How to balance academic workloads

Editor’s note: In this reflective post, Dr. Loy Lising shares how she balances the multiple demands placed on academics. As academic workloads have intensified, many feel that the balancing act between teaching, research, and service has become ever more challenging.

Loy is perfectly placed to model this balance, as she was recently recognized with a 2022 Lighthouse Award for a staff member who, in an exemplary fashion, models the values of the Faculty of Medicine, Health, and Human Sciences at Macquarie University.

***

Balancing academic responsibilities of teaching, research, and service has become increasingly challenging under conditions of social acceleration. Of course, academics are not alone in having to deal with the speeding up of our lives under neoliberal capitalism, as I showed in a study with Filipino migrant workers in Australia.

Three of the key strategies I use to keep everything together while inspiring students and achieving excellence with grace are:

1. I always remember that as academics we are first and foremost teachers, so our main role is to inspire minds and hearts.
2. I strive to create synergies in my work by making sure my tasks and roles align with my passion and skills.
3. I surround myself with like-minded colleagues who can do the work with me and can spur me on to achieve our individual and collective goals.

In the following, I will show what I achieved in 2022 guided by these principles.

Teaching to inspire minds and hearts

One of the units I convene is “Professional and Community Engagement (PACE).” PACE is one of the hallmarks of a Macquarie University’s education. It places students in a work environment so that they can gain professional experience.

PACE provides students with an opportunity to experience a work environment and enhance their employability. Academics also derive benefits, as PACE provides a platform to connect research and teaching. In 2021, when I first convened this unit, I started an initiative where I invited colleagues in my department and beyond to host PACE students to work with them on their research.

In addition to organizing the work experience for all Linguistics students in our Department, I hosted six students this year, who were interested in finding out how sociolinguistic research is conducted. Together, we worked on a corpus study of migrant English in the media. This provided the students with an appreciation of what sociolinguistic research entails and constituted valuable research assistance for me.

Maybe some of my PACE students will progress to undertaking research degrees. Supervising higher degree research is another of my passions, where I achieve synergies between teaching and research.

Heritage language maintenance in Australia

As with teaching, collaboration is at the heart of my research endeavors.

One of my key publications this year was a special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Multilingual family language policy in monolingual Australia: multilingual desires and monolingual realities,” which I co-edited with my colleague, Dr Hanna Torsh.

This publication has a long history – and patience is another academic virtue! – and goes back to 2019. Back then, I was awarded a small research grant by the Australian Linguistics Society (ALS) for a research project entitled, “Understanding migrants’ multilingual practices: Evidence from Filipino families.” This project aimed to investigate heritage language maintenance practices of Filipino migrant families in Sydney.

On the back of data collection for the project, I co-hosted a themed panel devoted to “Linguistic diversity in Australian migrant families” at the 2019 ALS annual conference. The presentations at that panel eventually transformed into the articles that make up the special issue (for a full list of the contributions, see the reference below).

Sociolinguistics in Connection

Academic meetings are a great way to facilitate research collaborations, and as the outcome of the 2019 panel was published, we hosted another event that will hopefully lead to new research projects further down the track.

This event was a symposium devoted to “Sociolinguistics in connection: Towards a healthy and resilient society.” Funded by Macquarie University’s Linguistics Department’s Research Community Incubator Scheme, the symposium was intended to strengthen the Department’s applied sociolinguistics cluster.

Together with my co-organizers Dr Agi Bodis, Dr Jean Cho, A/Prof Peter Roger, and Dr Hanna Torsh we assembled around 30 colleagues from across the university and other universities in the Sydney region for an inspirational day of lightning talks and academic speed dating.

The aim of the symposium was to deepen and expand existing research strengths by providing a platform for colleagues from various disciplines who do research at the intersections of language, healthcare, and education in our linguistically diverse society.

Surrounding yourself with like-minded colleagues

In work as in life, it is essential that we surround ourselves with colleagues who support us and spur us on so we can become better versions of ourselves as researchers, teachers, and administrators. I have been very fortunate in my mentors, peers, and mentees. Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller has been a constant and consistent mentor and support in all my academic endeavors since 2008. She has also created the Language on the Move research group, which has inspired so many of us to conduct research that actually improves people’s lives.

I must also mention Emeritus Professor Pam Peters, who has supported my corpus linguistics research related to diverse Englishes, particularly in Australia and the Philippines.

Maintaining focus on students and community

I started off this blog post by saying that one of the challenges with working in today’s academia is balancing one’s teaching, research, and service duties. What this year’s endeavors and experiences have taught me is that if we remain focused on the heart of our profession – our students and our community – we will always be inspired to do more and do better.

References

Ellis, E. M., & Sims, M. (2022). “It’s like the root of a tree that I grew up from….”: parents’ linguistic identity shaping family language policy in isolated circumstances. Multilingua, 41(5), 529-548. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0100
Lising, L. (2021). ‘Speak English!’: social acceleration and language learning in the workplace. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2021.1955499
Lising, L. (2022). “I want her to be able to think in English”: challenges to heritage language maintenance in a monolingual society. Multilingua, 41(5), 549-569. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0106
Rubino, A. (2022). Family language policy and dialect-Italian dynamics: across the waves of Italo-Australian migrant families. Multilingua, 41(5), 571-589. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0095
Taylor-Leech, K. (2022). Transnational identities, being and belonging: the diverse home literacies of multilingual immigrant families. Multilingua, 41(5), 591-609. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0092
Torsh, H. I. (2022). ‘Maybe if you talk to her about it’: intensive mothering expectations and heritage language maintenance. Multilingua, 41(5), 611-628. doi:10.1515/multi-2021-0105
Torsh, H. I., & Lising, L. (2022). Multilingual family language policy in monolingual Australia: multilingual desires and monolingual realities. Multilingua, 41(5), 519-527. doi:10.1515/multi-2022-0103