Academic developers developing: aspects of an expanding lifeworld

ABSTRACT

This text discusses the professional development of academic developers. It is based on the authors’ reflections and observations in the context of a semi-formal programme, Strategic Academic Development, held for academic developers in different regions of the world. Most recently the programme participants were academic developers in Singapore. In this text, we as authors share what we notice as similar traits and common patterns across contexts when academic developers develop professionally and their ‘lifeworld’ changes. Five dimensions are highlighted: expanding horizons; widening orientations; intensified focus on ‘the others’; using and/or producing research; and finally, the frames within which academic developers work.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic developers
• context
• horizons
• lifeworld
• professional development
• strategic academic development

Introduction

‘Overall more people are identifying themselves as developers now than 20 or even ten years ago’ (Baume & Popovic, 2016, p. 3). Consequently, and importantly for this text, there are a diversity of routes into this field, as demonstrated in a large-scale study by Green and Little (2016) of more than 1000 academic developers in 38 countries. Still, and perhaps for that very reason, ‘debate and uncertainty about the nature, indeed the legitimacy, of academic development, permeate the literature of our field’ (Baume & Popovic, 2016, p. 2). In fact, many academic developers also share the experience of impostor syndrome in doing their work (Rudenga & Gravett, 2019).

The ‘lifeworld’ of developers varies significantly. By this we mean that academic developers find themselves immersed in professional existences that are different, existences that due to their immediateness will colour their reflections and actions (Jay, 2009). The experience of this lifeworld is the basis from which they reflect, act, and become agents.

There are, in this journal, a fair number of contributions about the lifeworlds of academic developers (even if that specific term is not used) that explore the role, the practice, the organisation, and the challenges of academic development. Or, as Baume (2016) has categorised the main aspects of IJAD contributions: they concern the people, the field, and the work. However, there are comparatively fewer contributions on how we develop the knowledge and skills for the practice we engage in. Some articles showcase individuals’ paths into academic development work and identities (Fyffe, 2018; Jessop et al., 2018; Kensington-Miller et al., 2015), while Kensington-Miller et al. (2012) explored whether ‘there is a best way to develop the next generation of academic developers’ (p. 131) through interviews with directors of educational development – and the simple answer was ‘no’. But the need for professional development opportunities was strongly argued.

At the same time, several scholarly contributions highlight the expanding scope of academic development globally (Geertsema & Chng, 2017; Gibbs, 2013; Stensaker, 2017; Stensaker et al., 2017; Sugrue et al., 2018; Sutherland, 2018). It therefore seems appropriate to ask how we – as academic developers (ADs) – develop ourselves professionally in and across our respective lifeworlds.

In 1997, IJAD published a special issue on ‘Developing the developers’. In this issue, Isaacs (1997) suggested that developers have developed themselves by embracing the model of reflective practice and implementing it while carrying out their work, for example, through action learning, at conferences, and in journals and books. Much later, Patel (2014) suggested that ‘promoting a culture of scholarship among educational developers will contribute significantly towards their pedagogical professional development’ (abstract). Furthermore, in an award-winning article Van Schalkwyk et al. (2013) demonstrated an example of a reflective professional development activity that colleagues in a teaching and learning centre undertook together as yet another example of how to develop professionally. Baume and Popovic (2016), in their recent state-of-the-art book on academic development practices, highlighted a variety of ways to develop professionally in more or less formal ways through: mentorship, technology, participation in national and international networks (like ICED and its national branches), reading and writing groups, and portfolios. However, taken together, there appears to be a relative lack of literature related to more formal or semi-formal professional development of developers. This text accordingly offers an addition to what we perceive as a gap in our field. We offer our text as a contribution to how developers can develop in the context of the changing scope and increased complexity of contemporary AD.

In this text, we use mainly observations from supporting professional development of ADs in combination with personal experiences. We have worked as academic developers for twenty and thirty years respectively, and have together organised and led several different professional development activities for academic developers in a number of countries and institutional contexts in the world, ranging from half-day workshops to extensive programmes. Among other things, we have offered a particular semi-formal professional development programme for academic developers called Strategic Academic Development. The programme was run three times in Sweden (see Mårtensson & Roxå, 2014; Roxå & Mårtensson, 2008), once in Iceland, and once, most recently, in Singapore. When moving between contexts, our own experiences came into focus through interactions with colleagues with experiences of academic development practice in different parts of the world.

In this paper, we do not analyse the programmes per se. Rather, we reflect upon the development of ourselves and other academic developers through an expanding process of reflection. By using our recent engagement in Singapore as a focal point, and relating this to previous experiences and observations, we seek to contribute mainly to two conversations: firstly, exploring how ADs develop professionally; and secondly, exploring generalizable patterns in such development. We will briefly describe the context of the professional development activity before we report on what we have experienced and observed as resulting from it.

The programme: strategic academic development: an initiative to improve higher education in Singapore

The authors of this text developed and co-led the programme in 2018 together with a local coordinator. The content and structure were similar to previous versions of the programme in other contexts. The programme was offered to 25 participants with a range of AD experience, from a few months to 10+ years, representing seven different higher education institutions in Singapore. The two overarching aims of the programme were to: a) contribute to forming a local/regional network of ADs, and b) support the scholarly, professional development of the participants. Each participant applied to and participated in the programme on the basis of an institutionally anchored AD project of strategic character, and with the consent of and support from their institutions. The backbone of the programme consisted of continuously working on progressing with those projects, both in terms of their theoretical, strategic, and contextual underpinnings and in relation to getting input and feedback from peers within, and leaders of, the programme. Projects varied in focus and scope and included such topics as, for example: developing and/or evaluating workshops and courses on teaching and learning; exploring the effects of mentoring and/or assessment practices in the institution; designing a new institutional system for student evaluation of teaching; and developing a new strategy for a Teaching & Learning Centre to work within the institution. Participants worked individually, in pairs, or in teams on their projects.

The programme had 3 + 2 + 1 days of scheduled course meetings in Singapore, with the final day being self-organised by the participants. Between course days, one online meeting in small groups (four to five participants, including one course-leader) took place. The total amount of participant time was four full weeks (≈160 hours) over a 10-month period. The programme was deliberately designed for participants to engage as much as possible in interaction with each other. Much time in course meetings was spent on sharing ideas, experiences, readings, as well as on dynamic writing and peer feedback of project progress. We therefore call the model ‘semi-formal’; since there were some formal pre-set requirements to fulfil in order to receive a course certificate, it was not completely informal, nor entirely participant-led. On the other hand, participants were given a lot of self-directed and collegial opportunities to shape much of the course content and processes. As course leaders, we offered input from our knowledge-base and experiences, in a significantly interactive way. As it is not the purpose of this text to evaluate the course per se, we will not go through the documented evaluation data – applications, written project papers and peer feedback, formative reflections, and summative course evaluation – but even so use these as a source to inform our reflections.

Twenty-three participants completed the course. We know through our professional networks that several participants have presented their projects at conferences, locally and internationally, and some projects would have been submitted as contributions to this special issue. It struck us that the outcomes are very similar to the previous iterations of the programme that we have run (Mårtensson & Roxå, 2014; Roxå & Mårtensson, 2008). Hence, it appears as if a professional development programme, based on a semi-formal, networked design and with a contextual project focus contributes significantly to the professional development of academic developers. It also seems, by and large, to transcend national and institutional boundaries and to work well across contexts.

For us as authors of this text, the interplay between what we think of as the common and the ‘uncommon’ ground, caused us to bring to the surface our previous experiences. We as ‘outsiders’ and our course design constituted uncommon ground for our participants. Our Singaporean participants and the conversations we had throughout the programme thereby offered us an opportunity to revisit and scrutinize our own previous experiences, and triggered the reflections that now we share in this text.

Making sense of ADs developing trajectories

As a collective, the various groups in courses like the one described above mirror aspects of what is described by Sugrue et al. (2018) in their review of literature on academic development as a community of practice (Wenger, 1998). They discuss the development of AD, its recent development in terms of status, its focus, but also its reports on achievements. What we want to add in this text is a focus on individual trajectories within a general framework of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). We thereby aim to contribute to a discussion on how ADs develop in the profession, particularly in the context of the changing scope and increased complexity of contemporary AD. Such insights can facilitate conversation, support self-reflection, and scaffold attempts to support ADs through professional development activities.

The above programme, like most other professional development activities in which we have been engaged, centred around development projects formulated by each participant. The individuals as well as the entire group thereby embark on trajectories, which become readable through various versions of the project report and through each participant’s contributions to the process. These trajectories form the material from which we draw our conclusions. We interpret the trajectories hermeneutically, but also as a version of critical ethnography (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009), an exploratory approach allowing us to fuse the material provided through observations of participants’ and groups’ trajectories with our own experiences of having worked in the field of AD for a long time. Hence, the dimensions suggested below should be viewed as metaphors that will, we hope, be useful as creative devices that allow the community of ADs to develop new and interesting insights (Alvesson & Spicer, 2011) about ADs’ developmental trajectories. Our suggestions offer the potential to scaffold further reflection and more systematic research into how individual ADs develop within the profession.

Developing as academic developer

The lifeworld of ADs is a composite that is often based in a specific regional, national, and even institutional tradition and culture. However, it also relates to the fact that ADs are active within academia, with what appear as common global traits. An exploration of ADs’ professional development, we argue, has to take this into account. It is likely that ADs develop professionally in many ways, where some ways are individual, some are cultural, and some are linked to the fact that the practice is deeply ingrained in academia, which in turn can be described through converging as well as diverging aspects. In this paper, we deliberately focus on what we consider to be the converging aspects: common ground for ADs’ professional development presented in an exploratory way, and thereby we hope with the potential to act as inspiration for future research.

In the following section, we offer our reflections on those converging aspects, hoping that they may contribute to some food for thought for other readers across the IJAD community. We highlight some recurrent dimensions where we have seen academic developers developing. These dimensions have become evident in our conversations with ADs and observations of the trajectories their projects have taken. The dimensions are:

1) expanding horizons in academic development

2) widening professional orientations

3) an intensified focus on ‘the others’

4) academic developers as: a) users and/or b) producers of research

5) perceptions of the frames within which academic developers work

We do not claim that these dimensions are comprehensive, nor that they necessarily apply to all academic developers. Instead, they should be seen as an attempt to discern general patterns of development of ADs, based on what we have seen through altogether fifty years of academic development, particularly within the context of ADs’ professional development.

Expanding horizons in academic development

Academic development can be understood as relating to a horizon that defines what the work entails and what is important to focus upon. The ADs that we have seen develop professionally seem to widen their professional horizon. Many, though not all, ADs start their work doing something specific: working with individual teachers implementing policies, teaching in pedagogical courses, or researching a certain aspect of teaching and learning in higher education. The list could be longer. ADs new to the profession appear to concentrate on only one or a few of all the many things ADs can do.

We have noticed that it is common that these individuals, when participating in professional development for ADs, expand their horizon and thereby perceive their professional domain differently. They notice more things, more aspects, and more pathways. Consequently, they also start to work with different things – acquire a wider repertoire – than what they started out with.

In the light of these new aspects coming into view, they then often start viewing their entire practice differently. It is not that previous things become unimportant, but what they did when new to AD shifts in appearance and often becomes more embedded in other practices. The individual AD can now start to choose where to concentrate, and begins to see that changes in one domain of AD work might influence other domains. Time-frames also shift. It is not only that change takes time; it becomes apparent that new things happen in between an AD intervention and its effect, and that these things have to be taken into consideration. The entire AD practice becomes even more complex.

Thus, as the horizon expands it is not only the quantitative aspects of AD work that changes; it is also the integration of aspects. A system comes into view and starts to affect the individual AD. From this point on, the opportunities to do things increase but also the demands to use professional judgment. With this experience, the AD increasingly becomes invited, consulted, and relied upon by a wider set of stakeholders. The need to prioritise increases. Therefore, many ADs experience a gradually increasing workload. Not only are there more things to do, but also increased demands to act professionally in many and sometimes very diverse activities.

Widening professional orientations

Consulting, teaching, policy-work and other things ADs do can be performed in many different ways. There is an individual touch to how the work is conducted. It is clear that ADs, as individuals, influence what they do as well as how they do things.

In his seminal work, Land (2001) explored a number of personal orientations guiding individual ADs in their work. His study deals with the purpose of AD work, with which the AD identifies, and from which stakeholder resources are drawn. In broad terms, Land placed the identified orientations along two dimensions: individual – system, and liberating – domesticating.

The first dimension (individual – system) relates to whether the individual AD focuses their attention on the individuals in higher education, or on the system. In the former case, the starting point is the individuals’ understanding of their situations, of their lifeworlds. In the latter case, the focus concerns the system: policies, rules, institutional traditions.

The second dimension (liberating – domesticating) relates to the purpose or the aspiration of the individual AD. Is the main purpose to liberate the individuals: the teachers or the students? It could be about increasing agency by revealing and removing oppressive tendencies in the higher education of today. Or, is the purpose to concentrate resources and efforts within an institution so that leaders can distribute them effectively? This entails a certain degree of domestication of the individuals within an institution.

It is important to understand, Land remarks, that specific orientations are not mutually exclusive. The boundaries between them are blurry. One orientation may be efficient in relation to one objective, but inefficient in relation to another. In the same way, particular individual practices, like teaching in pedagogical courses, do not lend themselves to one orientation only. Pedagogical courses can be seen as liberating individual teachers, but also as a vehicle for domestication: where individuals are deprived of their agency and moulded into instruments for wider purposes (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2017). It is clear that individual ADs do not always have full control of the interpretation of what they do.

We see relevance in the framework Land suggests. In our experience, an individual AD enters a professional development activity mainly using one orientation. Then, over time, things change. It is not frequent that an AD becomes more entrenched in just that one orientation (even though this hypothetically might happen). Instead, the ADs we have worked with begin to see the different orientations as the realisations of choices where they can act deliberatively. They start to widen their intentions to include more potential orientations, and as they do so, they start to experience contradictions. For example, if an AD believes in the liberation of individuals, for the benefit of individual development and critical thinking, they sometimes realise that this cannot be achieved without policy changes within the institution, something that in turn entails a degree of domestication of students and academics.

Hence, developing as an AD often needs realising and coming to terms with contradictory elements in the various tools and strategies that are at our disposal. Therefore, development could appropriately be described as a widening process: a process where more orientations become incorporated in the developer’s repertoire. However, the quality of this development is arguably determined by the capacity not only to incorporate more orientations, but also to integrate their various values and techniques and to balance the contradictory features that will become apparent in specific situations.

An intensified focus on ‘the others’

This aspect relates to the people with whom an AD interacts while engaging in development work. One way to talk about this is similar to the way that Prosser and Trigwell (1999) describe approaches to teaching. A teaching focus entails an emphasis on what the teacher does while doing teaching to students. A learning focus on the other hand entails a rebalancing, so that students and their learning come into primary focus: teaching then in part earns its value by resulting in student learning. It is important to recognise that even though teaching and learning as words may be understood as describing a background and a foreground, the system still needs both.

Similarly, ADs can view academic teachers, leaders, students, and others with whom they work in different ways. We have seen many ADs shift the balance between a focus on what they themselves do, to what the others do – meaning that the AD practice and the individual AD are moved somewhat into the background. This implies that development is not necessarily what ADs do, but instead is what happens in the organisation of which an individual AD is a part.

An intensified focus on the others may result in a shift in conception of change and of the impact that results from AD work. Even the perception of time shifts to more long-term perspectives. Development in some senses moves further away from the individual AD.

One positive side of this is that development is no longer limited to, nor solely dependent on, what ADs do. They do not need to be present everywhere and every time when things happen. They can start to do things that are more intentionally – strategically – targeted towards longitudinal development. Sustainable change happens in the complex midst of various practitioners’ work, rather than as a direct result of interaction with an AD. Development thereby becomes ongoing instead of occasional. The focus moves towards the agency of the others.

There are, however, two potentially negative outcomes of this shift. First, ADs may become less visible in the organisation and therefore more vulnerable, and they may also feel isolated as their practice becomes less observed. It becomes harder for an AD to get credit for their contributions. Secondly, the ADs lose control over what happens as a result of their activities. ADs might have specific intentions with what they do. However, since the focus no longer is on specific AD activities, but on what participants do, teachers and others might do things not anticipated by the ADs, things that might in fact be twisted or interpreted in unforeseen ways. This loss of control is sometimes experienced as uncomfortable for ADs.

Despite this, we see ADs going through this transition and by doing so gaining faith in what they do. AD practices become meaningful not only because of the rewarding interactions with individuals, but also because so many things develop without the ADs direct presence … like ripples on the water. The process is related to a widening understanding of agency within higher education organisations. Agency as well as development becomes more of an ongoing process of choices inside localised practices than located in the professional development activities organised by ADs. Individual members of an organisation may add small elements to their own repertoire, but since these smaller elements, almost invisible in themselves, may add to each other inside everyday practices and among colleagues, they can result in big changes and in changes that could hardly have been anticipated by the AD.

This shift in focus of the others, those with whom we work, often releases tensions in an AD: ‘It is not only up to me to change things, I am part of a wider community, where others do most of the development-work’. The result is often a new perception of the field and a transformation of identity. It also, we argue, places the emphasis where it should be, on the practitioners: on academic teachers and students, and all others involved in development of education.

Academic developers as users and/or producers of research

This section has two foci: ADs as users of research produced in various disciplines, and ADs as producers of research. As some of the literature in the Introduction highlights, this is a recurrent issue in our field.

ADs as users of research

ADs use research from many disciplines, not least from their own disciplinary background (Green & Little, 2016). Furthermore, ADs utilise material produced in other contexts, material developed and refined elsewhere. And since development often happens when ADs are not present, the academic teachers or others who use concepts and perspectives offered to them by the ADs may use these in different ways than was anticipated by the disciplinary community that developed them. In this sense the individual AD is a broker (Wenger, 1998), a role that in academia entails certain codes of conduct.

For ADs, however, this raises a potential problem. They do not control what happens as academic teachers and others utilise what they have learnt. For these professionals, the everyday practice often is fundamental and the concepts and perspectives used gain value only if they are what Entwistle (2019) calls action theories, that is, perceived as meaningful in relation to this practice. There is a risk that material from, for example, educational research is interpreted and used in ways dissonant to what was intended by the researchers. The AD then, having acted as a broker, introducing a model or a concept to a teacher who reinterprets these in new and somewhat unintended ways, at least partly is responsible for this – in some ways inappropriate behaviour – even though what the teacher did might have resulted in better teaching and student learning.

The relationship to research material for the AD therefore sometimes becomes a bargain between correct use (that is, as intended by the researcher/s), and a more pragmatic adaptation while seeking improvement of a teaching practice.

Some ADs try to resolve this tension by emphasising the ‘right’ way to use research results. This can include assessing academic teachers’ use of material from educational research. Definitions and sources are foregrounded with the chance of reifying the meaning of the material according to its original intentions. However, doing so risks limiting the individual teacher’s opportunity to make meaning of or localise a concept for productive use in their development-work. This potential trade-off between on the one hand correct, and on the other productive, use of research material can be hard to balance.

Many ADs develop a pragmatic relationship to research material being used, something that can create or add to a conflict with educational researchers. We have seen ADs struggle with this, trying to find an appropriate balance even when the individual has a background in educational research. We do indeed consider AD work as an academic practice, where codes of conduct in academia have to be followed, but this work also entails inhabiting a role that gains its entire value from how it contributes to the development of educational processes. ADs need support from other ADs both to perceive this tension and to find a reasonable balance.

ADs as producers of research

As stated above, ADs enter the profession from a range of disciplines (Green & Little, 2016). Some are trained in education, but many come from other disciplines. This means that the individual AD often has an identity within a discipline other than education when they start to work in AD. This identity can also be a research identity. Since academic development as a field around the world increasingly includes research activities, individual ADs may be faced with the choice of maintaining a research focus developed in their previous discipline, or to develop a new focus inside academic development. We have seen both.

For individual Ads, the tension is often experienced as an identity issue: whether to remain a guest in academic development and keep my roots elsewhere, or whether to embark on a new and somewhat insecure research trajectory. Some ADs spend time in academic development before they return to their first discipline. Some ADs develop a new research identity in academic development. It is identity-work that sometimes needs a lot of time and energy as well as support from others.

From a wider perspective, it is fair to say that academic development is an under-researched field. Theories available are still often ‘borrowed’ from other fields: that is, not fully adapted to academic development, even if IJAD and other venues encourage the theoretical growth of the field. Alternatively, theories are often heuristic in nature and therefore still in need of refinement to become reliable and really useful. Hence, the field needs research that is situated from within.

Perception of the frames within which academic developers work

Most of the text above deals with academic development work and academic developers as if they owned their trajectories without external interference. This is far from true. In most contexts ADs are dependent on their institutions and institutional leaders; they are dependent on cultures and traditions inside other professions, such as disciplinary teaching cultures. National influences, like decreased funding for higher education and quality regimes, also impact AD work, just as they impact others in higher education – and these are to mention just a few of the things that frame AD work.

But we have seen repeatedly that as ADs grapple with the other dimensions, they also change their perception of the frames that in an absolute sense may remain the same, but in a relative way change as the individual AD develops. Even though the context in which ADs are active determines what can be done or not, it appears as if in comparison to the frames, the identity or self-perception of an individual AD is far more flexible and therefore in some sense also more powerful.

Implications and conclusions

So what? Our aim with this text is to offer reflections on the professional development of academic developers, in light of the expanding scope of our field. The trajectories we have reflected upon above are, in our experience, common patterns of development when academic developers participate in semi-formal professional development activities. These patterns are by no means exclusive, and they can certainly develop in other ways too. What we want to argue is that as academic developers we all need to find forms not only to support others’ learning but also our own, in the midst of our practice. We hope that the dimensions we have put forward can be used as creative devices for ADs to develop new and interesting insights about professional development. Perhaps these dimensions, and other yet to be explored, can form a basis or a backbone for professional development activities. These can certainly take many forms: conferences, portfolios, networks, reading, and writing, and they can be obtained through self-reflection, collaboratively, semi-formally, or through strict research. Academic development is still a stranger to many and has been called a ‘hybrid’-function (Edström, 2013): in between academic and scholarly practice, and institutional service. Furthermore, as AD becomes more mainstream and public, ADs gain ‘strategic positions’ within institutions and they are also offered ‘responsibilities in collaboration with institutional leaders, as “brokers” and “bridge-builders”’ (Sugrue et al., 2018). This results in higher levels of demand for not only professional development but also professional awareness, something that requires collaboration with colleagues. Indeed, one specific piece of advice from the directors in Kensington-Miller et al’s study (Kensington-Miller et al., 2012) is to ‘develop a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) with new academic developers from different tertiary institutions to work collectively through meaningful connections’ (p. 131). In this text we have offered an example of such an activity, and some of the effects it has had.

One result of the programmes we have run, is that ADs initiate collaborative projects across their institutions: projects that have ended up receiving national funding, resulted in publications, and acted as cross-institutional influence. Even though most participants’ projects have had impact locally, as far as we know, we consider the main consequence to be the collegial networks created and the expansion of a deeper understanding of the complexity of AD work. In light of the changing character of academic development, as becoming wider and more complex (Gibbs, 2013; Sugrue et al., 2018), and striving to become more holistic (Sutherland, 2018), support for our own professional development is much needed. We think that the example put forward in this text is one potential pathway to develop ourselves within and as a community.

Our reflections above on the trajectories of ADs, span across the three main themes of contributions to IJAD identified by Baume (2016): the people, the field, and the work. These themes are interwoven in the practical work we do and can inform change both in itself and in relation to ourselves and others as individual ADs, or even the way our entire profession develops. The five dimensions put forward here should be seen as a contribution to our community’s joint understanding of the changing nature of AD. We are humbly grateful for every opportunity to interact and learn together with colleagues from around the world. Our text could not have been written without these interactions. Therefore, in a way, this text is indeed one expression of the lifeworld of academic developers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katarina Mårtensson

Katarina Mårtensson is senior lecturer and academic developer at Lund University since 2000. Her research focuses on academic development in relation to collegiality, leadership and organisational development. She supports academic teachers and leaders to develop teaching and learning, and educational programmes. She also has some international commitments, such as being co-editor of Teaching & Learning Inquiry, the journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, ISSOTL, where she was co-president 2016-2019. Together with Torgny Roxå, she received the price for the Article of the Year, 2017, offered by the International Journal for Academic Development.

Torgny Roxå

Torgny Roxå is an associate professor at Lund University (Sweden) and has 30 years of experience in academic development. His research is focused upon strategic change in teaching cultures within higher education organisations, significant networks, and microcultures. He has organised and taught at several professional development activities for Academic Developers in Sweden and internationally. Together with Katarina Mårtensson, he received the price for the Article of the Year, 2017, offered by the International Journal for Academic Development. Currently he is actively engaged in the Norwegian centre for excellence in education, iEarth (Centre for Integrated Earth System Science Education).