Kia ora Vice-Chancellors Dawn Freshwater, Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, Neil Quigley, Jan Thomas, Nic Smith, Cheryl de la Rey, Grant Edwards and Helen Nicholson, We, the students, staff, and alumni of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Universities, urge you to .
Continuous increase of global reliance on sessional staff in higher education has not been accompanied by the development of strategies to enhance quality learning and teaching or understanding the experiences of these staff. This has resulted in a general discontent among this category of academics. The growing importance of building respectful working environments that integrate inclusive care and performance quality leads to the emergence of standards frameworks. Explorations of sessional staff lived experiences are vital to inform policy and practice. This study examined sessional staff predominantly in a marking role in a local context of an Aotearoa/New Zealand University. We explored our markers’ agreement with selected principles of an Australian national framework. Based on an anonymous Qualtrics survey, the quantitative data showed our markers agreed with most of the selected Australian framework principles at the individual and department levels. An appreciative inquiry of