What is an education-focused academic?

Author: Lynette Pretorius

As a tenured education-focused academic, I am frequently asked a variation of the same curious question: “What is it that you actually do?” There is often an underlying assumption that academia only possesses one true shape, leaving many outside, and indeed within, the university ecosystem puzzled by this specific title. To demystify this pathway and celebrate its impact, I decided to write this post to unpack the modern reality of the education-focused academic career.

To understand this role, it is helpful to look first at how university workloads have traditionally been structured. For decades, the standard academic career has followed what is known as a teaching and research (T&R) contract. Under this conventional model, academics typically balance the three parts of their workload (teaching, research, and engagement): 40% of their time is dedicated to teaching, 40% to disciplinary research, and 20% to service and community engagement activities.

In recent years, particularly in the Australian higher education landscape, another distinct type of academic position has become prominent: the education-focused academic. Far from being a minor modification of the traditional contract, these roles represent a profound structural shift. For education-focused academics, the majority of the workload, often up to 80%, is formally allocated to teaching and pedagogical innovation. Rather than splitting focus, this model allows academics to dedicate their primary intellectual energy to the art, science, and leadership of education.

Fostering high-quality learning and teaching

It will perhaps come as no surprise that the primary responsibility of an education-focused academic is to foster high-quality learning. For academics in these roles, this means moving beyond conventional boundaries to design vibrant, inclusive learning environments that actively encourage student learning. Since we have extra capacity in our workload, we can focus deeply on pedagogy and implement educational innovations that improve the student experience. For me, high-quality teaching is not measured by how much information I can transmit, but by how effectively I can cultivate independent thinking, build a sense of belonging, and inspire students to take intellectual risks. Furthermore, I actively work to nurture supportive learning communities that prioritise peer-based and student-led engagement to build high-quality learning experiences for students. By ensuring that each student’s voice is heard and valued, I endeavour to make my teaching a vehicle for both academic success and personal growth.

An education-focused academic also contributes to the broader scholarly community by sharing practical approaches to innovative education, thereby promoting high-quality teaching. By sharing educational resources, the work of an education-focused academic transcends the local classroom, helping transform individual teaching insights into scalable, institutional, and international practices that foster student autonomy and academic success. In my own practice, I approach this responsibility by designing and distributing a range of open-access resources intended to demystify the academic journey. I share these resources publicly and freely to ensure equitable support for all students, regardless of their background or institutional context. Some of the resources I have developed include:

• The University Study Made Easy YouTube Channel: Grounded in the understanding that the contemporary university experience can be overwhelming, this video platform serves as a space to support self-paced student learning. The content is carefully structured to reduce assessment anxiety, offering reassuring, step-by-step guidance on academic language, academic literacy, AI literacy, and research practices.
• The Doing Assignments Booklet: This comprehensive guide scaffolds the academic writing process for commencing university students. It demystifies the entire journey of assessment preparation, guiding learners through critical phases from the initial analysis of the assignment prompt to the final stages of editing and proofreading.
• The Writing Proposals and Theses Booklet: Designed for postgraduate and doctoral scholars, this resource provides structural clarity for advanced research projects, explicitly detailing the purpose, rhetorical moves, and pedagogical expectations of each individual chapter.
• The Evaluating the Reliability of Sources Tutorial: This digital learning tool utilises self-discovery and experiential learning methodologies, empowering students to actively build their own information and research literacy rather than passively consuming guidelines. By sharing these resources openly, education-focused academics help transform individual teaching insights into scalable, institutional, and international practices that foster student autonomy and academic success.
• Practice-Based Books for Doctoral Students and Early-Career Researchers: Wellbeing in Doctoral Education and Research and Teaching in a Pandemic World.
  

Finally, closely intertwined with both high-quality learning and teaching is the expectation of educational leadership. For an education-focused academic, leadership is defined by the capacity to inspire systemic change and cultivate a culture of pedagogical excellence across the institution. This involves mentoring colleagues, leading curriculum renewal, and designing transformative educational experiences. True educational leadership means taking the insights gained within our individual classrooms and scaling them up to shape institutional policy and faculty culture. In my case, this involves contributing to staff mentoring and professional development, sharing my teaching innovations through the scholarship of teaching and learning (described later in this blog post), and serving in institutional leadership roles that contribute to course design and renewal.

What does research look like for education-focused academics?

In many cases, research in the more traditional sense is not expected for most education-focused academics. For some of these academics, however, a small portion of their workload is devoted to research, specifically the scholarship of teaching and learning (often called SoTL for short). Think of SoTL as a bridge between the teacher as an expert and the teacher as a learner. When university teachers practice SoTL, they treat their own classrooms as a space for investigation. They ask questions like, “‘How does this specific assignment help my students develop critical thinking?” or “How can we co-create knowledge rather than just memorising facts in this lecture?”. They collect evidence, reflect on what works, and share those insights with the world so that other educators can utilise them. I view SoTL as a vital and ongoing part of my academic practice, both as a means of improving the quality of my own teaching and as a substantive contribution to educational leadership. Engaging in SoTL allows me to critically reflect on my pedagogical choices, respond to the evolving needs of diverse learners, and develop evidence-based innovations that enhance student engagement, inclusion, and learning outcomes. By sharing my SoTL work, I aim to advance sector-wide conversations about what meaningful, transformative education should be in contemporary higher education. While traditional research metrics, such as citation counts, are included in the evaluation of education-focused academics’ SoTL practice, it is the practical application of their research that is most highly valued.

An example of where my SoTL research has directly shaped educational innovation is in the use of collaborative learning in doctoral writing groups. I have so far written seven articles about my approach, published in academic journals and shared at conferences globally. In the first paper, I involved my students in conducting a literature review study to explore the existing research on writing groups. This was an educational intervention to help the students understand the publication process. In our paper, we demonstrated that the benefits of the writing groups were realised primarily through students’ engagement in reflective processes. This collaboration led to a second paper, in which the same group of students reflected on what they had learned about the academic publication process through their involvement in the initial study. We demonstrated how experiential learning activities in writing groups not only supported the development of practical research skills but also fostered deeper self-awareness and critical insight into participants’ own ways of thinking. Given the success of these publication activities, I have continued to provide opportunities for writing group students to co-author papers with me to explore the pedagogical benefits of writing groups. This has resulted in a paper where we showcased how the process of feedback on others’ work helps students improve their own academic writing. We also developed a model of how academic integrity understanding develops through writing group involvement. Furthermore, we highlighted that writing groups are not only spaces for academic skills development, but that they foster participants’ scholarly identity and a sense of belonging, thereby providing pastoral care in doctoral education. We examined the book project mentioned earlier and demonstrated that such collaborative projects significantly enhance participants’ academic writing skills, ability to provide, comprehend, and implement feedback, and understanding of academia, promoting personal and professional growth. Finally, we developed a model that shows how writing groups can be effectively implemented in the online space. As mentioned, it is the practical application of the work that is most important for education-focused academics. In the case of my writing group work, my pedagogical models have been adopted by other universities globally. This includes former group members adopting the practice in their institutions after graduation as well as other educators reading about the work and implementing it into their practice.

The importance of education-focused academics in higher education

Education-focused academics provide a vital conduit between pedagogical theory and daily classroom reality. By sharing their educational practices and engaging in educational leadership, they help improve the teaching and learning of their colleagues and institutions. These academics are important because they champion the belief that teaching is an imaginative and daring endeavour worthy of the same rigorous inquiry as any traditional research discipline. When universities invest in and value tenured, education-focused pathways, they signal a profound commitment to their core mission: the cultivation of knowledge and the nurturing of the next generation of scholars.

Questions to ponder

• Have you thought of pursuing an education-focused academic pathway? Why or why not?
• How can education-focused academics’ contributions be better valued in promotion processes?
• If you are an education-focused academic, what does the scholarship of teaching and learning look like for you?