Lecturers’ experiences in a TVET faculty: culture and the effects on their wellbeing.

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to understand the experiences TVET college lecturers had of their faculty culture and what affect, if any, these experiences had on their wellbeing. This was a qualitative study and focused on the experiences of six lecturers and their wellness in a faculty of a college. The purpose of the study was to understand how lecturers experienced their work culture, what factors in the culture where integral in their experiences and how these experiences had affected their health. This was an interpretivist study which sought understanding, knowledge and information from real lived experiences and followed a narrative inquiry research design aimed at capturing the stories of lecturers in their natural setting and to chronicle those stories in the study. Purposeful sampling was used to select participants and the semistructured interview was the data generation instrument used in the study. Antonovsky’s theory of sense of coherence (SOC) was used as the theoretical framework to examine and interpret the data. The thematic and content analysis approach was followed to further analyse and evaluate the data meaningfully in accordance with the research objectives and the findings and conclusions are presented in the narrative report to maintain the voices of the lecturers. The findings and conclusions reached from the evaluation of the data offer knowledge and understanding of the research topic to reflect a particular reality through the experiences of the lecturers in their unique cultural setting and therefore cannot be generalised to other faculties within the college or to other similar institutions. However, the stories and findings may resonate with the others within the institution in other college environments or maybe even in other higher education institutions. The study examined the perceptions of six individuals of their faculty and college culture and from these experiences cultural factors were identified which were affecting their sense of coherence, health and wellbeing. The findings and conclusions of the study showed that lecturers found their work culture to be disempowering, stifling and dysfunctional. A number of factors that they identified contributed to mostly unpleasant experiences in the faculty some more significantly than others. The study concluded that college lecturers worked in a highly demanding environment which contributed to their ill-health.