Abstract
The labour involved in online teaching in the pre-COVID-19 epoch and emergency remote teaching (ERT) under COVID-19 in higher education denotes the foremost interest of this thesis. There is a sparsity of scholarship comparing the impact of online teaching and ERT on tutors and all ranges of lecturers, including temporary and full-time lecturers within different higher education institutions in South Africa. Drawing on Hochschild’s (1983) emotional labour theory and Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy which provides a form of emotional labour, this thesis explores how online teaching and ERT shaped and reshaped the work of tutors and lecturers at universities in South Africa. Three key objectives guide this study. The first analyses the labour involved in online and ERT in different universities, whereas the second examines the extent to which online and emergency remote teaching represents an intensification of the academic labour of the teaching staff. The last investigates how rank and gender shape how teaching staff navigate online teaching and ERT.
This thesis is qualitative and is a multiple case study of the University of Cape Town (UCT), University of Johannesburg (UJ), and University of Limpopo (UL) and is informed by online semi-structured in-depth interviews with 43 participants, including tutors and temporary and permanent lecturers. They include nine tutors and five lecturers at UCT, one key informant, twelve tutors and six lecturers at UJ, and one key informant and nine lecturers at UL. These interviews were complemented by material from document analysis and online participant and non-participant observations. The study notes that prior to the pandemic, most Social Science departments at UJ performed extensive work online compared to UCT and UL, with lecturers giving students assessments to either write or submit online except for tests and examinations, which were written in person. These assessments were marked by tutors and lecturers online. This arguably gave UJ an advantage over UCT and UL during ERT.
One might expect massification and managerialism in higher education combined with the physical distancing associated with ERT in 2020 and 2021 (Barbosa et al. 2023) would create an environment unsuitable for nurturing students. However, this thesis suggests that ERT, in practice, evades a simplistic interpretation since it did not occur evenly within and across universities globally or in South Africa. In the three cases I explore in the findings chapters (which are divided based on each university: UJ, UCT, and UL), I highlight the diverse structural contexts in which ERT emerged and also point
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to a range of actors who are all but passive in what may appear at face value to be an out-of-touch, exclusive, top-down teaching and learning process. This thesis reflects that under certain conditions and with a committed group of tutors and lecturers, ERT and other remote learning experiences can provide opportunities for the development of critical pedagogies, including but not limited to an improved relationship between teachers and students, which centres on the increased emotional labour of those at the coalface of student engagement. However, this does not come without certain contradictions and limitations, as tutors are the most vulnerable in the teaching hierarchy. In most cases, women tutors and lecturers are engaged in more care work. This emotional labour of women tends to be underappreciated in broader society, which also undervalues this kind of work, thus, to an extent, reinforcing social status and gender inequalities. My nuanced analysis suggests that various groups performed emotional labour, implying that rank does not automatically determine whether one participates in emotional labour. The same applies to gender since men also participated in emotional labour. The conclusion highlights the centrality of “emotional presence”, a neglected yet key indicator of the reach of critical pedagogy in higher education institutions during COVID-19 and ERT and in a post-COVID-19 world.