Emerging voices and trends in academic development

Academic development as a field of practice and research is growing in both scope and reach. The work to which we turn our attention is becoming more varied, and the people doing that work and writing about it, come from a wider range of backgrounds, countries, and experiences than ever before. This special issue is a celebration of the diversity of our work and people.

Way back in 1993, the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED: www.icedonline.net) began life as an informal gathering of leaders representing five different academic development networks from around the globe (Mason-O’Connor, 2016). From the outset, the ‘international’ aspect of ICED was pivotal for achieving its goals of sharing good academic development practice and solutions, and supporting educational developers in countries where no networks existed. Now, ICED boasts 26 member networks representing more than 30 countries worldwide. ICED’s two newest member networks are from Chile and Kenya, and contributions from both those countries feature in IJAD for the first time ever, in this special issue. Representatives from both these new networks also joined the rest of the ICED Council at their annual meeting in 2018, before the biennial ICED conference held that year in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

With the theme ‘Institutional Change: Voices, Identities, Power, Outcomes,’ the June 2018 conference attracted participants representing at least 31 countries, and a huge range of fascinating papers, plenaries, workshops, and keynote presentations. It also sparked the idea for this special issue. Hearing all these different voices in Atlanta made us realise, as an editorial team, that IJAD needed to do more to enable these diverse, international, and emerging stories to be read in our academic development literature. Anchoring this special issue, then, are papers that grew from the opening and closing plenary keynotes at the conference. We also put out an open call for submissions from anyone who thought they had something to contribute to the theme of ‘Emerging Voices and Trends in Academic Development’. Many proposals came in from around the world and resulted in this special issue, comprising ten papers written by 36 different authors from 12 different countries – the most broadly international issue of IJAD that we have ever published.

The conference opened with a plenary panel of international academic development experts from four different countries: Canada, Singapore, Sweden, and the USA. The stories that Joy Mighty, Chng Huang Hoon, Torgny Roxå, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli shared in that opening keynote have been captured by the conference convenor, Michele di Pietro, in the first article for this special issue. Warning that we must not allow ourselves to be seduced by the idea of a ‘single story,’ their paper reminds us that there are multiple ways of doing, thinking about, and writing about academic development. The rest of the articles in this special issue tell many different stories from around the world.

They include stories of emergent trends in the field of academic development (decolonising and indigenising the curriculum, students as developers, and a focus on researcher development, for example) and many are written by emerging voices. These voices are ‘emerging’ not just in terms of coming from countries we have not heard from in IJAD before; they are also the voices of students (at least seven authors in this special issue were students when they authored their papers), postdoctoral fellows (two), and apprentices (one).

Following the opening plenary panellists’ paper on trends and voices that they see emerging in academic development, our second paper comes from Indonesia: the first time we have ever published a full-length article written by an Indonesian academic developer (a couple of very early IJAD papers were on the Indonesian context, but that author was not himself Indonesian). Excitingly, earlier this year we also published a shorter ‘reflection on research’ piece from Indonesia (Mulya, 2019). Tatum Adininigrum (from Indonesia) and Sean Sturm and Barbara Kensington-Miller (from New Zealand) remind us, in their paper on ‘Part-time academics’ perceptions of their role and academic development,’ that part-time academics need embedded and contextual academic development that allows them to exercise their agency and determine their own needs and doesn’t drown them in ‘menial administrative work’ (p. 118).

Mary Omingo, in our first IJAD article published from Kenya, and the third paper in this special issue, similarly urges us to consider the agency of the individuals for whom we offer academic development programmes. In ‘Lecturers learning to teach,’ Omingo tells the story of interviewing 25 lecturers at four different universities in Kenya. She discovered that different lecturers respond differently to the same opportunities. When it comes to academic development, one size rarely fits all. She reminds us to be alert to the ‘intentionality and reflexivity’ (p. 126) of the academics with whom we work and to search out their motivations and preferred focuses as we design our academic development programmes.

In terms of design, the work of helping to redesign (or reconcile) higher education curricula that may be outdated, limited, and exclusionary, falls often into the lap of academic developers. The next two articles in this special issue focus on the emerging trend of academic developers leading or helping with curriculum transformation alongside people whose voices may have previously been unheard or muted. The fourth article, ‘Disrupting metaphors of coloniality’ by Kasturi Behari-Leak and Goitsione Mokou from South Africa, reflects on an institution-wide approach to meaningful curriculum change. The approach saw ‘academics and students traditionally excluded from formal institutional structures and process of curriculum oversight’ (p. 136) come together to ‘disrupt the coloniality’ of knowledge, power, and being at a South African university.

Echoing the transformational work of this group of South African students, staff, academics, and academic developers, another multi-role team – this time at an Australian university – tell their story of Jindaola, in the fifth article, ‘An Aboriginal way towards curriculum reconciliation’. Their paper foregrounds the voices of Aboriginal local Knowledge Holders, including the first author of the paper. Jade Kennedy, Lisa Thomas, Alisa Percy, Bonnie Dean, Janine Delahunty, Kathryn Harden-Thew, and Maarten de Laat write about taking academic and other participants on ‘a journey where they must unlearn previous ways of thinking about and approaching knowledge’ (p. 159). In their beautifully told and illustrated article, we read of academic developers partnering with their local Aboriginal community to help ‘reconcile’ and ‘decolonise’ curricula across their university.

As in the South African and Australian articles, which witness university-wide approaches to change, our first-ever Chilean contribution to IJAD outlines an institution-wide, holistic approach not just to implementing academic development, but also evaluating its impact. Beatriz Moya and Héctor Turra (from Chile) and Denise Chalmers (from Australia) describe the development, implementation, and evaluation of two different but related educational development initiatives: Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) and Student Learning Assistants (SLAs). Both focused on the systematic improvement of learning and teaching across the university, with goals of transforming curricula, faculty reactions and practice, students’ learning, and institutional culture. The article outlines how the academic development unit went about assessing the effectiveness and impact of these programmes.

This kind of institution-wide cultural work (cf. Stensaker, 2018) of academic development comes to the fore in our seventh article also, only our third published contribution to IJAD from Denmark. Laura Louise Sarauw, Lise Degn, and Jakob Williams Ørberg invite us to consider the emerging trend of researcher development as academic development work. They argue that ‘research integrity training’ is important work for academic developers, and formational for early career academics, but that such training currently happens in very different ways across institutions, departments, and faculties. They also argue that ‘individualizing and responsibilizing’ approaches may not be the most appropriate way to foster the desired culture of integrity.

Our final full-length article in this special issue features the closing keynote speaker from the June 2018 ICED conference, Peter Felten, with current and former student colleagues from various universities around the world: Sophia Abbott and Aaron Long from the US, Jordan Kirkwood and Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka from institutions in the UK, Lucy Mercer-Mapstone from Australia, and Roselynn Verwoord from Canada. In their article, ‘Reimagining the place of students in academic development,’ they call for a more ‘liberatory form of academic development’ (p. 200) that positions students as legitimate actors and agents in partnership with academics, academic developers, other staff, other institutions, the wider community, and everyone involved in the shared work of learning and teaching.

This wider lens on academic development comes up, also, in our two shorter, reflective papers in the special issue. These two closing pieces are reflections on practice from emerging voices in academic development. In the first, Óscar Jerez Yáñez, Romina Aranda Cáceres, Fernanda Corvalán Canessa, Lesslie González Rojas, and Armin Ramos Torres – academic development colleagues from Chile – describe a one-to-one model of academic development that helps overcome disciplinary and departmental differences, and has seen positive changes in professor behaviour and institutional culture at their university. In the second reflection piece, a newcomer to academic development, Clinton A. Patterson, urges us to think about how bringing people into our field from other areas of the university may benefit both academic development and our broader institutions and communities.

I hope you will enjoy the diversity of voices this special issue of IJAD brings you. I encourage you also to check the reference lists of these special issue articles; many works not commonly referenced in IJAD are cited and offer us further new ways of thinking about academic development. The editorial team looks forward to continuing to broaden IJAD’s reach and welcomes submissions from countries in which academic development is a new field of research or practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.