Holidays and leaves (part 2)

Before I continue, let me explain what I mean by working through the December holiday first as what counts as work, whether work has clear time boundedness or can be done remotely, might have all changed in recent decades.

In general, university faculty members (lecturers) have three (+) main job functions, each with a different time and space boundedness.

·       Teaching has the highest time-boundedness. The time when a particular course starts and ends is usually decided way ahead of time (can easily be a year or more ahead) and outlined clearly (once determined, with little room to negotiate. The only possibility here is to get someone else to teach on one’s behalf). The space boundedness of teaching depends on whether it is offered in a contact mode (where the lecturer meets the students physically in classrooms), online (where everything happens online), or blended. Teaching can be at both undergraduate (Bachelor's degree) or postgraduate (Honors, Masters and PhD degree) levels, although typically (at least in South Africa), coursework only happens up to Masters level.

·       Supervision is slightly lower than teaching in terms of time-boundedness. An essay (a dissertation or thesis, from a few thousand words, a few pages, to a few hundred pages) is expected before one completes the degree, usually with a preference or requirement for the maximum duration, which sets the time-bound. With the availability of online means, supervision has increasingly become less space-bound. This is usually only applicable to postgraduate degrees.

·       Research (including reading, data collection, writing and publishing) is generally more flexible in terms of time. Unlike the two above, generally, the deadlines for this are less ‘dictated’ by external regulations but are more self-determined. Except if a study needs data collection (eg interview people or conduct a survey), this is typically not space-bound.

·       (service or also called community engagement: there is a lot less agreement on what exactly this is, but in general, this is more similar to research in terms of time and space boundedness.)

·       (admin: believe it or not, there is also a lot of admin work, involving documenting, tracking, reporting, coordinating, or even simpler things like responding to emails or following up on emails. Depending on whether the admin is related to which function above, it can be time/space bounded or not so much.

Like teachers, lecturers normally have two long ‘holidays’: one for the summer holiday (mid-December to mid-January in SA, for a bit more than a month) and one for winter (June/July, another 3-4 weeks).  

With the start of online teaching, the first thing changing our holiday is that coursework can be squeezed in a year (in this case, our department squeezes 6 coursework into a typical 4 coursework a year calendar). This cuts into the holidays if one happens to teach the particular module offered at that particular time (although one could ‘take leave’ after that particular teaching is over). This year, I didn’t need to teach during these two periods (unlike last year, when I started teaching in the first week of January, cutting the holiday by at least one week). However, I do have deadlines for supervision, just like last year. To catch the due date for those students, I had online meetings to discuss their essays with them daily, for one hour or more (sometimes also with additional hours offline to comment/edit their work). This doesn’t count the time that I catch up on research, which usually takes a backseat during the year because of the time-boundedness of other tasks. It also doesn’t count on admin or service.