![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
The experience of academic practice is significantly fragmentary. This is a problem for, amongst others, early career academics trying to step up into what they might expect to be a unitary and coherent role and for academic developers. There have been recent historical developments which have highlighted this. However, I propose that the ground for the fragmentary experience goes deeper, down to academic practice as a concept. Any claim that in principle the fragmentary experience is merely contingent is false. Contributions to the problem of definition borrowed from philosophy of art offer enlightenment, Dickie's theory enabling us to better understand academic practice as a concept in its own right. This also supplies the ground for autonomy for practitioners as freedom competently to direct their own work.
Acknowledgements
Two research projects (CETL Citation2007b; CETL Citation2010) inform this contribution, even though they did not aim to make the contrast between fragmentation and coherence as such the focus of their enquiry. Beyond contextual comments, I shall not describe these projects themselves in detail here. Empirical data corroborating already published reporting of this phenomenon come through exploratory research into evaluation of development provision, as part of the latter project (CETL Citation2010; see also Gough Citation2009). This enquiry has been concerned primarily with learning and attainment by ECA participants (impact levels 2 and 3 of a sector system for evaluation of development provision: see Rugby Team Citation2008; following Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick Citation2006; elaborated in this context further by Bromley Citation2009; explored also in Gough Citation2011) through their engagement with such provision, with particular attention to provision which does not lead to an award of credit towards, for instance, a qualification. As well as journal referees and their comments, I thank others who have helped me shape my thinking for and refine this paper: audiences of international conferences where I have presented, of the Society for Research into Higher Education, the British Educational Research Association, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, and the Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice; some of my students through course based discussions; and Sarah Haas (academic writing expert).