Academic developers as flexible generalists: responding to COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The pandemic forced universities to move rapidly to remote teaching, and Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) played a large role in ensuring that transition. We argue that the effectiveness of our work as academic developers lies in our style or approach as much as in any actions taken. This style of working – holding lightly to expertise, embracing a generalist status, and trading authority back and forth with faculty – was especially suited to the fluid and high-stakes nature of the moment. We suggest that cultivating this disposition might be an important outcome for CTLs to emerge from the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic development
• pandemic academic development
• professional identity
• higher education
• post-pandemic university

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Mary Wright’s contributions to earlier exchanges about this topic.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Stanton

Katherine Stanton serves as associate dean and director of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. The author of Cosmopolitan Fictions (Routledge, 2006), Stanton earned her PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University. She taught in Harvard’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program across a decade, designing courses on postcolonial literature and feminist theory. Her research interests include critical pedagogy and digital pedagogy. Since joining the McGraw Center, she has led new efforts to make the often hidden or obscured practice of teaching visible.

Suzanne Young

Suzanne Young is the director of graduate and postdoctoral teaching development at the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Virginia. She has taught literature and composition for over 20 years at Harvard and Yale, including a course on ‘Paris in the ‘20s’ that focuses on transatlantic modernism. Her research interests include composition, digital humanities, online learning, and modernist literature. At the Poorvu Center, she works with faculty and graduate students on course design, inclusive teaching, technology-enhanced teaching, and student engagement.