Academics’ experiences of university leadership in constructing their professional identities: a case of a university in Cameroon.
Loading...
Date
2022
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Teaching, research, and community engagement are the three main pillars of higher education
institutions, and academics construct their professional identities by translating these pillars
into teaching programmes across departments, research projects, and the provision of skilled
labour to the general public. However, academics' roles and responsibilities are shifting,
reforming, and being reviewed, making it difficult for them to interpret these roles and
responsibilities accurately, calling into question their conceptions of their own professional
identities in relation to their experiences of the influence of university leadership practices on
the construction of those identities. Furthermore, professional identity research indicates that
there is little literature on the conceptualization of academic professional identity, and the
available literature only theorises concepts related to professional identity in general rather
than academic identity in higher education. This study recognises the manner in which
leadership practices negatively influence academics' roles and responsibilities in higher
education in the context of a Cameroon university. To understand academics' conceptions of
their professional identity and to address the question of why their experiences of university
leadership influences the construction of their professional identity in the way that they do,
this thesis focused on a Cameroonian university as a case study.
Eleven permanent academics from the research site were purposively selected. A case study
design within a pragmatic paradigm, where both qualitative and quantitative methods of data
generation were used to explore the three research questions that underpinned this study.
Distributed leadership theory and the force field model for teacher development were used to
frame and generate data through semi-structured individual interviews and focus group
discussions. A survey questionnaire was used to generate quantitative data with 170
academics through simple random sampling to find out how academics’ experiences of
university leadership influence the construction of their professional identity.
The findings show that academics’ conceptions of their professional identity are ingrained at
three levels. At the micro-level, academics conceive of their professional identities based on
individual forces, which establishes three distinct approaches to conceptualising academic
professional identities in higher education. The study established that academics’ professional
identities are conceptualised as self-conceptions of their professional identities embedded in
the relationality of self, discipline, and context. Secondly, professional identity refers to academics' personal beliefs about their profession. This is demonstrated by the distinction
between individuals' personal beliefs about their field of specialisation within their
professional context and others' beliefs within the same professional context. The third
perspective is that professional identity is defined by the roles and responsibilities of
belonging to an academic profession, which are characterised by their capacity to ensure
visibility, effective teaching skills, teaching and research ethics, and the deontology of the
academic profession. At the meso-level, academics conceive professional identities based on
institutional forces, which establishes that university leadership's incompetency,
discrimination, egocentrism, and political leanings, among other things, negatively influence
the construction of their professional identities as they undertake teaching, research, and
research-led community engagement as their key performance indicators. At the macro-level,
academics conceive of their professional identities based on external forces, which
establishes that government interference in the pedagogical activities of the study context
negatively influences academics' professional identities through its appointment policy for
the university leaders and external political control. The study concludes with several
recommendations and the contention that a blended bottom-up-top-down leadership approach
is necessary to address issues related to corruption, discrimination, inconsistent and
ineffective leadership, appointment policy, funding, external interference, and a mismatch
between theory and practice in university policy implementation. This will significantly contribute to the development of a sustainable higher education system in Cameroon.
Description
Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.