedagogical and learning design advice and support for more than 100 staff. We hosted a range of other events, including workshops and webinars to target specific online needs, for example on hybrid mode teaching. We also created and supported communities of practise and mentoring partnerships focused on digital transformation or peer feedback processes. In addition, we established shared weekly feedback, collaboration, and professional learning among digital leaders within the DT; providing a space for strategic, policy, and praxis discourse as a professional community of scholars to meet the developing needs of Graduate School. This work also demonstrates how fundamentals of SoTL underpinned the ways in which we worked with colleagues.

As 2020 progressed and all the members of MGSE community became accustomed to remote working, we were often reminded of the need to remain ‘socially connected’ whilst ‘physically distanced’. We and most of our colleagues found the sudden upending of the order of things destabilising, and it was easy to feel as though we had been cast adrift from the support previously found in the physical spaces of our offices and classrooms. These had been social spaces of ‘reciprocal maintenance’ (van Dyne, 1996, p. 162) of Graduate School life and work; alongside the loss of on-campus classes and work there were also the lost opportunities for hallway collegiality.

Recognising the loss of these valuable interactions, we tried to re-establish some informal opportunities for connecting with colleagues through a small community of practice. In this approach to enabling colleagues, we intentionally leveraged the flattened hierarchies, recognising that part of enabling the whole community was continuing the practises of incidental knowledge and skill sharing. We invited six colleagues, mostly in the early stage of their academic careers, to be part of the group. Four accepted the invitation, and two members of the DT became the fifth and sixth members of the group. We met several times in the final six months of the 2020, each time with a loose agenda based on opportunities for seeking and sharing expertise. Leadership emerged from the interactions of the network of individuals, from conjoint as opposed to individual agency (following Grant, 2021). In this activity, participants brought the kinds of questions and challenges they might otherwise have raised with the people they passed in the hallway or shared an elevator with. As a group, we worked to find solutions and share resources. Members of the community expressed gratitude for the space to raise issues and find support, and the group became a way for us to understand the experiences of staff who were at risk of being dragged along by rapid change, rather than being supported to engage thoughtfully in diverse ways of teaching and connecting. More importantly, it became a model of sharing that enabled and distributed leadership in other systems within the larger community.

3.3 Mediate: Leading to Embed/Maintain Integrity

Mediation was a defining role of the taskforce across all DT activity. Mediation was instrumental to tailor supports for academic colleagues with a range of needs (from both digital support and well-being perspectives), to manage competing priority points of need through such significant and sudden change, and, not least, to create authentic and enduring reform that would best serve the Graduate School beyond the life of the DT and meet executive approval.

Two of the key legacy documents the DT developed were the LMS Standards and, most significantly, the culminating work that became the MGSE Digital Strategy. Both documents were the products of the multi-faceted perspectives of our membership-perspectives that were further developed through the open and robust collaboration of the group-that we guided through the hoops of executive approval as a team committed to their integrity. In this way, the DT team of academic, professional, and third-space workers (Whitchurch, 2015) acted as a mediating agent in representing the interests of those most impacted by the change through negotiation with the hierarchic structures of traditional leadership to which we were nevertheless beholden.

The LMS standards were formed as much as a professional learning framework for staff as a means of quality assurance and equity in access for students. Through the development process, the DT acted as a conduit between management and teaching academics. The draft standards were socialised through connection lines with academic teams, committees, and discipline groups by DT members. When presented to executive leaders, we were able to provide an informed rationale for any points of contention and make minor revisions as required to see the standards to endorsement. Therefore, rather than a top-down measure imposed on staff, the standards were adopted in the spirit of their (co-)development-as a genuine tool conceived by colleagues (practitioners and support staff themselves) invested in promoting digital capacity in the Graduate School.

The standards then worked as the foundation upon which we built a program of pedagogical and technical supports to staff, mediated through various projects undertaken by teams within the distributed taskforce membership. These included the development of an LMS support community for staff (providing for regular communications, repositories of guides/supports and weekly tips addressing points of common need), the development of Commons templates to meet specific standards, a suite of professional learning activities and the establishment of a virtual drop-in lounge for those teaching during this time.

Investment of key stakeholders across Graduate School organisational structures or ecological zones in the development of the Standards, in addition to other enduring work of the DT, has helped establish lasting integrity and contributed to/elevated ways in which staff engage with SoTL. The membership of the DT representation of various strata of academic and professional contexts, with diverse collegial reach, shared understanding of the purpose and merit of these initiatives. Shared ideology and shared ownership established a more unified commitment to the work of MGSE’s digital cause.

4 The Emergence of a Plan: Leading to Support Change During the ‘In-Between Times’ and Beyond

The remit to develop a Digital Teaching and Learning Strategy (DTLS) for MGSE which would align with other policies and strategies that guide the Graduate School was not a high priority in the early days of the DT. More pressing actions were required to support staff with shifts in practice and to provide some clarity about remote teaching. As the pandemic continued throughout 2020 (and still does as we write this chapter in September 2021) a series of practices and actions emerged, some of which we have described above. These practices and actions were based on seeing, hearing, and listening to a range of ecological zones within the Graduate School, then developing strategies through our shared collective agency, symbiotically and mutually influenced by each other (Gronn, 2002). We began shifting this practice into policy by enacting or ‘living’ a policy that had not yet been formalised or articulated.

Drawing these three vignettes together, we identify an open, dispersed leadership model which is quite different from the binary (sometimes adversarial) leader/follower model of old power. Sharing expertise through communities of practice aligns with the concepts of new power and the ethics of do-it-yourself culture rather than leaving it to those with specialisations. It is a process by which the actions and establishment of practices co-designed for wellbeing and equity, inclusive of different expertise and voices, inform and establish the direction and form of policy. These are conditions that provide opportunities to consider through SoTL how we interrogate our teaching work and the practices with which we engage.

Through effective mediation and the opportunity afforded by the unprecedented nature of the change ‘emergency’, the tension between the new power structure and the old in which it was embedded did not impact the DT’s effectiveness. Distinct from traditional top-down reform processes, these documents were informed by practitioners within and surrounding the teaching and learning space and developed through genuine consultation with and respect to key stakeholders and the digital agenda. While the DT operated as a new power model of dispersed leadership-leveraging the experience and collaborative output of its diverse membership and connections-the development of more formal documents of strategy and policy nonetheless and fittingly required approval from the executive level of the old power structure within which we were established and situated.

Drafting the digital strategy involved re-framing some of the original Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion actions such as building healthy public policies, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, developing personal skills, and reorienting services health (WHO, 1986). Our rationale for doing so recognised the need to adjust the nomenclature for an education context, and we were also conscious that the strategy would circulate and be interpreted within the ‘old power’ regime. However, in these ‘in-between times’ (following Grant, 2021), by framing the strategy across these areas of action and identifying a range of people to be involved in implementing the strategy, we hoped to embed distributed leadership ideas that would progress the work that needed to occur in a spirit similar to the ways we had worked as a team.

5 Looking Back and Imagining Forward

The initiatives and work of the DT demonstrate a nexus of old and new power emerging in higher education and the challenges that lie ahead as we imagine the future for universities following the pandemic. As Grant (2021) identifies, we are ‘in-between times’, and there is much that can be learned from initiatives that straddle a theoretical spectrum between old and new power. Many of the initiatives of the digital taskforce that aimed to support the shift to digital teaching and learning required imagining the future. Social space created when the group came together was augmented by these imaginings. The initiative and frameworks; advocate, enable, and mediate, and where we have positioned these in Table 5.2 along a continuum to bridge the old power/new power divide offers a way to consider how we navigated these liminal, in-between times.

Table 5.2 Digital taskforce actions on the spectrum between old and new power (adapted from Grant, 2021, p. 12)
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From this perspective of being in the in-between, teaching, learning, and leadership practices take form in and are formed by living the practice in ‘the site of the social’ and are often enacted at ‘points of need’. In our view, this mutual accomplishment is necessary for generating learning and leading capacities and working with change. Developing an understanding of leadership within higher education that endorse non-hierarchical, collective leadership provides a range of affordances. Bringing together people across different ecological zones, from various career stages, and in a range of various academic, professional, or third space roles can be powerful and effective. As Ling (2020) articulates ‘nobody owns the definition of SoTL’ (p. 67). As such, providing a space for crowd wisdom and collaboration (new power values) to nurture different skills and draw on different knowledges has great potential to generate new ideas about how we approach and think about SoTL.

New power values, or at least the attributes we have discussed, are not the status quo in universities. In this instance, opportunities and actions we have discussed here emerged during that liminal period in a time of crisis and instability. The work of the DT, which is now disbanded, led to a digital strategy; a formal policy document which fits into the governance of the Graduate School, a transfer of new power actions into an old power mechanism. To have an ongoing impact in universities in the in-between times, it is necessary to be able to work within the old power structures. However, what we demonstrate in this chapter is that by embracing new power, co-design, co-production, and other aspects of SoTL with actions informed in health promotion and social connection, change can also be achieved quickly, and aligned with agendas of equity and inclusion. In drawing on our experiences and framing collaborative scholarly personal narrative we also concur with Brookfield (2017) who argues

Narratives that are theorised and generalised as they are shared offer a powerful avenue for the scholarship of teaching and learning to have a dramatic impact on educators’ practice. (p. 184)

By reflecting on our actions and sharing these insights we hope that it may prompt others, individually and/or collectively to also consider new power perspectives, and ways to lead and engage with SoTL. Our narrative shows how our practices had impact as we navigated the in-between time in higher education. Similarly, by reconnecting with the radical elements of health promotion through advocating, enabling, and mediating across multiple hierarchical structures and ecological zones we were able to see how important and long strived for changes can be possible.