Exploring international collaborative writing groups’ potential for community-based academic development around public SoTL

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a new version of the ISSOTL (International Society of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning)-based International Collaborative Writing Groups (ICWGs), which has a specific focus on public scholarship. In this study, we focus on the community-based elements of the ICWGs-Public, and in particular on community-based academic development, including cross-institutional and international collaboration aspects of ICWGs-Public. In this qualitative study, we use Wenger and Wenger-Trayner’s communities of practice evaluation framework, which outlines seven levels of value, to explore the potential outcomes and benefits of ICWGs-Public, based on a series of semi-structured interviews with participants. ICWGs-Public show potential as a model for cross-institutional community-based academic development, particularly if the community of practice has a strong central focus, in this case public SoTL. Community-based academic development may therefore have an important role to play in extending SoTL beyond the academic realm.

KEYWORDS:

• International Collaborative Writing Groups-public (ICWGs-public)
• Public SoTL
• community-based academic development
• communities of practice
• cross-institutional collaboration

Introduction

Academic advancement is typically envisioned within the confines of individual institutions, and is often linked to institutional strategic goals. Academic developers, as third space workers (McIntosh & Nutt, 2022), are often viewed as boundary spanners, or ‘brokers’ (E. Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014), because they bridge the gaps between disciplines and organizational units. As Huijser et al. (2020) have noted, ‘facilitating change and bridging boundaries have long been fundamental aspects of academic development practice as we connect both the disciplines and the structures within and among higher education institutions’ (p. 91). However, academic development also takes place between higher education institutions, aligning closely with Parkinson et al. (2020) concept of academic development being centred around specific knowledge communities that exist outside or across higher education institutions.

In this study, we explore one such academic community, the International Collaborative Writing Groups (ICWGs), which have been a part of ISSOTL (International Society of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) since 2012, but more specifically, the public version of these ICWGs, which was launched in 2019. These writing groups are communities of practice composed of individuals from various institutions worldwide, united by a shared objective and specific project. Therefore, the academic development practices within this particular community are shaped by shared interests (Kenny, 2016), related to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The emphasis of Public ICWGs is on knowledge, skills, and expertise surrounding the concept of public SoTL, and the creation of a variety of artifacts and public communication channels to connect with the broader public. This paper reports on the inaugural version of ICWG-Public as a community-led approach to academic development around public scholarship in general, and public SoTL in particular. The community in this case is the ISSOTL community, and within that, a specific group of cross-institutional academics (and academic developers) with a particular interest in public scholarship (Matthews et al., 2017).

Here, we start by outlining the evolution of ICWGs-Public within the broader ICWG initiative, including a discussion of public SoTL as the guiding principle and focus. Then, following Matthews et al. (2017) and Marquis et al. (2017), we employ a Communities of Practice (CoP) lens to assess this initiative and pinpoint the community-based elements of the ICWGs-Public and their implications for academic development and future research.

International collaborative writing groups (ICWGs) and ICWG-Public

ICWGs date back to the 1990s (Healey, 2017), but ISSOTL’s first ICWGs occurred in 2012. ICWGs have two main aims (Healey & Matthews, 2017): ‘1. To build the capacity of participants to work and write about SoTL in international collaborative groups; and 2. To make a contribution to the literature on relevant SoTL topics, informed by international perspectives’ (p. 4). Since their introduction, five physical events have been held at the ISSOTL conference including the public scholarship ICWG in October 2022. The four academic output-focused ICWGs have culminated in publications in special sections in ISSOTL’s journal, Teaching & Learning Inquiry, among other academic journals (Marquis et al., 2017). The ICWGs-Public have so far led to the production of a number of public-facing artefacts including podcasts, blogs, and infographics, which are a key element of the community-based development in the ICWGs-Public compared to more traditional paper-based academic outputs.

The ISSOTL19 conference theme, SoTL without borders: Engaged practices for social change, tapped into an emerging dialogue in the ISSOTL community: how the scholarship of teaching learning could have a much broader outreach than the traditional avenues for academic research. As Boyer (1996) suggested, universities as institutions should mandate themselves as being invested in ‘the scholarship of discovery’ (p. 21), and in doing so, we cannot separate ourselves from each other as academics nor from our students and the broader public. Trigwell’s (2013) defined SoTL as

… having a primary focus on improving the learning of the teacher’s students, while satisfying several key elements of scholarship: a scholarly inquiry leading to the production of a public artefact and the peer review of that outcome. (p. 99)

Of course, the public artefact in this definition is inferred to be a peer reviewed academic journal article, which is the explicit aim in the ‘regular’ ICWGs. Yet, a public artefact can mean a range of other ways of disseminating SoTL results and findings.

Felten and Geertsema (2023) dive deeply into the idea of SoTL as inquiring into teaching and learning ‘as if the world mattered’ (p. 1059), thus taking SoTL beyond academia. They critique the potential of SoTL to become implicated in a narrow instrumentalist approach to professionalism (and professional development) where the emphasis is purely on ‘successful delivery of an educational product’ (p. 1102). Thus, ‘the “didactic” domain is rewarded and reinforced since it attends to the “how” of teaching (“what works”)’ (Felten & Geertsema, 2023, p. 1102; Roxå & Mårtensson, 2017). In relation to SoTL, this raises a key question: ‘Could SoTL, ironically, become another way of controlling and constraining faculty teaching and student learning, cutting us off from the world [read: the public] and from our own humanity?’ They base their argument on Edward Said’s (1994) notion of ‘amateurism’,

… the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession’. (p. 76)

Felten and Geertsema (2023) ultimately urge us to ask the question: ‘Who and what does my current SoTL practice serve?’ (p. 1109). All ICWG-Public groups, and their associated projects, had clearly asked themselves precisely that question.

In her closing address, then ISSOTL president Nancy Chick encouraged the ISSOTL community to find ways to make SoTL more public, recognizing that SoTL as public scholarship has common roots in Ernest Boyer’s expansion of recognized scholarships, as his notion of ‘the scholarship of teaching’ (1990) grew into SoTL. The idea of public SoTL was further developed in a recent book called Going public reconsidered, by Chick and Friberg (2022), both of whom also took part in one of the ICWG-Public groups.

For the 2020 ICWG-Public, the call went out to facilitators, leaders and participants who had an interest in exploring public SoTL. The challenge was to make SoTL more public and extend current SoTL audiences by exploring new and non-traditional academic outlets and media platforms, which was the key objective of the ICWGs-Public. Participants were challenged in their academic development processes as they engaged in a considerable shift in focus beyond developing academic publishing capacity (Matthews et al., 2017). Community-based academic development, within a community of practice model, and focused on public dissemination, could potentially lead to transformative and enabling value. The ICWG-Public finally took place at the ISSOTL conference in Kelowna, Canada in October 2022.

Each group consisting of 5–7 members. Within the common focus on public scholarship, four different groups focused on four different topics, that fell within shared domains for each group (Matthews et al., 2017; Wenger et al., 2002). The four ICWGs-Public spent two and half days prior to the conference working together as a community to shape their projects and engage in intensive exploration of the idea of public SoTL as a cross-institutional community. The intensive in-person work prior to the conference was important for the participants, as the idea of public SoTL was understood differently by different members from different locations and backgrounds. The following four projects were developed that they continued to work on for at least a year and presented at the ISSOTL 2023 Conference:

• Production of a series of story-based podcasts with a diverse group of people from ‘the public’ who addressed the question: ‘Who did you learn a lot from but never had a chance to thank’? Their intention was to get the public to consider the importance of teachers.

• Another project focused on involving the public in educating new medical staff and interns, and thus improving the public literacy of health and social care graduates.

• A third project aimed to translate what we know about teaching and learning to support social justice in general, and a range of social justice agendas in particular.

• The fourth project approached an educational association in the US as a partner to explore how critical race theory could be made accessible for education outside the academy.

Cross-institutional and international collaboration as academic development

In academic development, community-based approaches, particularly cross-institutional and international collaborations like ICWGs, are significant. However, establishing and maintaining such collaborations can be time-consuming and challenging (Marquis et al., 2017). This was especially true for the ICWGs-Public in this study due to: logistics related to international participation (post-Covid-19 reduced travel budgets) and institutional reward systems that do not recognize non-academic journal outcomes. The latter can deter faculty from engaging in SoTL as it may not directly benefit their career progression (Sturm, 2022), unlike discipline-based research. This issue may be more pronounced in public SoTL.

Given these institutional pressures, it is logical for academic developers to foster cross-institutional and international collaborations. These collaborations can help build communities of practice around SoTL and elevate its status as a crucial component in enhancing institutional learning and teaching. ICWGs-Public face an additional challenge: the concept of the public. This concept requires academic development and is largely unfamiliar to academic staff (Chick & Friberg, 2022). ICWGs-Public aim to share SoTL findings with the broader public to raise awareness of its significance beyond the academic community and specific institutional contexts. However, reaching potential publics necessitates the ability to communicate academic work to non-academic audiences in various modes and formats beyond academic journals.

Despite such challenges, cross-institutional and international collaborations offer numerous benefits. Lee et al. (2013) identified three primary benefits: enriching the international community, exchanging knowledge and resources, and engaging local communities and institutional leaders. These benefits apply to ICWGs-Public, but the emphasis on developing new practices related to public SoTL makes the exchange of cross-institutional knowledge and resources in an international context particularly relevant.

Successful collaborations depend on various factors, including the personal attributes of the participants. However, building trust and relationships is crucial for creating effective collaboration networks at individual, group, and institutional levels (Willis & Strivens, 2015). Yet, this process takes time as it involves crossing boundaries and requires individuals to reflect on and adjust their practices and identities. Christiansen et al. (2023) noted a lack of common perceptions among cross-institutional collaborations. Developing such common perceptions requires groups to work through their institutional and national boundaries to find common ground, which involves in-depth, honest conversations that need time and space to allow shared understanding to emerge organically.

The intensive two and a half days of pre-conference ICWG group work is intentionally structured to provide sufficient time and space for this process of boundary crossing to take place, and is considered a crucial component (Healey & Matthews, 2017). Conversations play a central role in this process (Koris & McKinnon, 2022).

While all the co-leaders of the ICWG Public were academic developers and can be viewed as ‘natural’ boundary spanners (Huijser et al., 2020), many of the participants in the ICWGs-Public were not academic developers, but faculty-based academics. As such, the academic development within this community transitioned to being community (of practice)-based rather than facilitated by academic developers, with everyone in the community participating in a process of developing expertise around the concept of public SoTL. This is not to downplay the importance of group leadership and overall facilitation, which aligns with Matthews et al. (2017) findings that highlighted a sense of community, shared learning, and group leadership as key to the perceived success of ICWGs.

Evaluating ICWG-Public as a community of practice

The value creation framework by E. Wenger-Trayner et al. (2020) offers a valuable lens for analysing community-based academic development, particularly in the context of the ICWG-Public process. This framework emphasizes the development of trust, boundary crossing, and finding common ground around the concept of value. B. Wenger-Trayner et al. (2019) propose that communities of practice endure as long as they deliver value to their members, which is conceptualized across seven different levels:

• Immediate value: The immediate experience while engaging with the Community

• Potential value: The potential outcomes of the community’s learning

• Applied value: The practical application of the learning

• Realised value: The impact the community is making

• Enabling value: Support processes that facilitate the community’s existence

• Strategic value: The community’s capacity to engage in strategic conversations to meet its needs (at the community level and at individual members’ institutional levels)

• Transformative value: The transformation of the community’s learning through continuous evaluative cycles. (p. 326)

These different levels of value provide a comprehensive framework to evaluate community-based academic development in ICWGs-Public. They allow us to focus on what is being developed, to what extent, and in what context, as well as reflect on its potential value. ICWGs-Public differ from a community of practice (CoP) in the sense of Lave and Wenger (1991) in that ICWGs are sponsored by a community association (ISSOTL) and have leaders and facilitators selected through a competitive process, while CoPs emerge through a more organic bottom-up process. However, there are still many relevant similarities that make this framework applicable to our context.

Given the lifespan of the ICWG-Public process (two to three years), the principles for fostering CoPs’ energy and internal direction proposed by Wenger et al. (2002) can be usefully applied here: 1) designing for evolution, 2) opening dialogue between insider and outsider perspectives, 3) inviting differing levels of participation, 4) developing public and private spaces, 5) focusing on value, 6) combining familiarity with excitement, and 7) creating a rhythm for the community. These elements are particularly useful for the academic developers among the participants, and in our case, they provide an additional frame to evaluate the community-based academic development taking place. Focusing on value aligns with the seven levels outlined above.

Before we delve into the findings related to this study of ICWGs-Public, some cautionary points that may be relevant in our case. A recent study by Stanislav Avdeev (2021) examined collaboration patterns in higher education research. The results showed that ‘the intensity of collaboration is negatively associated with geographical distance and positively associated with linguistic commonality but these findings differ significantly between various world regions’ (p. 5569). In other words, the ‘international’ among the participants in ICWGs was rather skewed towards the US and Canada, for valid reasons (e.g. the conference was in Canada). However, factors such as cost, language, and geographical location affect participation (as do institutional expectations around ‘valuable outcomes’), especially because it involved an expectation of face-to-face participation.

Methods

In this paper, we present a qualitative study that utilized comprehensive semi-structured interviews with several members of the ICWG-Public community to investigate the components involved in this instance of community-based academic development. We applied a thematic analysis to the interview data (Braun & Clarke, 2006), which was well-suited to the exploratory nature of the ICWGs-Public.

This research integrated various qualitative methods to collect data and could be termed a ‘qual-qual mixed methods design’ (Morse, 2010). This design is ‘exploratory descriptive’ and incorporates ‘research strategies used within another qualitative method, such as a specific style of interviews or an observational technique’ (p. 484). We used multiple methods to examine both the idea of public SoTL and the concept of community-based academic development. The collected data were then analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-phase framework for thematic analysis.

As event co-leaders, we maintained continuous notes and held regular discussions about the progress, challenges, and opportunities of this work. These field notes and recorded discussions were included in our research as critical reflections on the process and as aids in data analysis.

Following the conference, we invited volunteers from the four groups to participate in semi-structured interviews to discuss their experiences. The University of Wyoming Institutional Review Board granted ethics approval.

The interviews began with standard questions about their motivations for participating in ICWG-Public, their perceived benefits for themselves and the wider public, and the factors contributing to their group’s success. However, these questions served as a springboard for a more naturally evolving discussion about cross-institutional collaboration and community-based academic development. The thematic analysis enabled us to interpret and align discussions around these themes, even if participants did not always use the specific terminology. For instance, discussions about international collaborations allowed us to extract and organize response data into elements of academic development and value for communities of practice.

We conducted seven interviews with representatives from three of the four groups. All interviews were conducted and recorded via ZOOM, and transcribed using the in-built transcription tool.

Each of us (co-leaders and authors) individually viewed the interviews and read the transcripts to familiarize ourselves with the data (Step 1), generate initial codes (Step 2), and search for themes (Step 3) (Braun & Clarke, 2006). After reviewing individually, we then reviewed the themes as a team (Step 4) and identified themes through evaluative coding (Step 5). We then re-read each transcript to confirm the accuracy and nuances of these themes, before writing up (Step 6) the subsequent findings and discussion section. While we followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) steps as a way to identify potential themes, we ultimately landed on two key overall themes that emerged from the data: international collaboration and communities of practice around public scholarship. We then applied E. Wenger-Trayner et al. (2020) value framework to evaluate different levels of value.

Findings and discussion

The two key overarching themes ‘cross-institutional collaboration’ (including international collaboration) and ‘community of practice – public scholarship’. Academic development related to both these themes and discussions around academic development, or professional development more generally, traversed these themes at regular intervals.

Cross-institutional collaboration

As noted, the cross-institutional collaborations in the ICWGs-Public revolve around the notion of public SoTL. Boyer articulated back in 1990 that ‘the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions: the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching’ (p. 16). Boyer argued that the academy should recognize and reward all four components of scholarship, including the scholarship of teaching. While this may have become a more common recognition since, institutions remain slow to integrate teaching and learning into their research agendas. This was regularly mentioned in discussions about public SoTL in the ICWGs-Public as well as during the interviews, as it raises the question of ‘non-traditional’ dissemination of SoTL-based findings to publics beyond the academy. Such dissemination (e.g. in the form of podcasts or blogs) is often not recognised, and their value is thereby dismissed. In the context of cross-institutional collaborations, and in particular in international communities of practice, it therefore draws attention to the importance of strategic value and enabling value, as it requires the community of collaborators to define the kind of institutional supports individuals within the community might need to advocate for at their institutions in order to engage in the public SoTL work. Cross-institutional and international collaborations thus have an important support role to play in this process, which relates to applied, realised, and transformative value of ICWGs-Public as communities of practice.

Overall, this often means that academics working in the SoTL space are left with no structure or roadmap for the work they do. This can be a lonely landscape as many universities do not provide funding or formal recognition of SoTL research and output. The existence of ISSOTL in itself (as a community-based and cross-institutional organisation), and similar organisations, is a key support mechanism to many academic and professional staff within higher education across the world. ‘A big thing for me is as a SoTL scholar, I need to go beyond the walls of my institution to create meaningful networks with others who are interested in the same thing that I am in’ (P1). This suggests a combination of immediate, potential, and realised value that relies on individual agency to some extent (i.e. the choice to join ICWGs-Public) but is reinforced by growth facilitated by international collaboration. Thus, the existence of ISSOTL can be seen as fostering international connections and hence collaboration. Indeed, the very existence of the ICWGs is a testament to the positive role collaboration across international (and national) institutions can provide. In this case, the wider international element was rather limited for reasons already mentioned, which has potential implications for both the value of the artefacts produced as well as the impact of the overall initiative. Regular ICWGs (with the aim of academic publication outcomes) have been much more ‘international’ (Healey & Matthews, 2017).

Nevertheless, the four co-leaders of the public scholarship ICWG each come from a different country (if all English speaking) and a different higher-level institution and therefore brought with them diverse contextual and knowledge backgrounds. These four co-leaders, along with support from ISSOTL executive members, were initially tasked with articulating what public scholarship would mean for the group facilitators and participants. This was not a ‘formal’ definition but rather a foundation in how the process of selecting the groups, coordinating via ZOOM, meeting in person at the ISSOTL Conference, and finally producing the SoTL artefact. This was in itself a process of building a community of practice for public scholarship practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The collaboration itself was hence both important for individual professional development and academic career development, but it is also key to keeping ISSOTL contemporary in its vision and fostering innovative approaches to SoTL, and indeed for inquiring into teaching and learning ‘as if the world mattered’ (Felten & Geertsema, 2023). Participants in the interviews spoke about ‘join[ing] into a community’ (P2) and ‘the things that I enjoy are the collaboration, the people from different places, disciplines. etc., working together’ (P3 PM). The addition of the public piece to the ICWGs added an additional opportunity (e.g. for realised and transformative value), yet also required significant learning by the community: ‘to push SoTL into that public venue, and having multiple projects and multiple people working at it from different angles is one way to move the needle a little bit. I guess you’re not going to move the needle all the way. But you’re going to start moving in that direction’ (P4). A key question in relation to moving that needle has been firstly how to actually do that in practice, and secondly how to convince individual institutions in some different national contexts that this has value, both to their employees and to them. Both are related to the academic development that ICWGs-Public have engaged in as a community.

The very nature of SoTL research is discipline-based and participants often spoke about the ability of the conference, and the ICWGs-Public specifically, to be the context where they could explore, through collaboration, what public scholarship means, ‘looking at colleagues, and how we could work together’, and ‘look[ing] at different ways people were taking up that call to go public’ (P4). As well as the very positive views on the ICWGs as a site for collaboration and pushing the boundary on what public scholarship is, the context also had the participants confront challenges of working together. Our students deal with it on a regular basis in their courses when we ask them to do group assignments or projects. As academic and professional staff we often determine how, when and why we collaborate. In the new arena of thinking through public scholarship in SoTL the co-leaders, facilitators and participants were provided with the opportunity to negotiate collaboration both virtually, before the event, but also face-to-face in the intensive three-day workshop.

The sustained and focused face-to-face time that the three days provided cannot be underestimated when it comes to developing international collaborations, as boundary spanning takes time. The ICWGs-Public had an opportunity to do this focused thinking about public SoTL with colleagues from around the world:

It took us some time, for our group to figure out what public scholarship meant, and who was the public, and like what were we trying to share with the public, and why. And so it’s a good way of kind of really thinking about that. Because if I just talk to my colleagues, that are in my own institution we might have all had the same idea. But hearing what people from other disciplines and other institutions and other contexts. We got a much different answer than we would have, and like that from the whole group at the session, was really helpful to hear that there. (P5)

This face-to-face time thus moved this community of international collaborators from immediate value to the realms of transformative and strategic value. The face-to-face component enabled a development of understanding and finding a way of moving the project forward, ‘we evolved it together. Our understanding, I guess, but it also gave us an opportunity to talk about it more and to so yeah, it changed quite a bit at the in-person time’ (P5).

It was also during the face-to-face part of the ICWGs-Public that participants were able to address some of the challenges of working across disciplines and across different institutional contexts: ‘all together in Kelowna, and you know we could see the projects and the teams coming together. It just has been really a fun process’ (P6). Often the benefit (or the transformative value) of the international collaboration emerges with reflection on the process after the fact:

The team aspect of this has been just as beneficial for me, and I think for the whole team. You know, we’ve really built good connections. We communicate. Well, we are influenced by each other, thinking in ways that we don’t expect. And it’s just been really nice to have a very free flow of information around the topic and our work together.(P6)

Such reflections on the international collaboration aspect of the ICWGs-Public aligns with Kowalczuk-Walędziak and Underwood’s (2021) discussion of the benefits of international communities of practice, specifically the notion of multi-layered topographies with the multidisciplinary aspect as well the exploration of what public scholarship means for SoTL. In addition, ICWGs-Public have provided a site for reflecting on practice across institutions and national contexts and learning from others through storytelling and (professional) conversations.

A new community of practice – public scholarship

Some of the participants, including the co-leaders and group facilitators, had attended the ISSOTL conferences previously and/or had been a part of the academic ICWGs. The ICWG-Public therefore created a new community of practice, with a focus on academic development around public SoTL, which enabled international collaborations to continue on beyond the lifespan of the conference and potentially beyond the two-year process of producing an output from the ICWGs-Public. There was a clear sense from participants that the ICWGs-Public provided them with an opportunity to share ‘benefits to the whole society you learn from. You know, any research done in the university. It’s back to the society’, and that ‘the challenge is also opportunity’ (P2) in striving to define what public scholarship means and what it entails. In other words, the opportunity that P3 mentions relates to a combination of potential, applied and realised value, while it remains to be seen what the ultimate transformative value might be.

The structure of the ICWGs involves roughly six months prior to the 3-day face-to-face pre-conference, followed by almost a year afterwards, meaning that there is time to build on the collaboration and really think through what public scholarship means in each of the group projects.

We’re making progress. but it’s like one of those big, intractable problems that you can chip away at. But I don’t know that you can solve … wrestling with total in sort of a different way, has been beneficial of the public scholarship ICWG thinking about trying to talk to people who are not academics helps you understand the pros and cons being an academic and words and language and approaches that we use. (P3)

As well as defining public scholarship and what it means to the SoTL research community, the participants spoke to the positive role of the ICWGs-Public as enabling them to address the obstacles of the accessibility of academic research dissemination: ‘How do we stay relevant to the broader world? How do we not put ourselves in the ivory tower and some niche area that we become irrelevant?’ (P3). There is a distinct sense here of a community of ‘amateurs’ in Said’s (1994) sense.

In addition, the important factor of how public scholarship endeavours can be successful beyond the academy and how this can be evaluated and measured was raised: ‘how do we put this together? Is it a toolkit? Is it a decision tree? How do we also talk to people’ (P6). These questions about public scholarship were addressed and debated, and they require continuous learning within and beyond the community of practice, so that realised value can be achieved. This requires a particular way of operating and a level of openness and curiosity about what lies beyond institutional boundaries; in short, it requires boundary spanning for learning to occur:

What’s made us most successful is that we’ve all been flexible, and we’ve all been open to discussion and open to: Oh, well, I wanted to do this, and nobody got upset that someone wanted to do that. I think it was really successful that we had a lot of really open discussion about what we were going to do, and how we were going to do that. (P5)

Conclusion

In this paper we set out to explore community-based approaches to academic development, and we have used the ISSOTL-initiated ICWGs-Public to explore both the opportunities and the challenges involved in community-based academic development across institutional, disciplinary, and national boundaries. The findings show that a communities of practice model provides much potential for community-based academic development, particularly if the community develops clear expectations around what needs to be explored and therefore learned, and what the potential outcomes might be. In this qualitative study, we used B. Wenger-Trayner et al. (2019) evaluation framework of communities of practice to explore what ICWGs-Public have so far achieved in relation to the seven levels of value, at least according to their own community members. Despite a range of challenges, ICWGs-Public show strong potential as a model for cross-institutional academic development, particularly if the community of practice has a strong central focus, in this case public SoTL. In relation to public SoTL, they also show the potential of ‘recovering the heart of SoTL’ (Felten & Geertsema, 2023) by focusing on inquiry into teaching and learning that goes beyond the political demand of ‘improving teaching’ in a narrow sense and exploring its implication for wider humanity.

The findings in this study thus suggest that it may be worth scaling these initiatives to other international and cross-institutional contexts with different foci. However, to do so beyond the relatively narrow international participation and to become more inclusive would require a structural rethinking of how ICWGs-Public might be organised into the future so that they can truly deliver on their potentially transformative value proposition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henk Huijser

Henk Huijser is an Associate Professor and Strategic Lead Educator Development and Recognition in the Learning and Teaching Unit at Queensland University of Technology. His research interests include SoTL and technology-enhanced learning in higher education.

Janel Seeley

Janel Seeley is Senior Lecturer and Executive Director of the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wyoming. With over 25 years of experience as an education professional she is an expert in faculty development, collaborative communications, and social work.

Siobhán Wittig McPhee

Siobhán Wittig McPhee is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include digital geographies, transnational flows, and power, colonialism, and justice.