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Faculty of Education - Top Achiever
Dr Karen Collett
Healthy work-life balance difficult to manage during Covid-19
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WHEN asked about how she has been managing over the past year, Dr Karen Collett’s response is blunt and to the point: “I have not managed to create and sustain a healthy work-life balance during this time, nor am I aware of any colleagues who have managed to do this.”
Dr Collett is a Senior Lecturer in school leadership and management in the Educational Studies Department of the University of the Western Cape. For the last 29 years, she has worked in the area of school and teacher development through NGOs and higher education institutions in South Africa and Namibia.
“What helped sustain me during this difficult time were strong and supportive relationships with colleagues and friends. These relationships have helped to build such an important space for care and attention, both at a personal and professional level. Writing together with colleagues has helped inspire me, and has kept the energy and commitment towards submitting articles for publication going.
“The boundaries between home and work-life for women in academia have become increasingly blurred, as the homespace is now also the workspace. Being able to switch off and distance from work is a continuous challenge, particularly when it comes to the time consuming work of online learning and virtual engagement.
“Finding the time to do the deep reading and thinking required for academic work is increasingly a challenge.”
Dr Collett has a particular interest in teacher well-being, school leadership development and the development of schools as thinking and learning organisations. From 2016 to 2019, she was the South African co-ordinator and co-initiator of an Erasmus Plus partnership focused on teacher well-being and language diversity, in collaboration with partners in Norway, Denmark and Ireland.
“I am currently researching the relationship between leadership in schools and teacher well-being. I am interested in extending my research by investigating the relationship between teacher well-being and professional learning communities in schools.”
Together with a colleague from the Education Faculty, and the UWC Writing Centre, she will be working on a participatory action learning and research project linked to the integration of academic literacies in faculty courses and programmes.
