25 years of accomplishments and challenges in academic development – where to next?

This issue of IJAD marks 25 years of volumes on a range of topics within academic development. In celebrating this milestone, we explore some of the journal’s accomplishments since 1996, when the first volume was completed, and we identify ongoing challenges that we expect will continue to be explored in the next 25 years. Additionally, IJAD will offer its readers an extended anniversary issue in 2021, with a focus on conversations in academic development.

To begin this retrospective, we return to the first five volumes of IJAD (1996-2000) to get a sense of the topics of interest at the time, papers’ theoretical grounding, approaches taken, and the contexts of the authors’ academic activity.

Topics with continuing relevance

It is clear that the topics investigated in those early issues are still largely relevant. Several articles have as their main concern the identities and roles of academic developers, which remain topical today, as two articles in the current issue suggest: those by Cunningham and Mills (2020) and Hunter (2020). Academic development practice was also a common concern in the early issues, either with a focus on what to include in courses and programs (or exclude from them), or oriented towards collegial peer learning. The tension between these two perspectives on how to enact academic development, either as formalized courses or as informal peer learning involving collegial partners, is also visible in two of the papers in this issue. Macfadyen, English, and Coates (2020) report on the engagement of a group of supervisors in activity research to develop knowledge and learning on supervision practices, while Ellis, Brown, and Tse (2020) propose a framework for the evaluation of academic development units. The evaluation of our practice will clearly remain highly relevant in the coming years, since academic development as a field of practice is often called upon to justify its impact and indeed its very existence, especially at times of budgetary constraints. This immediate urgency, however, also creates opportunities for continuing to explore and improve our practice in different contexts, and IJAD remains a key forum in this respect. Other topics that continue to engage our community are issues relating to academic activities that impact student learning, as well as teachers’ perceptions and experiences of their role as academics. For example, in this issue Taylor, Knorr, Ogrodnik, and Sinclair (2020) write about teachers’ perceptions of feedback, presenting the first academic (educational) development adaptation of Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) seven principles for good practice in midterm student feedback.

What received less attention in articles published during the first few years, however, are topics relating to a wider conception of academic development, including the theme of internationalization. Clearly, the globalization of higher education today requires approaches to academic development that allow us to deal with, and value, the international experiences of teaching staff and students. Rao and Hosein (2020) explore this further in their reflection on practice in this issue, in which they posit that there is limited if any knowledge specifically designed for international academics to acculturate to their university practice. Especially with regard to academic development, this may be partly due to terminology, as not all university contexts share the term or even the concept of academic development, and there is considerable blurring of lines between what has been called third space workers (McAlpine & Hopwood, 2009; Bilous et al., 2018). Others argue that academic development is inherently multidisciplinary, which may be its inherent strength, and they aim to ‘[unshackle] pedagogies of academic development from fixed cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary perspectives’ (Cunningham & Mills, 2020).

More recently, and perhaps partly as a result of this ‘fuzziness’ around the academic developer role, topics relating to the work conditions of academics are increasingly raised in IJAD. Wilkinson’s (2020) frank account of imposter syndrome for early academics in this issue is a good example. Unfortunately, there is an increasing need for a focus on the well-being and health of academic staff as we need to find solutions for sustainable work conditions and practices for individuals, which applies to academic development as well. One example is the book Write more, publish more, stress less! Five key principles for a creative and sustainable scholarly practice by Dannelle D. Stevens (2019), reviewed in this issue by Sharon Chang.

Increasing focus in the use of theory and empirical data

In revisiting the early issues of IJAD, we could discern more explicit use of theory in the journal in recent years. Although there are some examples of theory in earlier papers, most contributions build on experienced academic developers’ expertise of working in the field and are thus predominantly practice-based, often with a tone of ‘giving advice’. With only few exceptions, and similar to other emerging research domains (Laksov, Dornan, & Teunissen, 2017), theory is predominantly linked to close-up explorations of a specific topic and limited to invoking other articles on similar topics in higher education, often couched in broader educational theory. This is in contrast to aligning with a specific theoretical perspective, or to contributing to theory by giving an overview of a field to identify gaps in our knowledge base. Interestingly, most of the exceptions link to organizational theory and cultural change, as in an article by Candy (1996) on academic development as an arena and practice, and an article in the same year by Jenkins (1996) on discipline-based academic development. When it comes to methodology, it seems clear from our review of these early articles that with only a few exceptions, for example Isaacs and Parker’s (1997) paper on introductory short courses, most focus on discussing rather than building on empirical data.

The current issue, by contrast, draws on a wider range of methodologies and theoretical underpinnings, including feminism, liminal theory, hybrid metaphorical approach, and autoethnography. A more traditional methodological approach is perhaps the case study, which has been used continuously in IJAD over the years, and in this respect the contribution by Ellis, Brown, and Tse (2020) in this issue is no exception. Adaptations of well-established theories or concepts, like Taylor et al.’s (2020) adaptation of Chickering and Gamson (1987) to extrapolate seven principles for good practice in midterm student feedback, are a not uncommon approach. Both Hunter’s (2020) and Wilkinson’s (2020) papers are autoethnographic—an approach used to give voice to the lived experience of academic development—and both use metaphor to discuss issues such as imposter syndrome and perceived lack of agency in the construction of one’s own professional identity as an academic developer. Furthermore, MacFayden, English, and Coates (2020) use action research to explore the collective experience of supervisors, while Cunningham and Mills (2020) employ a creative methodology and explore academic development through the use of metaphor and poems.

Although there is a tendency towards more conscious use of theory in academic development research, we also acknowledge the continuing need for purposefully theorizing the field. We need a theoretical basis for our practice, for how we are, and for what we are about. In keeping with former IJAD editor Kath Sutherland’s (2018) call for a wider, more ‘holistic’ conceptualization of academic development, the need for theoretical and conceptual contributions seems higher than ever before. Our hope is therefore that in the next 25 years, contributors to IJAD from a diverse range of contexts will heed Sutherland’s call, resulting in a growing body of IJAD papers that systematically explore and review previous research and aspects of our practice, so that we can collectively expand on what has been established over the past 25 years. The apparent lack of such systematic approaches and theorizing on a global level might be an explanation for why it seems—25 years down the road—that the idea of a truly and consistently international journal is still somewhat of a challenge. In spite of authors hailing from diverse national contexts in the four IJAD issues that have appeared in 2020—four from the Scandinavian countries, one from Switzerland, and one from South Africa—the dominance of papers from the English-speaking world (as in this issue) is still noticeably strong. However, the reasons for this are manifold: often they relate to academic developers’ positioning in their institution, for example whether they are appointed in academic roles; whether there are specific academic development units and roles at all; how the units are labelled; and whether the academic developer role is actually recognized in particular institutional and national contexts. We thus hope that members of ICED—representing 26 networks worldwide—will scrutinize whether or not contributions to IJAD resonate with their practices and importantly, how they could contribute to the developing and expanding dialogue that first emerged 25 years ago. We look forward to an increasingly diversifying and widening community of global contributors over the next 25 years.

We would like to end this editorial with a warm thank you to IJAD associate editor Tansy Jessop, who now finishes her term on the editorial team. We are at present looking for a new associate editor to replace her. As is customary in our final issue of the year, we have included a thank you at the end of this issue to all those who have so generously contributed with their expertise and time to review for IJAD.