Creating a collaborative community spirit for the future of academic development

We invite you to imagine a landscape with hills and meandering pathways. As you look from your gentle mind’s eye, you see not a static landscape, but one that is in movement, that has an energy, a flow, a momentum. As your eyes travel across this landscape you see single paths that interweave with others, where ‘there’ and ‘here’ intersect. As academic developers, over the past half century, we have helped to forge many pathways across this rugged landscape of higher education and have brought many academic colleagues along with us through our on-going commitment to deep, caring, and immersive work (Bolander Laksov & Huijser, 2020; Gibbs, 2013; Knapper, 2003). At times, we go back across this already-traversed terrain to meet people where they are, working to ensure the sustainability of our work. Other times, we pause on this journey to revel in what is and to reflect on how far we have come. And yet, at other times, we envision what could be and plough boldly forward, guided by hope (McGowan & Felten, 2021), exploring new horizons that beckon us as we embrace, as Sutherland (2018) has suggested, ‘the whole of the academic role’, the ‘whole of the institution’, and the ‘whole person’ (pp. 261-262).

Along the way, a key aspect of academic developers’ success has been our valuing of supportive and facilitative approaches, working side-by-side with academic colleagues to build collaborative, community-orientated teaching and research cultures in which we embed our academic development work (Shagrir, 2017). At the same time, we have been increasingly asked to fill leadership roles, both within these communities and in our larger institutions. Are we, as Shelda Debowski (2014) asks, ‘agents of change’ or ‘partners in arms’? We are challenged to stay ‘part of’ the collegial communities we are invited into and create, meeting faculty where they are at, partnering with them, and celebrating good work, while at the same time, we are increasingly tasked with achieving institutional directives or goals that may not completely align with the collaborative communities of which we consider ourselves to be a part (Sugrue et al., 2018). These challenges remind us of the complexity and intricacy of navigating the interconnected paths of identity, belongingness, and cultural membership inherent in each academic development initiative.

Considered collectively, the articles in this issue capture these tensions in our academic development work and compel us to consider the positionalities we might, or must, take up as we move forward. Two articles draw our attention to an enduring need to nurture opportunities for individual teaching and learning development, despite previous and ongoing work in these areas (Gilmore, 2021; Sabourin, 2021). Yet other articles focus on a need for academic developers to build community groups to advance more process-oriented academic development initiatives (Kim et al., 2021; Turner et al., 2021). Finally, two articles beckon us to grow our academic developer identities and roles as cultural change agents within the university attending to the development of the whole academic (Carter et al., 2021; Lisewski, 2021). Embedded within the core of all these pieces is the importance of working together to continue to create the supportive and engaged community spirit that is the heart of academic development.

Gilmore (2021) focusses on the development of individual teachers’ teaching practice. To facilitate the development of teachers’ online teaching skills, an area of ever-more-relevant need, Gilmore (2021) notes that the conceptualisation of academic developers’ role might be expanded to integrate the role of coach. The author proposes a six-stage coaching model designed to provide both individual support and support through a community of practice, thus providing opportunities for individual reflection, as well as connection and community through ‘constructive conversations’. Inherent in this coaching approach is a ‘teacher dashboard’ – a means of compiling data from multiple sources regarding the teacher’s goals, engagement, and progress. Gilmore comments that ‘data visualisation empowers coaches and teachers to make data-informed decisions about their teaching practice’ (p. 128) and further comments that ‘[t]he coaching model has made an immediate and ongoing impact on the teaching capability and student experience at this university’ (p. 128).

While conversation about the increased numbers of sessionals and their need for various supports has been discussed for some years now, Brandon Sabourin (2021) has uncovered a particular literature gap in North American academic development work and the need for ‘documentation of targeted educational development practices’ (p. 136). Sessionals need academic development, not just with respect to teaching and learning, but also more broadly to provide connections and support into the academy for them. Sabourin (2021) notes that ‘[e]ducational developers in North America, especially those who might be working with sessional instructors, have power to influence the treatment of sessionals’ educational development simply by documenting their practice in a publicly-accessible venue’ (p. 136).

The curriculum development initiative described in Turner et al.’s (2021) piece reminds us that the facilitation work of academic development should be process-focussed, rather than outcome-oriented and highlights the benefits of such a focus. Collaboration within and among teams of staff, students, and faculty members served as a cornerstone of a Change Academy-inspired process to enact an institutional strategic plan ‘that includes the goal of having program-level learning outcomes developed for all programs’ (p. 151). This approach led to opportunities for teams ‘to interact and learn from each other, offering a means of comparing practice across contexts, exposing participants to new perspectives or activities, and, at times, making more explicit the tacit aspects of practice within their own departments and teams’ (p. 155) and highlighted the developmental benefits of such an approach.

Kim et al. (2021) note that, increasingly, Teaching and Learning Centres are providing support and legitimisation for SoTL ‘as an everyday part of their [faculty members’] academic practice’ (p. 169) and to ensure faculty can ‘achieve meaningful scholarly outcomes’ (p. 172) in their SoTL research. The authors also share the challenges faculty face when engaging in SoTL work and highlight the valuable and important role of academic developers in facilitating ‘a community of peers to offer support, encouragement, or a shared understanding of its [SoTL’s] significance’ (p.169).

Bernard Lisewski (2021) explores a different kind of facilitation in which academic developers play a mediating role. We can hold positions that require us to implement top-down university policies with respect to ‘best practices’. Yet we are also able to visit and reside comfortably in the micro worlds of the university where ‘teaching and learning regimes’, disciplinary contexts, and ‘practitioners’ different visions, ideologies, beliefs, memories and emotions’ (p. 180) are alive and well regardless of macro-level policies. Lisewski (2021) argues that academic developers are ‘cultural workers’ who are able to ‘seek to better understand localised practice responses to top-down policy implementation and develop highly situated educational practices’ (p. 182) so working to align policy and localised practices within their institution.

Carter et al. (2021) show us how academic developers can, with humour and humanity, create a ‘home’ for academics to develop their wholeness by ‘re-storying’ their experiences of failure. This home is built on the foundation of a caring community in which failure is normalised as part of the human (and therefore academic) experience. Academic developers can create spaces in which people engage in the identity work of developing self by learning from failure through reflection and by connecting through dialogue. Carter et al. (2021) caution that feeling at home with one’s failures and one’s self, developing as a whole individual who recognises and seizes the opportunity to learn from failure, must occur within institutional cultures and structural solutions that value and honour this work. This approach will represent a new direction for many universities as it involves the (re)shaping of cultures that traditionally reward success.

The landscape of higher education is in continuous movement as it responds to internal and external impetuses to shift. Shifting landscapes require us to adjust and re-establish our footing and perhaps find alternative paths to pursue as new possibilities come into view. What remains constant when facing these shifts is academic developers’ commitment to facilitating processes of development for individuals, groups, institutions, and the higher education sector and to doing so in ways that create a collaborative community spirit.