**5. Sense of Coherence**

By linking elements of innovative practice to the frailty model, we are able to support academics in their construction of a greater sense of coherence with regard to the fragmented and contradictory discourses of higher education. Developing a greater sense of coherence within academics of their teaching environments has always been one of the explicit intentions of the application of the pedagogic frailty model [17]. Within the salutogenic paradigm, Antonovsky [23] has defined the sense of coherence (SOC) in terms of its three subcomponents (comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness) as:

a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that:

(1) the stimuli deriving from one's internal and external environments in the course of living are structured, predictable and explicable (comprehensibility);

(2) the resources are available to one to meet the demands posed by these stimuli (manageability);

(3) these demands are challenges, worthy of investment and engagemen<sup>t</sup> (meaningfulness) (p. 19)

The sense of comprehensibility is supported by consistent, structured information and is confounded by stimuli that are chaotic, random, accidental or inexplicable. Unfortunately, Brookfield [37] reports that some teachers describe their work to be 'ba fflingly chaotic'—a situation that augurs badly for the development of a sense of coherence among university academics—presenting a challenge for university managers. A well-developed sense of coherence seems to be related to the ability of academics to cope with stress [38] and is likely to support the development of a positive approach to asset managemen<sup>t</sup> and wellness.

### **6. Individuals in the System**

One important di fference between clinical frailty and pedagogic frailty (as previously made explicit in the literature) is that studies of clinical frailty have a focus on the wellbeing of the individual, and consider assessment and treatment of the individual, whereas pedagogic frailty has a broader focus on the system in which that individual operates. This means that any given configuration for an individual may initiate or promote pedagogic frailty in one environment, but promote resilience in another, more receptive, environment. This can be seen in particularly sharp contrast when academics move from one national context to another and find that assets that were valued at home are no longer recognised when they move abroad [39]. However, the structure of individual profiles might predict the potential for frailty, or in other words, certain scripts act as indicators of 'prefrailty'. In an extreme case, a hypothetical, stereotypic academic who is a new arrival at a university might state that "he doesn't care what his colleagues do, he will not adapt any aspect of his teaching to fit current fashions because he has been teaching for twenty years and has established an e fficient routine that fits his lifestyle and allows his research to flourish". Such a person might be expected to have di fficulties integrating into a new environment that might exhibit a more progressive attitude to innovative teaching approaches. More subtle issues might be predicted where academics map their perceptions of the dimensions of frailty and produce knowledge structures with morphologies that are undeveloped and do not provide su fficient structure to indicate critical reflection on practice. An additional di fference between clinical and pedagogic frailty concerns age. Whereas clinical frailty is more prevalent in older patients, pedagogic frailty occurs at any stage of an academic's career and may be repeated as conditions change or as academics take on new roles [40,41].

Research suggests that frailty is a dynamic process that does not sit comfortably in the disease-centred paradigm that dominates medicine [42], and that there are opportunities along its pathway to transition out of, manage and/or prevent its adverse consequences. Considering clinical frailty, Gwyther et al. [43] write:

Superficially, there appeared to be a dichotomy in beliefs about frailty management. On one hand, some policy-makers appeared to support a greater medicalisation of frailty, a need for frailty to be recognised as an authentic clinical issue by medical professionals and treated as such. On the other, there were views that frailty should be demedicalised and that frailty managemen<sup>t</sup> should be conceived of as an adaptation to life stages and be embraced as a societal issue with ownership devolved to a wider societal network. (p. 4)

Again, there are direct analogies to be drawn from the comments above to the concept of pedagogic frailty. Rather than a medicalisation of pedagogic frailty, the modern educational world seeks to adopt greater managerialism and accountability to address any frailty in the system, so it may be 'treated'. This is exemplified by the classic "you said, we did" type of managemen<sup>t</sup> response to student voice. The devolution of managemen<sup>t</sup> o ffers a di fferent strategy [44] that would decentralise ownership of the teaching environment that might facilitate frailty managemen<sup>t</sup> as 'adaptation to professional life stages'.

### **7. Benefits of a Salutogenic Gaze towards Pedagogic Health**

By adopting Antonovsky's salutogenic gaze [23,24] to reframe the recent literature on pedagogic frailty [16,17], we might consider the issues that act on teaching in terms of the broader concept of 'pedagogic health'. This requires a modification of the original model of pedagogic frailty (Figure 1) to emphasize the dynamic continuum between frailty and resilience (Figure 3). Introducing the concept of 'pedagogic health' and modifying the linking phrases within the model provides a subtle ye<sup>t</sup> important development for a number of reasons, as it:

• Adopts a more a ffirmative language (pedagogic health literacy) that may be more appealing to senior managers, having a more positive subtext than frailty.

As an analogy, the increased recognition of mental health issues among both university staff and students has moved from a pathological model (dealing with problems after they have arisen) towards one advocating greater awareness of mental health literacy for all. One of the problems of dealing with student wellbeing within the current Higher Education environment is that 'students approach services when their mental wellbeing is already affecting their ability to cope' [45]. Rather than wait for problems to surface, it may be better to increase the mental health literacy (MHL) of everyone on campus as students with problems also have the potential to affect others including roommates, classmates and staff [3,46–48]. It is, therefore, an issue that affects us all, whatever our own state of mental health. Likewise, before waiting for academics to experience difficulties through frailty within their teaching, moving to the proactive promotion of greater pedagogic health literacy (PHL) across the campus is likely to have a more positive outcome for the institutional community.

• Avoids a potential misuse of the model through adoption of a simplistic harmful binary, the use of which to 'classify' staff would in itself be an indicator of prefrailty.

Within the managerial culture of the neoliberal university, there is pressure to find simplistic, instrumental measures that can be adopted for use as performance indicators [49]. The emerging body of work on pedagogic frailty has demonstrated an underpinning complexity to the teaching environment that cannot be adequately represented by a simple metric. This prevents the concept of pedagogic frailty (or pedagogic health) to be subverted for political means and to prevent the disconnections between expectations and practice described by Manathunga et al. [6].

• Indicates a continuum where no system is likely to exhibit 'total health' and so creates no arbitrary endpoint to prematurely terminate professional development.

The case studies of academics explored by Kinchin and Winstone [17] concentrate on academics who were already recognised as successful teachers. Therefore, each of them has the potential to contribute to pedagogic resilience within their institution. However, I note again here that individual success is not necessarily an indicator of resilience (rather than frailty) across the system, and that even the most successful teaching teams do not exhibit 'total health' (i.e., there is always something new to learn or a new skill to acquire). This depends on developing healthy, positive links between the individuals within a system (e.g., department) for that system to function well.

The learning and development of academics within this perspective do not have a predictable, linear trajectory with an easily defined or predicted endpoint. Rather, '[learning] is an entangled, nonlinear, iterative and recursive process, in which [academics] travel in irregular ways through the various landscapes of their experience (university, family, work, social life) and bring those landscapes into relation with each other' [50]. As such, it resembles the rhizomatic view of learning where knowledge is susceptible to constant modification as it responds to individual or social factors [51].

• The points listed above together help to make utilization of the model more 'management-friendly' and from which managemen<sup>t</sup> activities are not removed.

It is assumed that senior managers may be reluctant to investigate frailty within the systems over which they preside, and of which they are an active part. The pathological model might be seen as a poisoned chalice. Therefore, by looking at pedagogic health, we have a perspective from which we hope senior managers would not feel the need to exclude themselves—something that would invalidate the whole enterprise.

**Figure 3.** A revised model of pedagogic health to indicate the salutogenic continuum between extremes of frailty and resilience.
