Making a place: an oral history of academic development in Australia

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. This book sets out to offer an oral history of ‘academic development’ – a term that is somewhat opaque if not (often usefully) ambiguous. In much of this book it is taken to be synonymous with ‘educational development’ reflecting the original focus of much early development work in academia. In Australia, typically, the institutional home for such work is an Academic Development Unit (ADU) or Centre for Educational Development (Centre). This situation is broadly mirrored in the UK, Canada and the US, but with the US distinguishing between what they term ‘Faculty Development’ and ‘Instructional Development’ (see: http://www.podnetwork.org/faculty_development/definitions.htm)

2. HERDSA: Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia. In a fashion analogous to its UK and Canadian counterparts, the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) and the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE), HERDSA portrays itself as ‘a scholarly society for people committed to the advancement of higher and tertiary education. It promotes the development of higher education policy, practice and the study of teaching and learning.’ (see: http://www.herdsa.org.au/?page_id=2; http://www.srhe.ac.uk/about.asp; http://www.stlhe.ca/en/stlhe/about/vision_and_goals.php;) While the focus on teaching and learning is still very much evident in the US-based Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD), this network is more explicit about having a wider brief, claiming it ‘… fosters human development in higher education through faculty, instructional, and organizational development.’ (http://www.podnetwork.org/about.htm)

3. In this paper Nixon poses the following responses to the question ‘What does the new academic professionalism mean for the management and practice of higher education?’ (p180-2). The second and third are of particular import for us here:

1. ‘…research must be seen as central to academic life, but the restrictive definitions of research that currently dominate the academic scene would be broadened …’

2. ‘…teaching relationships would form, and to a great extent frame, the professional identity of the academic worker…’

3. ‘…the reintegration of professional development. … If academic workers were to become serious about their own professionalism, they would ensure that the task of professional development was clearly located within the academic structures of higher education preferably at department or faculty level. They would see professional development as professional self-development, in other words, and take responsibility for it as such. Not to take responsibility in this way represents a failure of professional nerve…’

4. ‘…recognising and respecting disciplinary and subject differences… inter-disciplinary practice depends upon a recognition of, and respect for, the cultural, epistemological and methodological differences between disciplinary and subject areas.’

4. ICED: International Consortium for Educational Development ‘… was established to promote educational or academic development in higher education world-wide. ICED is a network whose members are themselves national organisations or networks concerned with promoting good practice in higher education.’ (http://www.osds.uwa.edu.au/iced)