**1. Introduction**

The current literature on teaching in university is increasingly populated with references about stress and burnout among academics [1,2]. This should raise concerns about the physical and mental health of colleagues working within this system [3], and about the pedagogic health of the higher education system overall. Numerous stressors can be seen to act within the academy. For example, new academics report dissonance between expectations of their role and actual teaching experiences [4]. In addition, competing agendas within universities seem to be adding to the pressures of work [5], while political changes in the system appear to be at odds with the values that drew many academics into academia in the first place [6]:

Academics are experiencing a growing sense of disconnection between their desires to develop students into engaged, disciplined and critical citizens and the activities that appear to count in the enterprise university. (p. 526)

This generates strong feelings among academics, such as those described so colourfully by Leitch [7] who talks about feeling as though she is "riding two horses at the same time, being propelled simultaneously in opposing directions" (p. 166). The negative consequences of too much stress within the university workforce have been summarised by Mtsweni [8] in his analysis of responses to stress among university administrators:

the person may attempt to reduce the amount of information to be dealt with by opting for a simplified belief system which denies the true complexity of the issues involved. Typically this might entail a move towards polarised problem solving with a simplistic yes/no or right/wrong analysis. This diminished judgement can involve an increased personalisation of issues or a hostile egocentricity. In this case the sufferer can only see their limited viewpoint and begins to feel persecuted, interpreting neutral events as being directed at them. Lack of balance is completed by magnification and minimisation whereby trivial are given undue emphasis whilst key factors are played down or ignored. This unsupportable level of cognition eventually leads to fatigue and a state of under-alertness, characterised by forgetfulness, foggy thinking and disorganisation which may be wrongly attributed to a lack of motivation. (p. 20)

Within the context of teaching in higher education, these stress symptoms can be observed to be exhibited by colleagues and these can impede the innovative development of teaching and encourage the rise of 'play safe' classroom practices [9]. Such stress can lead colleagues to consider innovation in teaching practice in a binary manner as either 'good' or more typically 'bad' without considering the wider implications of change and possible benefits to students. The manifestation of hostile egocentricity referred to by Mtsweni can be observed through everyday comments such as, "It just won't work in our department—the managemen<sup>t</sup> don't understand that we are a special case!" And finally, small changes to relatively minor procedural issues (e.g., which line-spacing should students use in their essays [10]) are often discussed extensively and with passion whilst the 'elephant in the room' is left for another time. The combined effect of these unproductive tensions and workplace stressors that cause 'foggy thinking and disorganisation' can result in an environment exhibiting pedagogic frailty, where elements of the teaching environment seem to be working in opposition to each other so that teachers retreat into a conservative status quo [9] that may be professionally unsatisfying and pedagogically unsound [11]. To address these problems, the model of pedagogic frailty is aligned to key aspects of salutogenesis, to make it more amenable to university managers as a developmental tool. This paper is aimed at those who influence or deliver teaching at university, including teachers, technicians, administrators and managers, as all these roles have an impact on the discourses of learning and on the student experience. Whilst the literature on teaching understandably tends to focus on teachers, it is evident that other roles have an impact on what goes on and how it is reported.

### **2. Pedagogic Frailty and Salutogenesis**

The model of pedagogic frailty arose from a fortuitous confluence of personal and professional experiences with a theoretical exploration of university teaching [12]. This drew on three decades of work in teaching and academic development by the author that included several hundred structured teaching observations during which observed teachers often talked about the positive and negative factors influencing their teaching. The author also drew on professional examination of key factors influencing practice in the design of new academic programmes of teacher development [13]. The evolution of the model was also informed by personal encounters with clinical frailty [14] during which the overlap between the literature examining clinical experience and teaching experience became apparent, combined with the theoretical exploration of the visualisation of 'powerful knowledge' [15]. In combination, this gave rise to the conditions in which the model of pedagogic frailty could emerge (Figure 1).

By using the four key dimensions within the model (that have already been explored extensively in the literature [16,17]) to add structure to reflections on teaching practice, so that personal perspectives may be used as a basis for developmental dialogue (such as the example inserted below the model in Figure 1). Although the focus of research on pedagogic frailty considers the university system (i.e., the ways in which the various roles in the institution contribute to teaching), investigations need to start by uncovering the range of perceptions held by individuals within that system. Numerous case studies have revealed the variety of perspectives held by academics across the spectrum of academic

disciplines from the arts to the sciences [17] and the ways in which tensions might develop resulting from conflicting perspectives. The model of pedagogic frailty focuses on four key areas:


In studies published so far, the model seems to resonate with university academics who readily relate to the idea of frailty and the notion that aspects of the professional environment can create tensions that impede the development of teaching practice [18,19]. However, the negative undertones of the term 'frailty' have been recognised in the clinical literature [20] and may be seen as problematic by university managers when considering the professional development of university academics as it suggests a deficit model. We may attempt to overcome this by adopting an assets-based approach to the consideration of the wider concept of pedagogic health as a continuum linking the extremes of frailty and resilience. The consideration of assets updates the clinical analogy from which pedagogic frailty emerged by o ffering a parallel to increased consideration of health assets [21,22] within a continuum of health as proposed by Antonovsky in his exploration of salutogenesis [23,24]. Salutogenesis is defined as the study of 'why' and 'how' people stay well [25]. Staying well is related to the ability of individuals to manage tension, that is, how they respond to stressors. The managemen<sup>t</sup> of tension helps to maintain health. The pathological model is analogous to a deficit model of health, whilst salutogenesis pays more attention to the managemen<sup>t</sup> of assets that contribute to wellness, and so can be seen to o ffer links with the ideas of pedagogic health as a continuum between the extremes of pedagogic frailty and pedagogic resilience.

How individuals manage tension and stress in their daily lives and stay well has been referred to as 'salutogenic functioning' [8]. Reframing in this way firstly requires us to discard the dichotomy of diseased/healthy in favour of Antonovsky's health-ease/dis-ease continuum (reframed here as frailty–resilience for the educational context). This is reflected by the application of concept mapping that enables us to visualise nuanced academic perceptions of their 'pedagogic health' [17] in which the diversity of perspectives is valued, and an inappropriate binary good–bad distinction is never made.

**Figure 1.** The overall pedagogic frailty model (above) with (inset below) one academic's view of the regulative discourse dimension (After Kinchin [15,26]).

Whilst most previous applications of salutogenesis in universities have been concerned with the physical or mental health of individuals working within a university [27], in this paper I have turned this around and am focusing on the health of the system (i.e., the university) where the individuals are working. However, these two perspectives are clearly related to each other and the distinction between a 'healthy academic' and a 'pedagogically healthy' university may be blurred across the numerous interactions between the individual and the institution. The consideration of salutogenesis as a frame for pedagogic health requires a parallel consideration of a number of other associated concepts (particularly assets, wellness and sense of coherence) that need to be part of the network of concepts that will help to generate a robust context to inform practice. Concept mapping offers a tool to allow the visualisation of these ideas and the ways they may be linked (Figure 2).

This visualization of the relationship between salutogenesis and pedagogic frailty represents the author's perspective of the main concepts involved and the relationships between them. The concept map was generated by reducing the problem to include only the main concepts involved and arranged to emphasize the relationships between them. The linking phrases have been constructed to offer the maximum explanatory power in the minimum amount of text in an attempt to produce what has been termed an 'excellent concept map' in the research literature [15]. This provides the reader with a map

to complement the text as a way of reducing cognitive load and making the text more accessible when having to manage a set of unfamiliar terminology.

**Figure 2.** A concept map to illustrate the associated concepts that help to relate salutogenesis with pedagogic health literacy.
