Sessional academics
Sessional lecturers prepare, develop courses for many of the Universities’ subjects.Writing 24 lectures from scratch with no lecture notes and no support, doing all my own administration, maintaining the online learning system, co-ordinating and meeting with tutors, double marking essays, writing the course handbook, compiling the readings, answering student queries (via email, after lectures and in allocated consultation time), managing the students results database so as to achieve the correct bell curve for student essays, organising library resources for the reserve collection, organising lectopia recordings at the beginning of the semester. Basically I run the entire course on my own.
No support at all - no-one has even spoken to me or checked on how I’m going (which is especially worrying because it’s my first time lecturing and the course has 150 students). I am also left to discover very important admin duties on my own, usually when there’s a problem because the required thing hasn’t been done!
I obviously work outside of the hours for which I’m paid, but if I only worked the hours I was paid for, lectures wouldn’t be delivered! I feel like the University knows that sessional lecturers will work like dogs for very little pay because their career is on the line as well as the fact that it is the lecturer, and not the Faculty, who will have to deal with angry students. It’s especially a problem in the Faculty of Arts because there is an oversupply of PhD graduates and no full-time academic jobs so we will all scratch around for whatever we think will get us into a full-time academic job with the potential for sick leave, maternity leave, holidays etc.
It is important that we fix this problem as the expectations placed on sessional lecturers is excessive
and the pay and conditions are very poor.
Further information:
| sessional lecturer flyer | Please print out the poster and put it up in an area where sessional lecturers will see it. |