1 Introduction

Lack of student attendance in formal higher-education activities, such as lectures, has increasingly been identified as problematic in many parts of the world. Substantial international research has been conducted on the issues involved and multiple explanations and solutions have been proposed (Bukoye & Shegunshi, 2016; Sloane et al., 2020). The bulk of this international research focuses on students’ motivation, reasons for non-attendance, and proposals for teachers to change their teaching practices to motivate, encourage or require attendance. Relatively little international research has addressed university teachers’ perspectives on student attendance. In New Zealand, traditionally attendance at university lectures has not been compulsory, other than in some professional programmes. Naturally attendance at formal education events, on its own, is hardly satisfactory for those university teachers who design participation and engagement into their teaching activities, but without attendance, these educationally important contributions to learning are not possible in this particular physical and temporal space.

Covid-19 brought the issue into focus. Face-to face teaching was substantially replaced in 2020 by teaching online (or for many, emergency remote teaching, Hodges et al., 2020). Perhaps those teachers who have traditionally taught asynchronously at a distance fared well but for many, for whom distance teaching has not been a priority, the pandemic created challenges. Many university teachers had to take their conventional courses designed for face-to-face teaching and rapidly transfer them to an online environment. Lectures, tutorials and practical classes occurred via videoconference systems, field trips became virtual, and the experiences for teachers and students dramatically changed. Internationally, many university teachers experienced precipitous declines in both attendance and engagement, especially on Zoom and for large groups (see for example, Doran, 2021). Empty seats in lecture theatres were replaced by student absences on Zoom, and the black screens that result from cameras being turned off were hardly encouraging for university teachers who hoped for synchronous interactions with their students. Recent research on the impacts of Covid-19 on university teaching and learning has been reviewed by Pokhrel and Chhetri (2021) and many individual studies have researched impacts in particular institutions or in particular disciplinary contexts (see as examples, Pather et al., 2020; Crawford et al., 2020). New Zealand's response to Covid-19 was particularly fractured, as the country experienced periods of Covid-19-caused disruption that resulted in shifting back and forth between in-person and online teaching, as the country attempted to eliminate each wave of the virus. Although a great deal of educational research is currently underway internationally related to the aftermath of Covid-19, there is a danger that Covid-19 will be seen as a bounded event, rather than as something that highlights an issue that was there before and may remain after.

In New Zealand, university teachers often identify themselves as 'lecturers'. It seems intuitive that lecturing to students who are not there, or there in greatly reduced numbers, will impact on how university teachers conceptualise their identity, and perhaps have an impact on the confidence that they have in their identity as 'lecturers'. Although research has explored student motivation to attend and the interventions academics can make to address attendance issues, less research has explored how shifting classroom dynamics affect academic identity. There is a strong interplay between professional roles and professional identity, and a developing discourse in the educational literature on this theme (Archer, 2008; Fitzmaurice, 2013; van Lankveld et al., 2017; Watson, 2006) suggesting that who we think we are influences what we do, and that people also become what they are because of what they do and what they experience whilst doing it. "The relationship is thus complex, reciprocal, unfixed and open to change.” (Watson, 510). McCune, exploring how university teachers sustain identities that encompass deep care for teaching in research-led universities, suggested that "maintaining engagement with teaching in contemporary higher education is likely to involve identity struggles requiring considerable cognitive and emotional energy on the part of academics … " (McCune, 2021). McCune's study identified considerable tensions as academics endeavoured to undertake their diverse academic roles. Participants in that research "often described considerable stress and talked about putting a lot of thought and effort into understanding and working with these tensions (29)". McCune went on to suggest institutional policies and reflexive processes that would be required to address these identity struggles, but notably that study did not address attendance issues.

Self-determination theory (SDT, Ryan & Deci, 2000) is, in essence, a theory about motivation. It developed in 1970s and 80 s as an alternative to existing dominant theories of motivation that focused on rewarding appropriate behaviours. SDT suggests that individuals in a range of contexts require three basic psychological needs to cope with stress, and to maintain resilience, individual empowerment and well-being. Individuals need to feel competent to undertake the tasks before them; they need to feel in control and have some autonomy in deciding how to undertake the task; and they benefit from being socially included with others undertaking similar tasks. SDT has been applied effectively in a wide range of employment-related and educational settings over several decades, in particular in situations that prioritise intrinsic motivation. SDT has proved particularly helpful in understanding factors that contribute to well-being (Hobson & Maxwell, 2017) and how individuals cope with stressful work-related situations (Weinstein & Ryan, 2011). Strong links between intrinsic motivation, coping and feelings of well-being have supported the applicability of SDT in a range of contexts. It is widely appreciated, for example, that support for employees’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness leads to higher levels of individual empowerment and well-being (Rigby & Ryan, 2018). Metanalysis of research also suggests that supporting leaders to address the autonomy of employees also contributes to work motivation (Slemp et al., 2018). SDT has been used in higher educational settings. SDT has been used, for example, to analyse students’ motivation to learn (Fabriz et al., 2021). The core components of self-determination (autonomy, competence and relatedness) were found to be statistically related with university teachers’ identification with all three professional roles (researcher, teacher and practitioner) as well as with overall professional identity (Kovalcikiene et al., 2019). SDT has great potential for developing understanding of the identity struggles of university teachers and provides the analytical framework used in this article.

The events of 2020 and 2021 have raised the prospect that what we did before the pandemic, while perhaps better than what we were doing during the pandemic, is not necessarily a guide for what we should seek to achieve in the future. The research described in this article, in this forward-looking context, was part of a broad enquiry into learning and teaching in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, conducted in one research-led university in New Zealand, by a research team of university academics from multiple divisions and departments. This particular article addresses university teachers’ perspectives, gathered via interviews, on the issues involved in their students’ decreasing attendance in formal taught-events, and the consequences of this change on their roles and identity as teachers. SDT was used to interpret our findings and relate them to broader enquiries about academic identity and declining attendance at lectures.

2 Methods

Our research team included 18 university teachers (faculty), representing 15 different academic departments in the same research-led university, and one research assistant, working together as a professional learning community (PLC). The research team obtained institutional ethical approval for this research which emphasised the anonymity of interviewees to all but the interviewer, and the voluntary nature of participation. The research team considered that the issues being addressed were highly sensitive to university teachers so emphasised the importance of communicating and preserving the anonymity of participants as far as practicable in the research design. Interviewees were recruited by a purposeful sampling approach (Palinkas et al., 2015). Members of the research team identified individuals in their own departments who they thought would have diverse but insightful views on student attendance and on students’ motivation to learn, and passed their name onto the PI who invited them to contact our research assistant if they wished to be involved. It is important to note the highly subjective nature of individual team member’s conception of diverse and insightful, but every attempt was made to include those who regularly talked about their teaching in departmental settings and those who did not, and those recognised for using novel teaching approaches and those not recognised in this way. Some interviewees suggested the names of other faculty who might be interested in participating. The PI invited them to contact the research assistant if they wished to be involved. In line with our anonymity obligations, only the research assistant knew the identity of interviewees (each of whom was allocated a number that appears after quotations in the text below).

A sub-group of the research team developed a draft set of semi-structured questions about teachers' perspectives on their students’ attendance, on their students’ motivation to learn, and on their students’ learning success in the context of their own teaching experience, and these questions were discussed, edited and confirmed at research-team meetings and via email within the research team. Interviews were designed to open lines of enquiry and made use of prompting or contextualising questions where appropriate, but always allowed the interviewer to follow directions preferred by the interviewee. Interviews were audio-recorded. Interviewees were assured that they could withdraw from the process at any time, ask for a copy of the interview notes, audio recording or interview report, and ask for their contribution to be modified if it was not what they intended. The interview always started with two very open questions (What do you consider to be a good student? What do you consider to be a good lecturer/teacher?).

Guided by Thomas’ general inductive approach (Thomas, 2006), researchers sought to develop a summary of qualitative data to establish possible links to our research objectives and to enable the creation of a model or theory about the underlying structure of experiences evident in participants’ interviews, in the form of emergent and reoccurring themes in the data. To maintain the anonymity of the interviewees as far as practicable, the research assistant did not simply produce a transcript from the interview audio-recordings to be passed onto the other members of the research subgroup, but produced a written report of each interview, removing identifying features (such as department, discipline, and details of novel teaching approaches) and informally coded the key responses to lines of questioning to broad topics that developed in each interview (such as interviewees’ experiences of variations in attendance patterns, motivation to learn, and students success; and interviewees’ personal perceptions about cause and effect relationships in the broad contexts of teaching and learning). A sub-group of the research team (authors of this article; the PI, four other researchers and the research assistant) worked with these reports, initially as individuals and then in two extended meetings, to identify, discuss, agree and describe emergent and reoccurring themes, and to progressively reduce these to a number of themes with which all agreed. In the second extended meeting, the research subgroup agreed that SDT provided a suitable analytical framework within which emergent and reoccurring themes could be articulated. There followed an iterative process where the research assistant returned to the recordings to source quotations to illustrate these themes, and the themes themselves were redefined collaboratively by the research subgroup to match the precision provided by quotations.

It is to be emphasised that ours is qualitative research with limited aspirations for generalisability across institutions or nations. Our research design sought only inciteful observations within this field of enquiry that make a helpful contribution to this discourse. Within these limits is important to address the robustness, or trustworthiness, of our findings. With reference to Thomas’s theme of assessing the trustworthiness of analysis, and to Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) four general types of trustworthiness in qualitative research, it is hoped that the credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability of this analysis would be reasonable, given the anonymous and voluntary nature of participation and the emphasis on ‘self’ in the interviews. Notably, and in common with other qualitative research, the researchers inevitably were influenced by their own experiences and personal views on attendance, motivation and learning during this analysis. In addition, purposeful sampling and the voluntary mature of participation, has likely limited the range of interviewees to those with a strong interest in teaching and respect for research into teaching. Similarly, although researchers recognised the sensitivity of the matters being considered here to the interviewees, and the importance of anonymity, researchers accept that the extent to which interviewees were indeed anonymous is limited. They were not anonymous to the research assistant, and as all had been invited to participate by the PI, one member of the team knew who they might be. Approximately 10 per cent of those invited chose to participate. Nevertheless, and in line with Thomas’s advice, the credibility and transferability of the dominant themes to arise from the analysis were explored using ‘peer-debriefing’ which involved ongoing discussions within our research sub-group, in two wider-team meetings, and more widely within the university during two open meetings involving approximately 50 university teachers altogether. Dependability of the analysis was explored, to a degree, by comparison with international literature within this article. Confirmability, in particular, has not been explored in detail but may come later, as others work with, and within, similar groups of university teachers.

3 Results

We interviewed eleven academics from multiple academic divisions at a New Zealand University. Eight were professors, one was a lecturer, and two were teaching fellows. Individual reports from these interviews provided a rich source of data. Although each report included its own unique stance on our questions of interest, we considered the collection to be sufficiently congruent to be analysed together. Many themes within these reports were evident to the research sub-group. The research sub-group interactively and progressively re-interpreted and amalgamated these themes into emergent and reoccurring themes that together represented novel reinterpretations of our questions of interest and of all eleven interview reports. Our analysis yielded one overriding contextual theme and three emergent and reoccurring themes, that together suggested to the research sub-group that the interviewed teachers were collectively experiencing some form of crisis of confidence relating to their roles, responsibilities and identity as university teachers. Our themes are described below and illustrated with quotations from our anonymised reports. Some words or phrases have been replaced by #### to preserve anonymity.

4 A collective angst about attendance

Superimposed on all of our data was a strong sense that, for a range of different reasons and as described by interviewees in a variety of ways, student attendance in taught sessions was important to university teachers, that attendance was declining, and that lack of attendance contributed to a collective angst for participants in this research. The following quotations focus on this combination of lack of attendance and concern;

“Undergraduate [attendance]… it used to be about seventy percent, now it’s highly variable. … It varies, but undergraduates… far lower than I have ever seen before in forty years of lecturing … I feel that I have failed in my job, if the students aren’t learning or motivated in any way." (6)

“ … I got concerned years ago about this inexplicable absence of students from the class, and I couldn’t work out why. And I asked them “Why didn’t you come?” [8]

The extent of angst, focused on the circumstances within which low attendance manifested and impacted, is also evident in many of the quotations used below to illustrate emergent and reoccurring themes.

5 Three emergent and reoccurring themes

Integrated within this general feeling of concern, three broad emergent themes were reoccurring in our data: teachers questioning links between inputs into higher education and outcomes or outputs from higher education; teachers feeling personally responsible for responding to attendance-related changes in higher education but inadequately supported by collective responsibility to do so; and teachers expressing concern about what they can and cannot control as they teach.

5.1 University teachers questioning the links between higher education inputs and outcomes

Interviewees expressed strong interest in their own perceptions of their competence as teachers. Some interviewees emphasised that despite uncertainly about their own competence to be a university teacher, they nevertheless had developed personal commitment to support learning and particular pedagogical approaches to encourage attendance;

“I feel responsible to help students who want to learn. But, for whatever reason they are here, for whatever reason they are motivated to take this course, whatever biases they have, I am not skilled enough to change that. So I will help where needed ... But I won’t coerce them, force them, because that is not how it is going to work. … What I tend to do is: in one paper, I give them a problem to solve in their assessment, and each lecture, or each lab, has something in it that can help them solve that problem. Now, they may not pick it up that instantly, but somebody in their close group may. You set a little encouragement, a little bit of scaffolding, a little bit [of] pushing …, attendance and assessment tend to go very closely in hand, because we’re talking some recent advanced features and I find it very hard for them to think that they can self-teach.” (2)

Some expressed strong viewpoints about using ‘incentives’ to encourage attendance, with particular views on the professionalism of some behaviours (the practice of providing edible rewards, such as chocolate fish, to encourage student participation is encountered in this institution and may even be widespread) and on indicators of teaching quality. Participant 11 and 7 both express concern about some teachers' use of incentives. Participant 11 questions the use of attendance figures as indicator of teaching quality. Participant 7 expresses concerns about differences between those who do attend, and those who do not;

“I know other people try incentives, which would be having lollies, and I just… it’s a University, and I’m not into that kind of thing. And I am not being mean to people who do those sorts of things. And I know there [are] other people that really vow that attendance was a mark of their success. I’ve never really felt that. As I said, when anyone came to my lectures, my concern was about them and their ####. I wasn’t really bothered about how that reflected on me. But I know that other people have tried ploys, but that’s not me, sorry.” (11)

“You can do things that the students go, ‘Wow, that is a great lecture!’, but the problem is that you are preaching to the converted, to the students that are there, right? … You can say things, sort of bribe them… but I mean, all of that seems kind of cheap to me. I kind of think these are grown-ups, right?” (7)

Others emphasised that what might have been reasonable to incentivise attendance in the past, may no longer be reasonable in their particular circumstances, emphasising that perceptions of being competent to teach may be changing;

“It seems a bit ‘gamesy’, but … it was only worth ten percent, but it was a ten minute test when they came in, and anyway what was happening is that students went waddling in about ten minutes after class [started], and all the [students] were trying to do the exam … and so I made a rule, and I was very clear, it was advertised widely. And I said: ‘You need to be in before the class [starts] at two o’ clock. The doors will be locked between two and ten past two, and we will do the test. At ten past two, the teaching session will start. If you are not in the class by two o’clock, then you don’t get to do the test.’ And I only needed to do that once, and I remember the guy looking over the window when he came in five past [two]. And all the other students thanked me, because they were actually sick of having people rock in at five minutes after the test, and nobody did anything. And I know that sounds ridiculous, and I couldn’t do it now.” (11)

Others stressed the complexity of their role and uncertainty about how their approaches to encourage attendance reflect competence in teaching, or something else (in the case of participant 8, authority to make successful outcomes contingent on attendance);

“I thought “What could I do? [to solve declining attendance issues]”, and checked with my other colleagues; ... I asked all of the lecturers to devise a key lecture point that was the thing that they were talking about that related back to the aim of the course, and I ask them would they please ask the students that [how does the key point relate to the course’s aim], while they are in class, and then give them a mark for answering it. I suppose I kind of gamed it, in a sense that I am marking for attendance, but I am actually trying to do some useful things, I think … get everybody to get in the same storyline, at least one coherent thread to why they [the key lecture points] are all appearing one after the other… for the students, I thought it was really helpful for them to learn something in real time, instead of just sitting here without thinking.”(8)

At least one participant described the use of a particular tool to understand links between teachers’ competence to teach and the learning success of their students;

“They [the University] used to produce these graphs on how your students did in your paper versus every other paper they took in the University ... You could see within any particular student whether they did well in any other papers, but did badly in your paper, for example ... So, when I first came here … from overseas, from an institution that very much did not give any guidance to students, and I carried on my practice in my first year here, and I got one of these reports … that demonstrated that my students did relatively poorly in my course ... And basically, the message that I received from that was not that my course was harder; the message that I received from that, I wasn’t enabling them to be successful. So I think that that was good, and it was good that it came out so soon in my role here …. It made me see that, actually, what you do as their teacher has a huge impact on whether the students achieve success. And that it is really important to be aware of the things that are enabling success or inhibiting success in your class … .”(3)

Participant 3 was reflecting on how the institutional Grades Comparison Report, previously available in this institution but no longer so, supported teacher competence which was more limited without it.

Implicit within these interview records was a broadly-based suggestion that much within their teaching roles was poorly or insufficiently theorised, to the extent that it was simply impossible to assume causative links between: how teachers teach, and how student learn; between student attendance and student performance; between the grades that students earn and their likelihood of getting degree-related employment, and even at the level of the operation of higher education and the needs of society. Importantly, there was an overall sense that these links were somehow clearer in the past than they are at present, and that the challenges that university teachers face in understanding the pedagogical circumstances that they find themselves confronting nowadays are greater than in the past. Analysis of this theme can be greatly assisted by the application of SDT, in that much of the concern expressed relates to participant’s perception of their own competence, or sense of efficacy, to teach in the circumstances available to them.

5.2 Feelings of personal responsibility, inadequately supported by collective responsibility

Although ostensibly part of wider academic communities in their own department, the institution or the profession of higher-education teaching, interviewees described, to various degrees, the challenges involved in making a personal response to low attendance, lack of departmental or institutional commitment to the changes that they were personally making and the weight of personal responsibility in the context of teaching. This theme relates strongly to broad perceptions of social inclusion and relatedness and therefore to a core element of SDT.

At one end of the range of perceptions of individual responsibility were teachers who expressed a sincere personal commitment to supporting student learning with particular responses to student needs, in the context of attendance;

"There was a whole variety of reasons [why students did not attend] … , so it’s definitely a complicated thing, that behaviour … So then I thought, well, “Do I want them to come?”. And I thought “I do”, because I really like to engage with other people in the class, I go through a lot of effort to making it accessible.” (8)

Some extended this analysis to identify a sense of personal responsibility to, for example, motivate students to be interested in what they were teaching, even in the most challenging of circumstances (in the case of participant 6, acknowledgment that students nowadays are working to earn money at the same time as being enrolled in full-time study);

“I am increasingly aware, I have come aware over the many, many years, students have a much harder time now. They have many, many distractions, they have many personal and family commitments that can interact, and I cannot do anything about that … And they need to make money. Students are absolutely working. So of course, they come in and they are tired, they do all these things… so yeah, I feel responsible … To motivate them to be interested in what it is that I am doing. The learning, a lot of it is self-directed. But if you get the interest, then the motivation to learning comes with it.” (6)

While for some this sense of responsibility had escalated into disappointment in their own ability to address students’ needs;

"... I guess I'm disappointed if the students that I've been mentoring sort of one-on-one [don’t] achieve as well as I think they should, or if they come see you all the semester, and they come to you [to] ask questions at the end of the semester and that's really basic knowledge. 'We've worked on this before, I thought you've understood this'. Like, that does disappoint me - not the student disappointing me, but somehow that we haven't made that connection, and they haven't quite grasped that concept. So ... yeah, it does disappoint me, I guess. Not so much the student, just that we quite didn't make that connection, there is some sort of gap that I haven't been able to communicate effectively to that student. So I am sort of more disappointed at myself more than the student, I guess."(4)

At the centre of these personal analyses of the circumstances in which interviewees understood their responsibility was a sense in which their personal commitment to teaching was not matched by a supportive institutional commitment;

"I think the University... although it does talk a bit about how teaching is important, it's still doesn't really, I think, it still has not really recognized teaching as valuable within the constructs of the University. It tends to focus on research more. … I think that teaching is sort of under-recognized."(8)

Participant 9 compared perceptions of current support with those experienced elsewhere and in the past, emphasising how easy it is for teachers to "fall through the cracks";

“You know, I went to a liberal arts college in America, there’s a lot of hands-on stuff. We’d meet with an advisor, every couple of weeks, or once a month. There’s none of that here. It’s just – you could fall through the cracks, so easily. So adding a little bit more of that, I think it could with attendance, it could help with mental health – with the performance of our students, all of it, you know. (9)

Perhaps ironically, Participant 1 emphasised how important a sense of belonging is to students;

And a sense of belonging. I mean, there’s more to University life and to student academic [life]. I think that sitting there amongst other people, maybe you might land up talking to somebody and meeting somebody else and get a sense that you are not the only one struggling with that content, or might help at least form some relationships when you go to the tutorials, you are not feeling out of sync.” (1)

Overall, this theme emphasises profound limits to the extent to which interviewees felt socially included in a community of university teachers. A sense of isolation was palpable in many of these interviews.

5.3 Concerns about what they can and cannot control and about who does have control

Interviewees expressed strong viewpoints about distinguishing between those areas of their work over which they have autonomy and those areas they do not.

Some interviewees in some circumstances clearly did feel in control, and used this to support student learning as they thought best;

“… I enjoy it when I hear back from them [the students] as I am teaching and then I change what I am doing so it’s more accessible to them. Some years the course goes one way because the audience’s students' interest in that direction for the year; and another version of the course goes another way, even though the core content is the same, but that is because they were interested in this thing.” (8)

Some accepted that aspects of their teaching could not be in their control, but that this was inevitable and simply part of the job;

“I think it gets harder as you get older, because I think the students are much further removed from your age, and are less likely to feel that they can talk to you. And even having a title like ‘Professor’ is extremely off-putting, I think. But making sure, nevertheless, that you try … and that you are available … and if they [the students] have any query about anything that is going in class …or if what I am saying lacks clarity to them, they should feel free to come to me with those kind of things so that I can tailor them accordingly to the situation.” (3)

But others commented on the size of their class, or the circumstances in which their teaching reached their students. Participant 7 taught to groups of students too large to fit in one room, so many attended in one or more additional rooms to watch and listen to a live transmission of the lecture. Participant 6 does not teach students for a complete semester, so doesn’t manage to build relationships with students. These features are not controlled by the teachers themselves.

“For one of the papers … the lecture is piped through to other lecture theatres, and I have no idea how many people are there.”(7)

“Undergraduate [attendance] is much, much harder, because often it is modular. I come in for three, four weeks at a time, I don’t get to know the class. It’s harder to do the group work, and the interactive [elements of teaching]. And I’ve angsted about this for many years, because you keep being told to do it.” (6)

Or on the high diversity of learners with resulting uncertainly about how well-prepared all of the students could be for their teaching, in the context of attendance and student motivation to learn;

“ So our students; some have got degrees, some have got [to university] just straight from school, some [have] got English language shortfalls… so they are basically scaling up before they hit first year. And so, there is a lot of different motivations. My approach is, if you can’t attend our small classes, if you haven’t got the motivation, that is probably a good idea to have a ‘plan B’ ... I have split motivations: yes to chase them up, two, I am not their mother.” (2)

Or on the way that the institution evaluates the quality of teachers’ work, and the impacts that this has on teachers’ behaviour. Participant 3 expresses doubts about the way that the institution judges their teaching quality and comments on the extent to which such processes constrain their attempts to be autonomous as they develop their teaching.

“I don’t even do student evaluations based on the standard … [institutional] evaluation form anymore ... I think it is based on teacher performance rather than student learning outcomes, and I don’t agree with it at all … It is not about my performance. Because if I am achieving my student learning outcomes, the performance is kind of irrelevant … In that way, the University does constrain lecturers. And I do remember being told, when I first arrived here, ‘Don’t do an evaluation on your first couple of years, because they’ll be rubbish and you don’t want that on your record.’ And then it was ‘Don’t do anything interesting in lectures, or try anything novel, or at all challenging for students in years that you are trying for promotion, because you will get bad evaluations in the … [institutional] evaluation form’. So that’s constraining, right? And I have that been told to me by senior colleagues, as a junior colleague, that is constraining, right? You don’t want to try anything new.” (3)

The autonomy of university teachers to teach in the way that they might like to is clearly a significant theme in this research. In some cases, individual autonomy appears to be severely constrained. Accordingly, analysis of participants’ contributions to this theme can be significantly supported by the application of SDT.

6 Peer debriefing

Peer-debriefing in discussions within our research sub-group, in two team meetings, and more widely within the university, produced a strong endorsement from university teachers that the themes to emerge from this research were highly representative of widely held perspectives amongst university teachers, within our own institution and within our own international networks. One member of the wider research team remarked “This provides a framework for me to understand how I feel but had not been able to put into words”. Not all those consulted identified with all of the emergent themes as described. For example, one team member did not doubt their understanding of the nature of teaching at present but had substantial doubts about their ability to cope in the future, mindful that the circumstances identified by the interviewees in this research, and discussed by the wider research team, appear to all to be escalating.

7 Discussion

Collectively our overarching university teachers’ theme of angst and our three emergent and recurring themes of unsupported personal responsibility, lack of personal control and concerns about uncertain links between their own inputs and student outcomes, paint a picture of a group of university teachers experiencing a crisis of confidence about their identity as university teachers. That is not to say that all participants in our research are personally exhibiting symptoms of crisis. Indeed, some have clearly developed strategies that have enabled them to maintain levels of student attendance that they consider reasonable, or personal rationalisations for why high levels of attendance are not important to them. And notably, some feel obliged to adapt their teaching to what the situation requires and not necessarily in line with what they think good teachers ought to do. But our analysis does suggest an underlying structure of experience is evident in the data suggesting that this group of academic colleagues are stressed, concerned about the extent to which they personally understand the nature of university teaching nowadays, and feeling personally responsible as they address matters that they perceive to be only partially under their control, all in the context of concern about declining attendance at formal teaching events such as lectures.

It is clear that Covid-19 is not to blame for all of this, although it has brought these things to a head. The issues raised within this research have been with us for a long time. For many years universities around the world have been reporting declining attendance by students at lectures (Doran, 2021; Massingham & Herrington, 2006). A wide range of causes have been proposed including changing student lifestyles (Massingham & Herrington, 2006, as students increasingly work to pay tuition fees and living costs, and as nations increasingly identify university learning as a personal, rather than societal-gain), and failure of institutions to address students’ expectations of technologically-enhanced teaching processes and alternative availability of ‘content’, in conjunction with a perception by students that lectures focus on ‘delivering content’(Billings‐Gagliardi & Mazor, 2007). That university teachers somehow control access to the knowledge required to pass examinations, other than via curriculum design, should have been discounted by the wide acceptance of outcome-oriented education, including pre-identified intended learning outcomes, constructive alignment and student-centredness (Biggs, 1999; O’Neill & McMahon, 2005). Increasingly students have alternatives to attending lectures to gather ‘content’ and to learn more broadly, including lecture recordings, and increasingly students are using these (Luttenberger et al., 2018). Whether or not university teachers, in general, have actually adapted to these changes is an important corollary to these long-term interests.

And then Covid-19 arrived. Within a matter of days in early 2020, lectures, internationally, went from largely face-to-face social activities to become essentially solitary and online. Students initially attended via Zoom but as the weeks progressed their participation, internationally, generally decreased, either literally, or by virtue of having their cameras turned off (García-Morales et al., 2021; Skulmowski & Rey, 2020). Our PLC conversations and peer-debriefing confirmed that university teachers’ concerns about personal competence, personal responsibility and lack of control over the circumstances of their teaching roles generally escalated in this period, bringing concerns about student attendance and engagement into sharp focus.

The changing nature of university teaching has also been debated, or even contested, for many years. Whether university teaching is itself a profession or a professional element of the broader profession of academic scholarship has not yet been categorically determined. Boyer, for example, identified four scholarships for university academics to address (Boyer, 1990; discovery, engagement, integration as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning), but emphasised that not all academics would necessarily include all four in their own professional portfolio. And professional recognition (for example, via Advance HE’s Professional Standards Framework https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/guidance/teaching-and-learning/ukpsf) for teaching remains optional for many university teachers. With contestation about the professionalism of university teaching comes debate about the knowledge, skills and values inherent to university teaching and about the need for university teachers to update themselves on advances in university teaching, as they likely would within their own research areas.

While some elements of our understanding of the relationship between how we teach and how students learn have been established for many years (see for example, Trigwell et al., 1999 on being teacher-centred, student-centred and anticipation of deep or surface approaches to learning; and Stegers‐Jager et al. (2012), np, on the importance of addressing students’ “awareness and critical analysis of their own thought processes and cognitive ability”, or metacognition; see also Young & Fry (2008), others have been unfolding in recent years and are highly relevant to the challenging nature of university teaching in the 2020s. Much with relevance to attendance relates to our increasing understanding of student behaviour in relation to the practices of university teachers. Sloan et al., (2020), for example, researched how course-design and assessment-structures play a part in determining student engagement in formal teaching sessions. They made suggestions about how teaching approaches could fit student learning-expectations. Other researchers have used expectancy-value theory to suggest that, in effect, students balance costs (in terms of hours and effort) with anticipated gains to make sound cost/benefit analyses of whether to attend lectures or not (see for example, Dietrich et al., 2019) and whether to complete study programmes (Perez et al., 2019). Sun and Richardson (2016) developed a general theoretical model linking students’ demographic characteristics, perceptions, and study behaviour with measures of outcome, to explore causal relationship between students’ perceptions and their study behaviour. Clearly the academic field of learning and teaching in higher education, or the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), is making progress in developing an integrated knowledge base about how higher education teaching works. Research has also been instrumental in determining what we do not know about relationships between how we teach and how students learn, and in identifying areas that perhaps we thought we understood, but probably do not. Links between attendance and performance remain highly contested, for example. One study, in relatively-controlled circumstances, suggest that an increase in 1% in attendance results in an increase of only 0.05–0.13% in grades (Rodgers, 2001). The relationship was significant and positive, but the low effect size and challenges in controlling the circumstances draw into doubt the scale of the relationship. Causal links are far from clear.

Given such a complex and contested field of expertise as university teaching, it is hardly surprising that university academics wonder about their own contribution to the links that we assume exist between higher education inputs and higher education outcomes, and about their identity as academics, university teachers or 'lecturers'. It would be irrational not to question personal competencies in such fluid circumstances. That university teachers feel a weight of personal responsibility as they teach should not be surprising either. Research-led institutions internationally are often characterised as prioritising research over teaching but the relationship between each is far from simple and has significant impact on academic identity (McCune, 2021; Nixon, 2020; van Lankveld et al., 2017). Teaching in research-led institutions nowadays requires academics to be highly competent both at research and teaching. New Zealand’s peak body for its university sector, for example, emphasises the need for even competent researchers to be trained and supported to become good teachers; “ …universities do not believe that being a good researcher will automatically make an academic a good teacher. Universities know that teaching is a skill that requires development and that, even with training and support, not every researcher can become a competent teacher. However, universities also believe that an academic cannot be a good teacher of higher-level degrees unless they are also a competent researcher.” (Universities NZ – Te Pōkai Tara, 2017, np). And most university teachers lecture alone, even if many collaborate in delivering papers and programmes. Perhaps academic groups used to be collegiate communities, but even basic facilities to support conversations, such as tea rooms, have declined in recent decades (Wright & Ville, 2018). Where it is present, collegial support for teaching can be important for developing teaching identities (van Lankveld et al., 2017) but academic groups are not always supportive of individuals within them in the context of teaching (McCune, 2021). There are well-established links between lack of collegiality in academic groups and individual stress (Hatfield, 2006). Stress is also a product of lack of autonomy or sense of personal control in many situations (Muraven, Rosman & Gagné, 2007). While many factors can contribute to institutional judgments about the quality of teaching (Smith, 2008) increasingly in many countries student feedback is paramount in determining tenure and promotion with respect to teaching (Goos & Salomons, 2017). University teachers can have a range of emotional responses to student feedback, but often these are significant and stressful (Lutovac et al., 2017) and remedies to poor feedback are only partly under the teacher’s own control. Students’ prior learning and preparedness for particular studies is important, but problematic for many university teachers (Bettinger & Terry-Long, 2008). Class size is likely to be an important factor in meeting student expectations for some university teachers, particularly those involved in teaching large groups (Ake-Little, von der Embse & Dawson, 2020). The circumstances in which teaching occurs is also significantly related to quality perceptions of both teachers and students. For example, synchronous hybrid teaching (with simultaneous face-to face and distance students via videoconferencing), while new and exciting for some, can be stressful for all involved and not entirely satisfactory for anyone (see for example, Raes et al., 2020).

We are not aware of SDT being used to explore the circumstances in which university teachers are attempting to address the changing study habits and expectations of university students, but it appears to have great utility in analysing the underlying structure of experience evident in the data collected in this research. Our underlying structure of experience highlighted a range of coping strategies but also tensions similar to those described by McCune (2021) as "identity struggles requiring considerable cognitive and emotional energy on the part of academics (30)” and a range of constructs that should help us better understand these tensions, and to research them in the future. Using SDT to support the analysis of the findings in this research also links to discourses on how to improve intrinsic motivation and wellbeing, as often research informed by SDT has these objectives in mind.

University teachers may lack confidence that their knowledge about teaching, and skills to teach, are sufficient to address long-term declines in student attendance in their lectures. In educational contexts there are strong links between teachers' perceptions of efficacy as teachers and their students' perception of efficacy as learners that have implications for student learning and for student motivation to learn (Chiu et al., 2021). A range of approaches have been researched, including a model of pedagogical design thinking for professional development programmes for teachers.

University teachers may experience limited autonomy in an educational system where designation of quality is primarily the prerogative of students, rather than teachers, and where the design of teaching situations is decided for them. The extensive literature on SDT emphasises balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and highlights lack of autonomy as a key limitation to intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Educational research also points to links between teachers' perceptions of their own autonomy and competence, and their perceptions of the competence of their line managers and of those whose job it is to support them (Hobson & Maxwell, 2017). Lack of intrinsic motivation is clearly related to perceptions of lack of autonomy but may also be linked to inept management or the unavailability of necessary support.

University teachers feel the weight of personal responsibility in institutional contexts that fail to connect them within social networks including those with similar responsibilities. Research utilising SDT identifies relatedness as a reciprocal function, involving both giving and receiving, and conceptually as something that also exists at the group level, so that groups of individuals may in some cases identify as isolated (reviewed by Vansteenkiste et al., 2020). Wennerberg and McGrath (2022) comment on the advantages of providing professional development support for communities, rather than for individuals.

Self-determination theory, and the extensive discourses that relate to it, therefore, provide insights into how universities may be able to adapt and into basic limitations of the existing identity of university teaching. University teachers' perceptions of their competence to teach could be addressed with professional development opportunities, noting that teachers' current perceptions of limited relatedness suggest that this could beneficially be provided to groups, or communities of teachers, rather than to individuals. Perceptions of lack of autonomy could be addressed by providing teachers more autonomy in deciding how to teach, noting of course inevitable links between how teachers teach, management structures and conflicting priorities of institutions. Perhaps more realistically, this analysis points to the need for deeper and more systematic change in the identity of university teachers. SDT may help identify a path forward not only for individual institutions, but perhaps also for the institution of higher education itself as it grapples with the challenges wrought by our latest global pandemic and the longer-term declines in student attendance at lectures. Teaching in higher education is clearly a complex task, and one for which competence is unlikely to be found in a list of skills. It may require participation in a community, or a profession, to address feelings of unsupported personal responsibility, concerns about the best way to teach when those being taught are also changing, and to recapture, or discover, a sense of professionalism in how to teach, and in how to evaluate the quality of teaching. School teaching has long been recognised as a profession, whereas university teaching has not been. Although perceptions of limited autonomy, relatedness and competence all suggest solutions at the institutional level, their combination and link to generic academic identity suggests that Covid-19 may have exposed broader limitations in university teaching as something other than a fully professional role.