CoPs: Enhancing Quality Learning and Teaching with Sessional Staff

Abstract

The Australian higher education sector depends on sessional staff to undertake the majority of teaching. Despite the fact that sessional staff are central to the university, sessional staff report feeling isolated and invisible. There are few opportunities for sessional staff to participate in professional development or to engage in teaching teams and the wider academic community. Moreover, this reliance on sessional staff has been identified as a risk to quality learning in higher education. The Benchmarking Leadership and Advancement of Standards for Sessional Teaching (BLASST) framework has established national evidenced-based standards for systematising good practice for quality learning and teaching with sessional staff. Drawing on the BLASST framework, this chapter examines the potential for Communities of Practice (CoP) to support quality learning and teaching with sessional staff. Authentic examples are used to illustrate the ways in which CoPs can be used to improve quality learning and teaching, sustain good practice, and ultimately, to include sessional staff in academic communities. These CoPs can be implemented in a variety of ways—face-to-face, online or blended—and they may develop within traditional, structured university systems, or grow organically from a grassroots approach. Four factors for successful CoPs for sessional staff are identified: fit for purpose; a strengths-based approach; sharing of practice; and debriefing. The evidence suggests that learning and teaching CoPs for, and with, sessional staff are good practice.