Year: 2009
Author: Prosser, Brenton, Tuckey, Michelle, Wendt, Sarah
Type of paper: Abstract refereed
Abstract:
At the Adelaide AARE Annual Conference in November 2006, Prosser presented a paper that reported on a pilot study into the role of imagery, emotion and hope in sustaining teacher's work in difficult socio-economic contexts. Now, three years later, this project has expanded to embrace colleagues in Social Work and Psychology to examine the role of the personal domain in sustaining the work of service professionals in urban fringe communities.
The imposition of work into the private lives of Australians is at its highest level since the introduction of the eight-hour day. However, for service professionals working in low-income communities, this imposition can often go beyond long working hours and employee stress. Each day their motivation and wellbeing are challenged by conflict, poverty, trauma and tragedy.
This paper will present the early findings of one study with teachers within a broader project that interviewed professionals working in Adelaide's northern suburbs. While many teachers move into other professions within five years, others have been able to draw on resources from the personal domain to sustain their wellbeing and support their work for significant periods of time. Specifically, this paper will examine how teaching professionals understand, articulate and mobilise personal resources to sustain themselves in tough working environments.
The paper will also reflect on the challenges of developing an interdisciplinary study, as well as the inadequacy of both popular and disciplinary languages to engage meaningfully with the concept of the personal domain as part of the work of professionals. This inadequacy, the paper contends, is not only due to the slippery conceptual category 'personal domain', but also to the lack of discourses to interrogate this realm and the inability of different disciplines to construct a mutual lexicon to develop these discourses.
The paper hopes to feed into discussion about the importance of 'personal domain' resources in improving professional retention in urban fringe communities, in employers helping sustain the health and wellbeing of their workers, and in university educators preparing graduates that are more likely to be retained within their chosen profession.
The imposition of work into the private lives of Australians is at its highest level since the introduction of the eight-hour day. However, for service professionals working in low-income communities, this imposition can often go beyond long working hours and employee stress. Each day their motivation and wellbeing are challenged by conflict, poverty, trauma and tragedy.
This paper will present the early findings of one study with teachers within a broader project that interviewed professionals working in Adelaide's northern suburbs. While many teachers move into other professions within five years, others have been able to draw on resources from the personal domain to sustain their wellbeing and support their work for significant periods of time. Specifically, this paper will examine how teaching professionals understand, articulate and mobilise personal resources to sustain themselves in tough working environments.
The paper will also reflect on the challenges of developing an interdisciplinary study, as well as the inadequacy of both popular and disciplinary languages to engage meaningfully with the concept of the personal domain as part of the work of professionals. This inadequacy, the paper contends, is not only due to the slippery conceptual category 'personal domain', but also to the lack of discourses to interrogate this realm and the inability of different disciplines to construct a mutual lexicon to develop these discourses.
The paper hopes to feed into discussion about the importance of 'personal domain' resources in improving professional retention in urban fringe communities, in employers helping sustain the health and wellbeing of their workers, and in university educators preparing graduates that are more likely to be retained within their chosen profession.