In September 2024, I started a seven month sabbatical or study leave. I was able to apply for this after so many terms of consecutive teaching. In my case, this was the first time I had stepped away from teaching being my main endeavor for 16 years and it was quite a shock to the system. My plan was to retain my education leadership roles (TEL leader, deputy programme director and CTEL advisor) but have no modules to teach or students dissertations to supervise, meaning I could focus all my time on research projects and PhD student supervision. I am just over half way through this period of study leave now and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my experiences. I have documented some key insights I gained over the first few months.
Panicking on the approach and on landing! As I approached study leave I was panicking about getting all my teaching activities done before I was official excused from them. I had timed my study leave to enable me to set up all module websites for the degree (around 50) before I went so that no one had to cover this work. Perhaps unsurprisingly I had taken on too much and the last few weeks felt overwhelming at times. Everything got done, as it always does, and then I took a few weeks to settle into my study leave, starting to draft papers and look at funding applications I wanted to work on. Whilst I thought this might relieve my sense of overwhelm and panic, it just gave rise to a different cause for the panic - what if I could not do this? I have been very fortunate in my education work, I have worked hard and achieved the things I set out to achieve in my teaching, but what if I could not do this in research. After all, I only had seven months, and research papers (well, peer review) and funding applications take a huge amount of time. I would like to say that this panic subsided but it has not gone yet. As small successes started to appear (four small funding applications being successful and a few papers accepted), it has started to reduce but still remains bubbling away under the surface. Journaling helped imposter syndrome. I have never been someone who has experienced much imposter syndrome. On reflection I think this is because I have generally focused on things I knew I could do and I have, at times in my career, fought for a place at the table and doing that has given me confidence in my abilities, along with a lot of hard work to develop my skills. However, when I found myself, for the first time in almost two decades, with actual headspace to think about research, I suddenly felt like this might not be something I could really do. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, but in those moments where I felt imposter syndrome creeping in or I was worrying about slow progress, I kept a journal, completing it at least once a week. I had three sections that I wrote in: 1. Key tasks I had completed since the last log 2. Gratitude points or successes 3. Things I need to park and forget about The act of writing down what I had done made me realise I was progressing a lot more than I was giving myself credit for. It also reminded me how grateful I was for the time away from teaching to think about research and say yes to opportunities that previously I would have had to turn down. I still have lots of applications and projects to complete before my study leave finishes but I feel more confident the time will not have been wasted now and I am already wondering if I can keep this journaling up when I return to teaching. Teaching is great... So this one may not be a surprise but taking time away from teaching has reminded me how much I love it. I love the creative process of designing teaching in the first place. I love actually delivering lectures and small group teaching. I am also someone that quite likes marking too. In fact there is very little about actual teaching that I don't like. but administration and bureaucracy breaks us. I am missing teaching but I am not missing all the associated activities like timetabling, dealing with extension requests, academic conduct discussions and staffing debates. I know that all these come with the joy of teaching; they are unavoidable but they are also an absolute time sink and require a lot of effort for very little reward. There must be ways to reduce this burden and allow staff to focus on the actual teaching (answers on a postcard please). A change really is as good as a rest. So far on my study leave I have not worked less. I have worked more outside of the office which has given me more flexibility but my partner still often needs to come and fish me out my study late at night to ensure some semblance of non-work time in my day. The culture of overworking academia is engrained within me but it is also that I genuinely want to be working. I am excited by what I am working on. Of course, I have always been excited by research - you cannot do it if you are not excited by it, but so often that excitement has been tempered by, quite honestly, administrative exhaustion. When I have been working late previous it has been simply because I could not get through the workload if not. The next step is going to be adjusting to a return to teaching and what challenges that brings.
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