Nourishing flourishing early career academics
Principal Supervisor: Dr Susanne Francisco
Co-Supervisor: Associate Professor Alan Bain
The proposed inquiry will seek to find out What practices nourish ECA’s to flourish? Specifically, the proposed research will inquire into i) ECA’s perceptions of flourishing, ii) ECA’s experiences of being ‘nourished to flourish’ and iii) the practice architectures that enable and constrain practices that nourish flourishing ECA’s.
The proposed inquiry will use a collective case study design that includes using hermeneutic phenomenology as a lens for making meaning from participants perceptions and situated experiences, and the Theory of Practice Architectures to provide an overlay on this lens for considering the ECA practices and practice architectures that enable and constrain these experiences. These methodological frameworks will inform the data collection, analysis, investigation, interrogation, and sense making of the proposed inquiry.
Multiple sources of data including document analysis, in depth personal interviews, focus groups and site visits will be analysed using thematic analysis. This analysis will foreground ECA experiences and knowledge to facilitate deep exploration of the data.
The researcher anticipates that by working with ECA participants to establish common dimensions of their experiences of being nourished to flourish, as well as exploring practices which constrain and enable nourishing, the proposed inquiry may have a role in influencing future practices and policies to improve ECA’s experiences and retain them in the HE sector.
In around 2021 I decided to complete my Master of Education with a view to doing a PhD. I did my Master of Education with CSU and found the subjects and the lecturers to be inspiring, knowledgeable as supportive and I was delighted to be able to do my PhD at CS.
CSU Pedagogy Education Praxis (PEP) research group meetings and reading group discussions. Attended the 2023 PEP CSU writing retreat, and contributed to theoretical and methodological discussions during that time.