The ‘impact’ of academic development

More and more, it seems, academic developers must provide evidence of the ‘impact’ of our work. Whether we like the connotations of the word or not – and Kathryn has written elsewhere about the choices we make with the language we use in academic development (see Sutherland, 2015) – we should all aim to show that our work is meaningful, valuable, worth the time and effort invested in it, and yes, impactful. This demonstration (and questioning) of the impact of academic development is a significant focus for the International Journal for Academic Development. We declare in our ‘Aims and Scope’ that our journal’s goal is to improve the quality of higher education internationally and it is important that we continually ask ourselves as scholars and practitioners of academic development if we are achieving this goal. The articles in this issue help us to do just that.

A big question occupying the minds of many of the contributors to this issue of IJAD is what kind of impact our academic development work has on academics/faculty, on students, on learning, on research, on institutions, even on countries. Several of the articles also ask what constitutes ‘impact’ and how do we sustain it? Previous research published in IJAD (particularly Kreber and Brook [2001] and Bamber and Stefani [2016]), has helped the academic development community – including the authors of the articles in this issue – to grapple with these questions by offering various frameworks or models to assess our impact. It is encouraging to see earlier conceptual models and frameworks being tested through new research in academic development, and we think this issue of IJAD will extend the thinking in our field considerably.

The articles in this issue represent the work of 22 authors in six different countries: Singapore (1), Denmark (2), the Netherlands (2) – writing about lecturers at a UK university in the Middle East! – England (3), Australia (4), and the United States of America (10). Their work covers a wide spectrum of topics, including the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, new faculty programs, support for transnational and/or English-medium educators, staff-student partnerships, professional dialogue, and assessment for learning. They use a wide variety of research methodologies (qualitative, evaluative, hermeneutic, and interpretivist) and methods (quasi-experimental evaluation, reflections on observations, connoisseurship evaluation, interviews, questionnaires, case studies, and collective autoethnography). Yet, a couple of common themes draw all seven articles together: does what we do change the practice or conceptions or learning of the people for whom we are doing it? And are these changes sustained and sustainable?

In the first three articles, ‘impact’ is at the fore. All three include the word in their title, and concern themselves with measuring the impact of, in turn, a new faculty program (Meizlish, Wright, Howard & Kaplan); two courses on assessment (Reimann); and a professional development project designed to develop the capabilities of teachers in a multicultural educational environment (Lauridsen & Lauridsen). First, Meizlish and colleagues describe a very promising approach to supporting new academics in their teaching development through a targeted, year-long program of workshops, teaching observations, reading, and support from faculty developers and senior colleagues. Their article is an important contribution to IJAD for its description of a sustained program that might be adaptable elsewhere, and also for its comprehensive approach to evaluation. Their impact evaluation process uses measures not often seen in academic development research (including pre- and post-tests, institutional data including student evaluations, and a control group comparison). They show, for example, that their program has a positive impact on participants’ student evaluations and on their subsequent engagement with the teaching center.

Reimann’s article also provides examples of positive impact from academic development endeavours. In her research, she investigated two courses that focused on assessment and interviewed participants from both courses (one for new lecturers and one for more experienced teachers). Her thematic analysis showed that both courses engendered important conceptual changes for the lecturers, in particular new ways of thinking about assessment and student learning. She argues that ‘assessment for learning’ is a threshold concept that should feature much more prominently in academic development curricula and courses, and that academic development needs to ‘move beyond the “informal vs. formal learning” debate and instead examine the ways in which transformation can be achieved, both through the content and the learning activities of courses’ (p. 94).

This kind of examination of both content and learning activities is evident in the third of the articles in this issue, which looks at an academic development project conducted at a departmental level in a Danish university. The activities of the academic developers and participants in the program include ‘supermentoring’ (a teaching observation and reflective feedback process), a two-day retreat, and a half-day workshop. Through self-assessments, evaluative questionnaires, and written feedback from the observations, Lauridsen & Lauridsen determine that participants show evidence of higher levels of satisfaction, a change in knowledge and skills, and significant changes in behaviour. Similar changes can also be seen in the participants of the programs described in our next two articles.

Lamers & Admiraal also write of an academic development program for lecturers working in a multicultural context. In this instance, their participants were transnational educators (predominantly from India, the Phillipines, and Pakistan, with a few from five other countries in the Middle East and North Africa) teaching at a UK university in Oman. Through a program that included observations of and reflections on teaching practice over a period of three years, Lamers & Admiraal show that initiatives that are ‘embedded in academics’ professional practice’ (p. 118) can help lecturers to move toward a more student-centred, learning-focused approach to teaching. Interestingly – and challengingly for academic developers who are tasked with working with many academics, often across many departments and even institutions – individualised feedback was considered to be the most valuable of all the interventions. As we develop (and evaluate the impact of) our various academic development programs, we need to think about how we ‘treat each academic as a whole person, with individual needs, fears, strengths, and weaknesses’ (p. 119).

The program that Cook-Sather and her colleagues describe at a US university, in the fifth article in this issue, does just that: it treats academics as whole people for whom positive encouragement and care can accelerate acclimation to a new university. Cook-Sather and her co-authors (two of whom were students) describe a faculty-student partnership process that uses tenets from positive psychology to encourage reflection upon, rather than judge, the teaching observation process. Employing collective autoethnography as a research approach, the authors provide two case studies that are inspirational in their evidence of how academic development that is situated in practice – and that involves students – can engender positive teaching and learning changes. Such partnerships ‘afford faculty a rare opportunity to engage in ongoing learning … not just our learning about pedagogy but our learning about ourselves, [and] how we relate to students’ (p. 131).

The kinds of positive dialogue about teaching described in Cook-Sather and colleagues’ article, are also evident in the sixth article, but this time among UK academics aspiring to Fellowship in the Higher Education Academy (HEA). Asghar & Pilkington recognise, as do those involved in staff-student partnerships, the incredible power of dialogue that involves reflective questioning and careful critique. Creating a place of safety from which academics might explore their pedagogical leanings, approaches, and challenges, is important for academic developers and Asghar & Pilkington argue that a dialogic approach can offer such a space. Using interviews with participants engaged in a professional dialogue process that culminated in the award of an HEA Fellowship (with or without accompanying written portfolios or reflections), they found that the dialogic process also offered developmental opportunities that encouraged participants to think about what sort of teacher they wanted to be, but only if conducted in a mutually respectful manner. They conclude that ‘in the current climate of increased accountability there are challenges in terms of creating safe spaces for academics to explore their pedagogical expertise’ (p. 145).

Myatt and colleagues in our final article in this issue also write about a climate of increased accountability and demands for quality assurance, and offer the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) as one potential response to the call to raise the quality of education in universities. They emphasise that a long tradition of research in academic development has shown that what we do does have an impact despite several challenges. They offer a potential solution to these challenges in the form of a conceptual framework that can help institutions to encourage widespread, and deep, engagement with SoTL. Through a process of reflection and refinement over three iterations and employing what they call a ‘connoisseurship evaluation’ process, they developed a framework to facilitate and guide conversations within institutions about their current engagement with and potential for capacity-building in SoTL.

Together, the articles in this issue offer a range of insightful frameworks, approaches, and measures that will advance the ‘impact’ dialogue within the academic development community. By engaging with this work, we hope that the readers of IJAD will be inspired to reflect on their own practice and broaden their own impact.

On behalf of the IJAD editorial team,
Kathryn A. Sutherland
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
[email protected]
Meegan Hall
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand