“Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” – Verna Myers

“We all have a voice, we just have to decide how we want to use it.” – Minda Harts

Gender bias in teaching is a persistent issue in academia that influences both the content used to teach and the way students learn.

In academia, proactively amplifying the voices of women and marginalised colleagues is crucial for creating a more inclusive and equitable academic environment. Oftentimes, their contributions are overlooked or undervalued. Thus it is essential for us to act and ensure their ideas are heard and recognised.

In academia, we are easily tempted to compare ourselves to others. Whether it’s the number of publications, the duration of a PhD, conferences, prestigious grants, or awards, it often feels like someone is ahead of you. Here are our three top strategies to avoid comparison to others:

As many of us wind down for the year, it is easy to get caught up in unfinished projects, looming deadlines, or unfulfilled goals and objectives.

However, this week’s post serves as a call to action to reflect on your positive experiences, achievements, and joyful moments in 2024, no matter how small, because they can make a profound positive difference in how you end this year.

In academia, building social capital is essential for fostering meaningful collaborations, professional growth, and a sense of belonging. Finding the right tribe—like-minded individuals who share your values and aspirations—can elevate your academic journey and create lasting impact.

In 2022, an idea was sparked, grounded in passion and a belief in positive change within academia. It started with a single LinkedIn recommendation by Anne-Wil and Christa’s post on well-being activities in the classroom: simple yet profound #PositiveAcademia posts. These posts weren’t just fleeting thoughts, but seeds planted with care in the fertile ground of a collective desire to create positivity during the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. Fast forward to today, and we’ve reached over 200 posts, each representing a brick in the foundation of Positive Academia.

 This journey wasn’t about following a set formula or achieving predefined metrics. It was about doing something meaningful, driven by the conviction that every small action counts. Along the way, it has become clear that building something impactful requires three key elements: passion, collaboration, and consistency.

This week marks the second little action in our Voice Hack Series!

The process of Reflect, Review, and Reveal is crucial for academics as it fosters deep self-awareness and clarity in thoughts, enabling scholars to articulate their standpoints, contributions, and ideas with confidence.

By engaging in the 3R process, academics can refine and enhance their voice, ensuring that their contributions are both meaningful and authentic.

This week marks the start of our Voice Hack Series! Having a voice as an academic is essential for exchanging our knowledge, engaging our audiences, and making research arguments more direct and compelling.

It is also an essential driver of our self-construction and supports the development of our desired identities.

By following our Voice Hack series, you accompany Christa’s current journey of finding her voice as a strongly introverted academic.

This week encourages challenging our imposter syndromes! Doing so boosts our confidence, satisfaction, and resilience. Acknowledging our achievements, seeking feedback, and practicing self-compassion can help transform our self-doubts into growth opportunities.

This week is a call to break new ground! Breaking new ground can empower academics to innovate, challenge norms, and creatively address societal challenges. Academics can thus evolve into positive change-makers, driving progress and fostering sustainable and meaningful contributions to society.

This week is a call to walk the extra mile! For academics, we define “walking the extra mile” as going beyond daily tasks to foster sustainable careers and positive societal contributions. It includes contributing to societal challenges, mentoring, integrating diversity and inclusion, and caring for the self. This ensures that academics create lasting value for professional growth and the broader stakeholders.

This week is a call to making your work meaningful! For academics, engaging in meaningful work is crucial for fostering a greater sense of purpose, and fulfilment that can enhance enthusiasm for positive change-making in their communities. Beyond this, making academic work more meaningful builds the foundations for academics to craft their careers based on their own beliefs, values and passions.

This week is a call to foster curiosity! For academics curiosity plays a crucial role because it drives intellectual growth through exploration and innovation. It encourages continuous learning and problem-solving that both support academics’ identification of strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. Curiosity thus enhances the sustainability of our careers.  

This week is a call to become independent! We believe that being independent is crucial for personal and professional development, self-awareness, self-reliance, and critical decision-making aligned with personal and professional values and principles. It also reinforces resilience and the building of sustainable and healthy relationships.

This week is a call to follow your passions! Being passionate about what we are doing is critical for finding meaning and purpose in our academic profession. By following our passions, we can foster a deep connection with our endeavours and thus inspire and empower others.

This week we advocate for talking about teaching with pride, a wonderful contribution by our lovely colleague Sian Stephens, as a way to forge bonds with our colleagues and to boost professional esteem.

This week is a call to foster Resourcefulness! Fostering resourcefulness leads to enhanced problem solving, creativity, adaptability, collaboration, interaction and supports the building of positive and resilient organizational cultures.

This week is a call to foster Responsibility & Accountability. Fostering responsibility and accountability leads to enhanced trust and integrity, improved performance and innovation, and strengthened organizational resilience. These benefits collectively contribute to a more positive, effective, and sustainable organizational culture.

This week is a call to prioritize our mental wellness and recognize its impact on academic excellence. Mental health refers to our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. Good mental health helps us manage stress, relate to others, and make sound decisions.

This week is a call to Speak Up. Speaking up in academia can significantly enhance our well-being by fostering positive, supportive and effective interaction in our organizational cultures.

This week is a call to foster impartiality. Being impartial requires us to cultivate an attitude and behavior that allows for fair and non-judgemental decision-making, interaction and communication with others.

This week is a call to mindfully evaluate your caffeine consumption and understand how it influences your energy levels. Are those morning cups of coffee and afternoon energy drinks actually the reason you feel so drained and unfocused?

This week is a call to be resilient. Being resilient is crucial for navigating the many challenges and setbacks in our academic lives. It allows us to bounce back from adversity, maintain our mental and emotional well-being, and supports our adaption to changing situations.

This week is a call to be courageous. Being courageous is vital because it catalyses the embracement of risk, the challenging of norms, and fosters innovation and creativity. Courage drives positive organizational cultures within which individuals voluntarily confront risks and stand up for what they believe is right. Thus, courage helps us to break free from standardised, taken-for-granted routines and fosters positive-change-making in our organizational lives.

This week is a call to be kind. Small acts of kindness play a crucial role in fostering supportive and flourishing cultures, leading to a sense of belonging and positive interactions among colleagues and students alike. Ultimately, small acts of kindness not only enhance the wellbeing of individuals but also enrich the academic community as a whole.

This week is a call to foster curiosity. Fostering curiosity supports building cultures of innovation, creativity and continuous learning. Such cultures encourage the seeking of new knowledge, exploration of new perspectives and the questioning of existing practices and behaviour, leading to improved resilience, problem-solving, creative thinking, adaptability to changes, and inclusive relationships.

This week is a call to foster respectful interaction. Fostering respectful interaction is pivotal for creating a supportive and inclusive environment within which we feel psychologically safe to communicate our ideas, collaborate with others and to resolve conflicts constructively. It also improves team dynamics and promotes a positive organizational culture characterized by trust, respect and transparency.

This week is a call to become optimistic. Optimism serves as a catalyst for positive change, enabling individual and collective envisioning and pursing of goals. Optimistic leaders inspire confidence, motivation, and a sense of purpose among their followers, thereby improving organizational culture, performance, and well-being.

This week is dedicated to using the right etiquette when addressing someone in academia. Addressing someone correctly is important because it is pivotal for building positive relationships, maintaining professionalism, and showing respect and consideration for others.

This week is dedicated to reaching out in academia. Reaching out is important and because it enables you to put things in perspective, to deal with feelings and thoughts, feeling safe and secure (Novak, 2016).

This week is dedicated to creating positive co-authorship in academia. Co-authorship brings various benefits such as enhanced creativity, innovation, efficiency, networking opportunities, inclusivity, and the ability to work on more ambitious projects than we could do alone.

Referring to Christa Sathish’s recent Reflections on the completion of AMR’s Bridge Reviewer Program , this week is dedicated to creating positive academic reviewing culture.

The crisis in academic reviewing refers to various challenges within the peer-review process, such as reviewer disengagement due to heavy workloads and prioritising the quantity over quality of publications. The increasing volume of submissions requires more engaged reviewers who are willing to spend more time, time they do not have, on reviewing. This can affect the effectiveness and quality of our peer-review processes and ultimately lead to poor academic writing and theorizing and lower quality contributions.

The AMR Bridge Reviewer Program is an excellent example of how collective and positive actions in academia can lead to holistic, constructive, and inclusive peer-reviewing. The program provides opportunities for ECRs and PGRs and includes those who may not have easy access to review to join the academic reviewing community

#actionsinacademia #positiveacademia #proactiveacademia

Referring to Anne-Wil’s blogpost on proactivity in 2020, this week is dedicated to Being Proactive in Academia. Success in academia doesn’t happen overnight: it requires lots of hard graft, initiative, and resilience, and of course a dose of pure luck!

Every career is different and so are everyone’s life circumstances. So, measure your “success” based on your own goals, values, and circumstances, not on “internalised external goals” derived from a mythical person such as the “world’s most successful academic”.

Realise though that much of your academic career can only be shaped by one person: you!

This week is dedicated to humour in academia. “When it comes to relieving stress, more giggles and guffaws are just what the doctor ordered” (Mayo Clinic, 2024) and there are various benefits (such as stress relief, fostering social bonds, or improved immune system) So, let’s make our daily struggles (e.g., stress, long working hours) and heavy burden of responsibilities easier by cultivating humour in our daily lives and academic cultures.

Everyone loves a freebie. Everyone loves a present.

Academics are no different. But most of them prefer a very specific freebie: books!

So, if you are a senior and/or well-resourced academic, why not make a difference this week by being a book fairy? There are at least three ways you can be a book fairy.

“You are unique, resilient, and constantly growing. Embrace who you are, and let yourself feel proud of all that you have accomplished and all that you will achieve in the future” Tanvi Vyas

We believe that everyone should celebrate themselves as often as they can, no matter how big or small the achievement. The need to perform at high levels requires resilience and focus.