Lean on me: Teaching together from a distance

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic globally disrupted lives and contributed to the exacerbation of pre-existing inequalities. Women in research were also affected. The prominent role that women played in professional and personal care duties had a detrimental effect on their research outputs, potentially hindering their career progression. Moreover, the challenges faced by women academics during the pandemic, including job loss, increased mental health issues, and the intersection of gender with other socio-demographic traits exacerbated existing gender disparities within academia. By systematically scoping the qualitative literature on the experiences of women researchers during the pandemic, this study sought to explore how women experienced and reacted to the challenges generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative meta synthesis of the included studies revealed three themes: gendered professional expectations, colliding identities and coping strategies. These themes show how gendered roles such as teaching and professional care work, associated with the hierarchical and gendered division of tasks both at home and in the workplace, made women feel unsupported and alienated as relevant agents in the academic context. The study reveals the importance of pastoral care, teaching and service work as the essential backbone of the academic infrastructure, especially in times of crises. It also exposes how productivity-focused researcher assessment criteria, rewarding mainly individual results and unrewarding of care and service work, can be viewed as perpetuating structural inequalities based on gender, parenting situations, contractual situations and background. In conclusion, this study exposes the need to proactively address the gendered practices and implicit biases which reproduce inequalities within academia and highlights how paying attention to the experiences and needs of women researchers is essential for improving the resilience and crises preparedness of academic the system.

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Artistic Autoethnography in Human Resource Development: Deepening Empathy and Affective Understanding to Forward Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice in the Workplace

Bohonos,

Kwon,

Gerken

et al. 2024

New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development

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Artistic ethnography is growing in prevalence across the social sciences and has been used to explore daily lived experiences with marginalization powerfully. This approach, however, has received very little attention in Adult Education and HRD literature. Artistic approaches to autoethnography engage with aesthetics, feelings, and embodied experiences while pushing researchers to consider ways they can work outside of standard social scientific prose style writing and numerical abstraction when creating representations of lived reality. Artistic approaches to autoethnography can enhance all areas of HRD research and practice but hold salience for critical HRD, as its leading proponents have called for an emphasis on “relating,” engagement with the affective domain of workplace injustice, and “radical vulnerability” as we work to imagine and create more just organizations. The purpose of this article is to explore how artistic autoethnography can advance the critical work of HRD by carving out a nurturing space where those living with the daily discomfort of marginalization can finally share their feelings and explore insights that stretch beyond the limitations of standard academic prose.

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Lean on me: Teaching together from a distance

Cited by 3 publications

References 34 publications

Diagnosis Model Proposal for Improvement Opportunity in Project Management: An Approach from the Perspective of Lean Waste

Diagnosis Model Proposal for Improvement Opportunity in Project Management: An Approach from the Perspective of Lean Waste

The experience of women researchers during the Covid-19 pandemic: a scoping review

Artistic Autoethnography in Human Resource Development: Deepening Empathy and Affective Understanding to Forward Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice in the Workplace

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