Part-time English Language Instructors' Well-being: A Case Study In Türkiye

Date

2023-6

Author

Arda, Çisem

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Political and economic changes drastically transformed the educational system in line with neoliberal policies. Education has been commodified, and the workforce has begun to be employed in a flexible and insecure manner. Similarly, In Türkiye, English teachers who aspire to establish a career at the tertiary level may find themselves working in temporary positions at universities because of not holding a compulsory master‘s degree to be employed in a permanent language instructor position. Thus, this qualitative study aimed to investigate how fourteen English language instructors employed on temporary contracts at a Turkish private university experience their well-being. Utilizing a single instrumental case study method, the study was conducted in the Department of Foreign Languages by collecting data using a biographical information survey, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and an ethnographic journal kept by the researcher based on the unstructured observations in the research setting. The data was examined through a multilayered analytic method employing the well-being framework of Holmes (2005), the PERMA Model of Seligman (2011), and the thematic analysis guidelines of Creswell (2013) and Braun & Clarke (2006). The findings depicted that although not sensing any authoritarian pressure and felt comfortable teaching in a nontoxic institution among respectful instructors, still, the part-time English instructors‘ well-being experiences are negatively affected by precarious conditions. They struggle with job instability, insecurity, and financial problems that stress them constantly. Moreover, due to temporariness, they face invisibility and various uncertainty problems, which lower their well-being since they cannot develop a sense of attachment to the institution.

Subject Keywords

Teacher well-being, Part-time English language instructors, Temporary teaching in higher education, temporary teaching at a private university, precarious working conditions

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104061

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis