Academic Leadership: Fundamental Building Blocks
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Under the ICVF model, the five operational roles are paradoxical in nature (Vilkinas &
Cartan, 2001, 2006) meaning the Academic Coordinator must decide how and when to
apply a given role, and to what extent each role competes with others. The role of the
Academic Coordinator has inherent paradoxes which lead to tensions and potential
conflict for the individual (Robertson, 2005) in deciding how to apply each role.
Therefore, Academic Coordinators need to deliver a range of strategies that are often
inherently contradictory.
Example:
- Caring for students and dealing with their personal issues (Developer role).
- At the same time demanding that the students complete their assignments
(Deliverer role).
As you can see, these competing demands make the role of Academic Coordinator
complex. As Robertson (2005) argued, college teachers, like Academic Coordinators,
need to be able to integrate these paradoxical behaviours so that they are not disabled
by each of the specific roles’ conflicting demands. The following example illustrates
these competing paradoxes.
Mary Jane is an Academic Coordinator for a Bachelor of Marketing degree. She was
appointed into the position a year ago because she had a lot of great ideas for the course
which the Head of School liked. She has put a lot of energy into finding creative solutions
to ensure the program is exciting, meets industry needs, and fully engages the students in
cutting edge teaching and assessment practices. (These are all examples of Mary Jane
spending a lot of time in the Innovator role – which appears to be her strength). At the
same time, Mary Jane has come under pressure from some of the teaching team as well
as her Head of School for timely information on the performance of the program (e.g.,
course statistics, withdrawals, deferrals, etc.), outcomes related to teaching quality
innovations and actions for addressing these indicators. Mary Jane doesn’t enjoy this
aspect of the role and finds it tedious and somewhat difficult working through this
information (These are examples of activities within the Monitor role – which is
paradoxical and competing to the Innovator role). Mary Jane needs to recognise her
strength in innovation and pull back a bit, and develop some of her monitoring skills.
