Holistic academic development: Is it time to think more broadly about the academic development project?

Introduction

The International Journal for Academic Development (IJAD) plays an important role in shaping what several commentators have called the ‘academic development project’ (Barrow & Grant, 2012; Clegg, 2009; Lea & Stierer, 2009; Peseta, 2007). Since 1996, IJAD has published research that founding editor, David Baume, recently concluded has three key areas of focus: academic developers themselves, academic development as a field of study and practice, and academic development in action (Baume, 2016). Yet what do we mean by academic development? Are we all talking and writing about the same thing? And, is it possible, as Clinton Golding (2014) suggested a few years ago, that we might sometimes constrain ourselves – and ultimately the potential of the academic development project – by cleaving to too narrow a conception?

A while back, the editorial team asked Brenda Leibowitz, an IJAD editor at the time, to reflect on what is meant by ‘academic development’ in an effort to provide guidance for authors hoping to submit to IJAD. She concluded that, while it is a hard term to pin down, academic development is ‘about the creation of conditions supportive of teaching and learning’ (Leibowitz, 2014, p. 359). Brenda was not alone in this conclusion. The vast majority of literature on academic development – both recent (Sugrue, Englund, Drydal Solbrekke, & Fossland, 2017) and historical (Baume, 1996; Clift & Imrie, 1978; Hicks, 1999) – casts the main role of academic development as the improvement of teaching with the hopeful aim of subsequently enhancing student learning (Barrow & Grant, 2012; Geertsema, 2016). I do not disagree with this focus; academic developers do incredibly important work on enhancing teaching and learning at the individual and institutional levels, and IJAD publishes significant research that extends our thinking about how to do that work. However, I think we could be more capacious, and more critical, in our view of the support we provide, the development we offer, and the research we read, write, share, and publish. We could be more ‘holistic’ about academic development.

We could broaden our focus beyond learning and teaching to consider the whole of the academic role. That is, we could take more account of the other aspects of academic careers (research, service, administration, leadership, etc.). We could also broaden our focus to encompass the whole institution. This would entail continuing to serve in what has become an expected role as brokers between disciplines, departments, leaders and managers on the development of, and strategic imperatives around, learning and teaching. This whole institution focus should also include the professional and support staff, and the students, who support the development of teaching, learning, and research, not just the academic staff. Finally, we could broaden our focus to embrace the whole person, the ontologies, epistemologies, and emotions, intellectual and personal, of the academics that we support, serve, and develop.

There have been intermittent calls for a broader focus along these three lines, as this editorial will show, but it is a rather quiet chorus. IJAD offers this editorial and accompanying articles as further voices for this choir. Before sharing these voices later in this editorial, first I explain how this ‘found’ special issue of IJAD came about. I then identify the milieu from which academic development research (and IJAD) emerged and in which it currently resides, and I provide an overview of other related development contexts and literatures. I follow this with perspectives on the three foci identified above – the whole of the academic role, the whole institution, and the whole person – by drawing on the work of former IJAD editors and well-known academic development scholars, and through briefly sketching my own country’s academic development history. Finally, I show how the new work featured in this issue of IJAD is adding to and extending conceptions of our roles, scholarship, and purpose.

A ‘found’ special issue

When Brenda Leibowitz wrote the reflection piece (2014) mentioned above, she indicated that IJAD had put out a call for contributions to a special issue tentatively titled ‘Beyond learning and teaching: Extending the frontiers of academic development’ to be published in 2016. We had in mind, then, an issue similar to the one you now hold in your hands or read on your screen. The issue did not transpire, however, as we did not receive enough submissions. Over the last couple of years, though, various pieces of work have since been submitted to IJAD that challenge traditional conceptions of academic development, and help readers think differently about the academic development project. Much like ‘objet trouvé’ or ‘found art’, the editorial team have gathered these pieces up and offer them now as the final issue for the year, coalescing around this ‘found’ theme of ‘holistic academic development’.

Academic development and other kinds of development

Separate fields have built up around academic development, organisational development, and researcher development over the last few decades. These are fields of practice and development, as well as research, all with their own scholarly journals, international conferences, and organisations. I briefly describe the focus of each below before arguing the case for more deliberate interaction if we are to achieve truly holistic academic development.

The field of ‘academic development’ (or educational, faculty, or instructional development as it is variously known internationally) has had a clear focus on supporting academics in their teaching endeavours, evidenced by various reviews of the literature in recent years (Amundsen & Wilson, 2012; De Rijdt, Stes, van der Vleuten, & Dochy, 2013; Steinert et al., 2006; Sugrue et al., 2017; Sutherland & Grant, 2016). In my own country, Aotearoa New Zealand, this legacy traces back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Directors for academic development were appointed in New Zealand universities to help universities respond to an increasing and diversifying student population, an influx of new teaching staff, and more sophisticated teaching technologies (Clift & Imrie, 1978; Barrow & Grant, 2016). Similar appointments were made, and accompanying teaching development units established in, for example, the UK (Baume & Popovic, 2016, p. 295), Australia (Lee, Manathunga, & Kandlbinder, 2010), Canada (Knapper, 2003), the US (Sorcinelli, Austin, Eddy, & Beach, 2006), and Sweden (Åkesson & Falk Nisson, 2010, cited in Baume & Popovic, 2016) around the same time and earlier in some cases. For many countries, the emergence of academic development arose out of a need to respond not just to a changed and growing student population, but also to create learning environments accessible to all not just a few, and to improve the learning experience of all students (Grant et al., 2009). This was especially necessary in South Africa where apartheid had created massive inequities in access to and provision of higher education (Kloot, 2015; Leibowitz, 2014).

The emergence of academic development in universities was followed by the creation of professional organisations set up, in part, to support the people doing this work. Such organisations include, for example, the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) set up in 1972, the Professional and Organizational Development Network (POD) established in the US in 1974, and Peda-forum, the Finnish network of expertise in university pedagogy and academic development, set up in 1994. Academic development as a field of practice and research truly came to fruition in the early 1990s, with the establishment first of the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED), an international network of such organisations (see the ICED website, www.icedonline.net, and the essay by Kristine Mason-O’Connor (2016) for more on ICED’s history and its member organisations). Then, in 1996, the International Journal for Academic Development was launched by ICED, with an announcement in its inaugural editorial that it would be concerned with the following:

The processes of helping institutions, departments, course teams and individual staff to research into, reflect on and develop policy and practice about teaching, learning and assessment and other activities in support of learning (Baume, 1996, p. 4).

The vast majority of educational development literature, and the biennial ICED conferences (Leibowitz, 2014), continue to focus on teaching development and support (see, for example, the special issue on the evaluation of faculty development in Studies in Educational Evaluation [Stes & Hoekstra, 2015]). Recently, Ciaran Sugrue and colleagues (2017) reviewed twenty years of literature on educational development (from 1995 to 2015) and looked at over 100 papers, identifying some key trends. They note recent moves towards supporting more technologically-informed teaching practice; more partnership with others in the space of leadership development; a mix of formal and informal provision; and paying more attention to ‘recognising the person who is the academic, beyond their disciplinary identity…to the ontological and epistemological, to be “holistic” in approach’ (p. 8). The focus of most academic development literature, however, is still clearly on the development of teaching.

Around the same time as academic development as a field of research was emerging, ‘organisational development’ was becoming more prominent in universities worldwide. In higher education, in the US for example, organisational development grew out of the ‘quality movement…rooted in the quality-of-work-life, productivity, and process improvement work of the 1970s and 1980s’ (Torraco & Hoover, 2005, p. 424) and focused on organisation-wide change and improvement in universities, in part through support and training for academic staff. In the UK, Huxley and Hall (1996, p. 83) noted that the job title of ‘Personnel Director’ in universities began to shift to ‘Human Resource Director’ in the early 1990s around the same time that Deans and Heads of Department began to be called ‘academic managers’. Along with these infiltrations of business language came, also, more staff training and development for academic managers, and more performance review and appraisal for all staff. This was linked, D’Andrea and Gosling argued, in 2001, to ‘the larger managerial approach to change agency currently in fashion in higher education and recently reinforced by the requirement from the HEFCE that all institutions develop a human resources strategy’ (p. 71). Just a few years later, a report funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in 2007 found that 92% of organisational development staff surveyed in UK universities were engaged in ‘institution-wide improvement ventures’. These included activities focused on improving the student experience, leadership and management, teaching and learning provision, administrative processes, and research performance (Chambers, Huxley, Sullivan, & Thackwray, 2007), so there are clearly crossovers in organisational development with the work of academic developers.

By contrast with academic development and organisational development’s longer histories, the field of researcher development is a more recent phenomenon, although its definition is as slippery as academic development’s appears to be. (NB: Researcher development is separate from research development, which focuses much more on the funding side of research – see, for example, the website of the National Organization of Research Development Professionals in the US: https://www.nordp.org/). In an essay on the emerging field and scholarship of researcher development, Linda Evans (2011) remarks that it is ‘difficult to find an explicit, stipulative, definition of researcher development’ (p. 77), and that even defining what is meant by ‘researcher’ is difficult. Furthermore, as Sue Clegg argued in IJAD back in 2003 (p. 39), while ‘scholarly, subject-based [research] activity is supported by a rich network of conferences, publications, peer review, professional collaborations, on-line discussion groups, and e-mail exchanges [that involve] large amounts of both formal and informal learning’ these activities are not necessarily conceived of by those who engage in them as ‘professional development’.

Activity around researcher development in some countries became a lot more targeted towards the end of the twentieth century. For example, the Roberts Review in the UK in 2002 recommended more deliberate and directed researcher development, in particular that ‘universities ensure their early career researchers have a career development plan in place and access to training’ (Browning, Thompson, & Dawson, 2017, p. 2). Since then, there has been considerable focus on more formalised development for early career researchers (particularly doctoral students), through initiatives such as the UK GRAD programme (2003–2007), and then Vitae (2008–present) and the UK Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers (also introduced in 2008). Vitae has had broad international reach, with institutional members in many countries beyond the UK, including Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Barcelona, Italy, Korea, and South Africa, for example. Without intending to provide an exhaustive list, other organisations that focus on researcher development and/or career development for doctoral students include, for example, the Europe-based but worldwide organisation, ORPHEUS, ‘a network of higher education institutions that is committed to developing and disseminating best practice within PhD training programmes’ (http://www.orpheus-med.org/). In the US, the Preparing Future Faculty programs initiated by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Association of American Colleges and Universities had a long history and significant impact through the 1990s and early 2000s. Furthermore, the scholarship in this area of development has increased with, for example, the International Journal for Researcher Development being established in 2009 (now called Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education.) As others have argued elsewhere, researcher development now needs to extend beyond supporting the career aspirations of doctoral students, to provide continuing professional development for all academic staff and others involved in research in universities (Evans, 2011; Careers Research and Advisory Centre [CRAC], 2016).

Other than academic, organisational, and researcher development, many other ‘development’ areas relate to the academic role. ‘Leadership development’ focuses on support for leaders and managers in universities and is represented by organisations such as the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education in the UK, now subsumed within the new organisation, AdvanceHE. ‘Academic career development’ – ‘the process by which [academics] and their employers manage careers over time’ – is another ‘burgeoning literature’ (Zacher, Rudolph, Todorovic, & Ammann, 2018, p.2) to which academic developers could pay more attention. There is also ‘learning development’ (often referred to as ‘academic advising’ in North America). While learning development focuses on encouraging students to be actively engaged in their own learning, the professional and academic staff who provide learning development often work closely with, sometimes even from within, academic development units. For example, the Higher Education Development Centre at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand includes both academic staff development and student learning development within its remit. Learning developers are supported through organisations such as the Learning Development in Higher Education Network in the UK, and the Association of Tertiary Learning Advisors of Aotearoa New Zealand. Learning development also has its own journal (Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education) and is arguably moving towards recognition as an academic discipline in its own right (Samuels, 2013).

These fields of development research are clearly interrelated, all with a focus (partial or full) on the work of academic staff. However, they do not often crossover, as Billot and King (2017) discovered, for example, when they undertook a corpus analysis of induction studies in Higher Education (HE) and Human Resources (HR) literature, and found different terminology, practices, and foci relating to induction for new academics. Practitioners and researchers in all of these fields – that includes us, readers of IJAD! – could be reading and talking to each other a lot more, and working together more closely to provide holistic programmes of support and development for academics. Such programmes would address the whole of the academic role, the whole institution, and the whole person.

The whole of the academic role

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when academic development units were being established in universities in Aotearoa New Zealand, every single one of them had ‘research’ in their name. The first one, for example, was set up in 1969 at the University of Canterbury and was called the ‘Educational Research & Advisory Unit’. The research was on students, teachers, and other institutional priorities to do with the changing nature of the student population. Their focus was, as Barrow and Grant (2012) show in their article about the emergence of academic development in Aotearoa New Zealand, firmly on teaching and learning. At my own university, the academic development unit began life in 1973 as the ‘University Teaching and Research Centre’ and the initial conception was that the Centre would provide both staff development and research support in relation to the teaching role of academic staff. It was not an easy task, however. John Clift, the first Director of our unit in 1973 bemoaned that:

Whatever the reasons, whether the status of teaching, lack of professionalism, inadequate recognition for tenure and promotion, or the lack of valid criteria to judge teaching competence… there does appear to be substantial resistance by university staff to engaging in a worthwhile programme of staff development (Clift & Imrie, 1978, p. 14).

What might such a ‘worthwhile programme of staff development’ have look liked for academic staff and how might such resistance have been overcome? By the turn of the century, the unit’s name had changed to the University Teaching Development Centre (UTDC), and a former director, Cedric Hall, wrote a paper advocating for the introduction of a qualification in university teaching (Hall, 2001). In that paper, he identified a future focus for academic development in Aotearoa New Zealand that should include assisting academic staff to: deal with change, develop management and enterprise skills, address the educational implications of the Treaty of Waitangi, provide a climate that promotes the University’s commitment to equity principles and practices, and expand their repertoire of research skills. Around the same time, other prominent academic developers and scholars internationally were also calling for a more holistic approach to academic development.

For example, in the US, Mary Deane Sorcinelli and colleagues proposed, in their wide-ranging book on the past, present, and future of faculty development, that ‘faculty may need academic support systems and professional learning opportunities beyond those traditionally offered’ (p. xviii). In Australia, around the same time, Anna Reid and Peter Petocz (2003) argued that academic developers needed to ‘reorient the major focus of their work towards holistic academic development where research, teaching, and even leadership and management are acknowledged as equally important’ (p. 108). They worried that targeting specific aspects of academic work in isolation would only exacerbate the bifurcation of teaching and research. In the UK, Sue Clegg made a similar point the same year: ‘if research development were thought of alongside academic development (in the sense of teaching and learning development) it might stimulate a dialogue that could begin to break down the pernicious ideology of teaching and research as separate activities’. (Clegg, 2003, p. 46). Clegg argued that we should not ask ‘academics to leave aspects of their identity at the door’ when engaging them in professional development activities. Just a few years later, in the wake of a wave of ‘professionalisation’ of academia in the UK, Paul Blackmore and Richard Blackwell (2006) called for a more integrated approach to academic development that recognised the entirety of the academic role, and also the fragmented nature of modern academic work. They argued that taking a holistic approach requires academic developers to ‘work with the grain of preferred faculty self-identity’ (p. 380). If anything, this fragmentation is more pronounced now than a decade or so ago, and the calls for a more holistic approach to academic development echo through the literature to the present (Åkerlind, 2008; Boud & Brew, 2013; Jones, 2010; Macfarlane & Hughes, 2009; Orlando & Gard, 2014; this issue of IJAD), indicating that more could be done in practice and in scholarship.

Academic staff starting university jobs in 2018 can expect, at different stages during their academic careers, to undertake the roles of teacher, researcher, administrator, manager, leader, entrepreneur, academic/community/corporate citizen, industry liaison, recruiter, fundraiser, and many more. Doctoral degrees and post-doctoral experiences help to prepare academics for some of this work, particularly the research and, increasingly, the teaching. However, many arrive in their first academic post with little formal training in most aspects of the academic role. Unlike other professions – such as Law, Accountancy, and Medicine – where practitioners are expected to prove their initial competence through entry examinations and their ongoing fitness for practice through continuing professional development expectations and requirements, academics barely conceive of themselves as ‘professionals’ (Gibbs, 2013) let alone see the need for engaging in ongoing development. So, what are we doing to support and encourage the professional development of academic staff in all of their roles? What might constitute a ‘worthwhile programme of academic development’ some 40 years on from John Clift’s plea?

At my university, we have a new ‘academic career framework’ that outlines the expected roles for academics under four headings – Ako/Learning and Teaching, Rangahau/Research, Ruawhetu/External Engagement, and Hautūtanga/Leadership – and recognises the need for support and development in all four areas. While not all of the aims outlined in Cedric Hall’s 2001 paper have been squarely met, our unit is now called the Centre for Academic Development (CAD), and we work closely with other units across campus to support academics in all their roles, not just teaching. We now have an academic staff role in CAD devoted to supporting Māori (indigenous) academics, and to encouraging other academics to honour the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in their academic work. Our Human Resources unit has developed leadership programmes and Treaty programmes that address some of the other calls, and our Research Office now boasts a research development coordinator who works closely with CAD.

Similar developments are happening elsewhere, as the papers in this issue demonstrate (authors of these papers are highlighted in bold to help you navigate through the issue). Bjorn Stensaker in the first article in this special issue, on academic development as cultural work, argues that academic developers have a broader mandate than in the past, to work across the many academic roles. In the second article, Nicole Reimann and Linda Allin describe a postgraduate certificate programme for academics that covers not just teaching, but also researcher development. Troy Heffernan, in the fourth article, on support for sessional (part-time, casual, adjunct, fixed-term) academics, argues that both their teaching and research development need to be catered for if sessional academics have any hope of securing a permanent academic role. And, in the seventh article, Jeanette Fyffe finishes by reflecting on her own journey from researcher development to academic development and back and again and wonders ‘if these are but two sides to the same coin’. We should not, she argues, ‘be pursuing one at the expense of the other – setting up a conflict and rift between the teaching and research desires in the centre of those we seek to serve’ (p. 363).

As a field, we need to think about how best to support all these academic roles and/or how best to work with the others in our institutions, and in other development fields, who also provide such support. The next section of this editorial considers the need for academic development to work for and with the whole institution.

The whole institution

Recent literature reviews of academic development have emphasised our expanding role, reminding us, as did Johan Geertsema in an earlier essay for IJAD, that ‘academic work forms a complex system with many elements that affect one another and the environment within which it occurs’ (Geertsema, 2016, p. 125). For example, Sugrue et al. (2017, p. 11) argue that academic developers now require the equally ‘exciting and frightening’ ability to serve as activist-advocates within universities, ‘to model leadership, to advocate for sustainable innovations, to be strategic, to be politically aware, aware of values, of power and positioning within the organisation’. Others have mapped a shift in focus for academic development that requires us not only to support teaching and learning endeavours, but also to consider organisational structures and higher education agendas (Beach, et al., 2016; Fraser & Ling, 2014).

Several papers in this issue of IJAD pick up this call, in quite different ways. Stensaker encourages us to understand that academic development occurs within organisations that are more ‘managed’ than ever before. He proposes that academic developers have a ‘key role to play in stimulating increased collaboration, coherence, and even organizational learning in the modern university’ (p. 276). Calling for closer relationships between academic developers and others within the organisational structures that govern the modern university, he stresses that academic development need not serve only at the behest of management, but can influence the thinking and framing behind important organisational decisions.

Reimann and Allin provide an example of this kind of relationship in action. They describe a postgraduate certificate that involves members of the wider academic community as assessors and mentors in roles such as Faculty Coordinators and Workplace Advisors. This wide variety of staff and leaders provide advice, support, and mentoring for participants in a qualification that includes teaching development and researcher development components. The qualification reaches beyond the academic development unit to other organisational structures, people, and support networks.

Similarly, Sue Cherrington and colleagues, in the third article in this issue, describe a university-wide initiative that includes staff, and even students, from many different disciplines and roles around the university: academic developers, academic staff, learning advisors, and library and information technology services (ITS) staff. Participants meet regularly in a Professional Learning Community to discuss the learning and teaching environment, and how developing teaching can improve student learning. Holistic academic development that encompasses the whole institution is about including staff who are not academics, and students too, in teaching development. As one of the participants in the Professional Learning Community notes, ‘There are many people on campus running similar courses or activities, but without a forum to get together and share our experiences, we work in silos’ (p. 305). Such silos are bemoaned by Heffernan, too, who shows that many sessional academics feel neglected by their universities and are expected to be self-sufficient in terms of their own development. Holistic academic development would ensure support for all staff involved in academic work, regardless of their employment status (sessionals and professional staff who teach or support teaching, as well as permanent academics).

Like Heffernan’s sessional academics, who feel pulled between their teaching and research responsibilities and development needs, both the Stensaker and Cherrington, et al., articles also acknowledge the challenges academics face in balancing their teaching and research roles. They identify issues of finding time to prioritise teaching development when faced with more rewards for their research outputs, for example. This is why, as the next suite of articles demonstrate, it is crucial that academic developers think about the whole person and all the issues bearing on their decisions and abilities to take part in academic development.

The whole person

Holistic academic development recognises that tensions permeate the academic development project, and affect individual academics. Some of these tensions relate, as mentioned above, to the pull between teaching and research identities and expectations, and to disciplinary affiliations and commitments. In the sixth article in this issue, Ian Kinchin and his colleagues suggest that a focus on helping academics develop their teaching identities may unwittingly contribute to the perceived and troublesome split between teaching and research. If we ignore disciplinary identities, we do not see the whole person.

Kinchin and colleagues argue that we need to be aware of and work within the fullness of our own multiple identities, too. They propose that taking a researcher-led approach to academic development work will help academic developers to embody their own research traditions and gain credibility in the eyes of the academics with whom they work. They share their own individual research frames, demonstrating that different research traditions can bring dynamic and diverse perspectives to academic development work, while shared research values can provide stability. Their article, which offers the perspective of six academic developers at one UK institution, exemplifies the findings of Deandra Little, David Green, and Colette Hoption’s article on the disciplinary backgrounds of academic developers.

Little, Green and Hoption, in the fifth article in this issue, extend earlier work (Green & Little, 2016) on academic developers’ backgrounds to investigate how disciplinary research approaches and traditions translate into and ‘imprint’ upon academic developers’ current work. They find that disciplinary research training has a lasting influence on the research work of academic developers. As a result, they argue that we need to raise our awareness of other research traditions in order to support the interpretation of, participation in, and contributions to the scholarship of educational development (SOED). They show that academic developers from Education and the Social Sciences are more likely to recognise and use their own disciplinary research approaches in academic development, and that STEM and Humanities academic developers may need more support with adjusting to SOED. Holistic academic development requires us to be aware of our own disciplinary backgrounds and influences, as well as those of the people with whom we work.

In the seventh article in this issue, Jeanette Fyffe supports Little, Green, and Hoption’s argument that disciplines ‘imprint’ upon us, when she argues that our ideas about the way the university ought to be ‘are formed deep within us as we grow up in discipline, and they shape our encounters with the institution’ (p. 363). Fyffe’s article should become compulsory reading for any new academic developer. She urges us to think about how we welcome new developers into our communities. She reminds us that the complex nature of our field, while enticing, can also be bewildering and overwhelming. She challenges us to think about how we ‘become’ academic developers, not just how we ‘do’ academic development (cf Billot & King, 2017). And she does all this through a reflective lens that is neither self-absorbed nor self-congratulatory; rather her prose encourages us to think of the people behind our initiatives, practices, and research, and to act relationally not just strategically. In short, she behoves us to care for the academic development project by uncovering why we do what we do, and for whom.

This theme of care is taken up in our final contribution to this ‘found’ special issue, from Julie Timmermans and her Canadian colleagues. Their reflection on practice article encourages us to think of ‘care’ as a possible threshold concept in academic development. Just as Fyffe views the ‘objective of academic development being to support academic colleagues to find a purity of expression for their own disciplinary love,’ (p. 364), the authors of this reflection piece identify such expressions from their own disciplines. Timmermans and colleagues go beyond demonstrating care for disciplinary concepts, however, to encourage us to explore the transformational potential that ‘care’ as a strategy might have within the academic development project: care for disciplinary concepts, care for students and learning, and care for each other.

Conclusion

Academic development is a joint enterprise (cf Wenger, 1998) between academic developers and many members of our university communities. That joint enterprise is arguably threatened, however, by the complexity of organisational structures, by disciplinary differences, by the side-lining of important community members, by a failure to recognise the tensions in academic work, and by a too-slow take-up of ideas from and collaboration with other development fields. A more holistic approach to academic development would pay attention to the whole of the academic role, the whole institution, and the whole person. The risk, of course, is that in trying to serve all we will ending up serving none well. Or that, as Sugrue et al. (2017) argue, the ‘complexity and diffusion’ of the academic development project may result ‘in lack of coherence’ (p. 9). I am not suggesting that we prioritise researcher development, or leadership or organisational development, over teaching development. Rather, I encourage the various research fields and the practitioners providing the professional development to speak to each other more. Previous academic development scholars have identified a ‘brokering’ role for academic developers (Debowski, 2014; Little & Green, 2012; Sugrue et al., 2017). I hope that this special ‘found’ issue of IJAD will encourage all readers to engage more energetically with that brokering role: between different disciplines, across institutional boundaries, with our organisational development colleagues, with research developers, and in other development literatures.

IJAD update and thanks

As is customary in our final issue of the year, we have included a thank you to all the peer reviewers who contribute to the SOED enterprise by reviewing for IJAD. You will find a list of everyone involved in reviewing articles over the past year at the end of this issue. As is also customary, we like to update you on happenings in the IJAD editorial team. We aspire to honour the ‘international’ intent of our journal’s title; therefore, our editorial team comprises four co-editors from four different continents around the world, each of whom serve a four-year term, with the help of an associate editor from the same continent. This means that, each year, one of those editorial partnership teams rotates off and is replaced by new editorial team members. At the end of 2018, our Singaporean co-editor, Chng Huang Hoon, finishes her term. We are very grateful for her contribution to the IJAD team, particularly for representing us at ICED Council meetings twice, and for serving as screening editor for the past year. We will miss her attention to detail, her wise questions, and her humorous emails. Happily, we will not lose the Singaporean perspective, as existing associate editor, Johan Geertsema, has been appointed to replace Huang Hoon as co-editor. We are now on the search for a new associate editor from the Asia region, so we will update you on more team changes next year! In the meantime, enjoy reading about the amazing work going on in academic development around the world and do think about submitting something of your own for publication in IJAD.