Conversations that make meaningful change in teaching, teachers, and academic development

This special issue is both about and a product of conversations. Academic developers from across the globe submitted more than 120 proposals and papers in response to our call for research and reflections on the conditions that enable, and the changes that emerge from, ‘significant conversations’ about teaching in higher education (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2009, 2015). Pairs or teams of authors drafted nearly every submission, revealing the conversations at the heart of academic development scholarship and practice.

This editorial also is both about and a product of conversations. For more than two years, this special issue’s four co-editors have been emailing and talking. We have learned an immense amount from the manuscripts submitted, the reviews of those papers, and our conversations through the process. Sometimes we had flashes of insight. Sometimes we disagreed. Sometimes we struggled to make sense of it all. In this editorial we will synthesize our current thinking and introduce the papers in the issue, and we will share snippets from our own conversations. We are confident these papers make a major contribution to the research on and the practice of academic development. We also are confident that this special issue raises more questions than it answers. Isn’t that always the case with a good conversation?

Is trust necessary for conversations or an outcome of conversations? (Torgny)

It might appear that trust is necessary, but we don’t have the evidence to back that up. Let’s not oversimplify. (Gabriela)

Significant conversations about teaching often occur ‘backstage’ (Goffman, 1956; Roxå & Mårtensson, 2009), at the fringe of formal events such as workshops or conferences – or in liminal spaces like coffee shops or Zoom rooms, far from any academic development programme. Unlike ‘frontstage’ teaching dialogue that often is done to academics at the behest of institutional leaders, significant conversations with or among colleagues are characterized by mutual respect, reciprocity, and the sharing of values and practices – and also some degree of risk and vulnerability as conversation partners wrestle with the uncertainty, complexity, and even failure that are inherent in teaching.

In situations with a strong demand on professionals to remain credible, Molloy and Bearman (2019) argue, behaviour easily becomes ritualised. Making errors or showing signs of vulnerability may lead to blame and stigmatisation. Therefore, in many situations, academic teachers, working in what can be prestigious environments where academic rigour and credibility are the main currencies, may hesitate to engage in situations of doubt or uncertainty in relation to teaching and student learning. Still, to learn, they need to take that risk of exposing themselves. To promote informal conversations about teaching and learning means inviting more people to take that risk. Thus, exploring conditions for and examples of emerging informal conversations may support academic developers in encouraging more academic teachers, academic managers, and academic administrative personnel to take that risk.

Perhaps once we better understand trust, vulnerability, and change, we will have a clearer sense of how academic developers can enable significant conversations. (Peter)

Prospect theory might help us think about when and why teachers are willing to take these kinds of risks. (Gabriela)

Kahneman and Tversky developed prospect theory to explain how people make economic decisions in situations that involve risk and uncertainty (Kahneman, 2011; Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). In a nutshell, prospect theory suggests that people tend to be loss-averse, meaning that their decisions are guided more by a dislike of loss than the possibility of gains. This theory has been tested and adapted in many disciplines, demonstrating that in a wide variety of contexts people are willing to assume risk and to tolerate uncertainty when they feel they are in the ‘domain of gains’, which sometimes is called the ‘win zone’ – a situation where meaningful change appears more likely and appealing than loss (Mercer, 2005).

These insights have implications for the ways academic developers can support and seed meaningful conversations and change. How do we create conditions that invite and encourage academic teachers to set aside or tamp down their professional and personal risk-aversion so that they can embrace the possibility of meaningful change in their teaching and their students’ learning?

Perhaps the essential first step is to recognize that being open to change is a risk for academic teachers. Hesitating or turning away in the face of uncertainty and loss is a very human response. Academic developers would be wise to empathize with and respect that reaction as we work with colleagues, rather than seeing it as a sign of hostility or disinterest. To create the possibility of a ‘win zone’ we need to help teachers see academic development as a space of worthwhile work within a trusting and trusted community of colleagues. This echoes recent scholarship that demonstrates the importance of academic development focusing on meaningful questions and practices (Bolander Laksov, 2019; Condon et al., 2016), holistic understandings of our colleagues and our work (Sutherland, 2018; Timmermans & Sutherland, 2020), and conditions that foster care, trust, and agency (McGrath, 2020; Stocks & Trevitt, 2016; Timmermans et al., 2018).

In the end, how do backstage conversations and academic development contribute to more equitable teaching and learning? (Kate)

How do we create conversations strong enough to withstand discourses with hegemonic potential, for example, neoliberalism? (Torgny)

Academic developers are faced with the wicked problem of contributing to evidence-based learning that is accessible, sustainable, and equitable – working with our colleagues and across our institutions to nurture education that co-creates good citizens for a just society (Bass, 2020; Solbrekke & Sugrue, 2020). A defining feature of wicked problems is that they do not have straightforward or familiar solutions. That is certainly the case with this special issue. Yet as we live through times wracked by a global pandemic, climate change, social and economic inequities, and more, academic developers cannot behave as if our work takes place in a vacuum. We need to ask ourselves and each other: ‘amid the array of contested and politically difficult agendas, how do academic developers enact and imagine a future for themselves (and the profession) in ways that recognise and take seriously the business of their own political power, and in particular, their responsibility to speak truth to power?’ (Peseta, 2014, p. 65). Our answers to that question will vary based on our contexts and positionality, but no matter who we are or where we work, we should consider: ‘What resources do academic developers draw on to exercise their own agency? What is afforded through our positions?’ (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2017, p. 101).

Those questions bring us back to the theme of this special issue. Significant conversations are both a process for and a product of meaningful change in academic development. Indeed, by nurturing backstage conversations among academic teachers, we are contributing to the possibility – not the certainty – of enhanced teaching while also cultivating a generative culture that enables further and deeper change. This is difficult, ambiguous work. Yet the prospect for meaningful change is worth the risk, and the process of engaging in conversations about teaching can be enduring, connective, and transformative (Spitzner & Meixner, 2021).

What have we learned about the role of informal conversations in supporting teachers in making meaningful change? (Kate)

This special double issue on pedagogical conversations features twelve research papers and three reflections. Contributions come from a wide variety of pedagogic contexts in Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They look at academic development in newly established initiatives, programmes that have existed for years, and courses that have been offered for decades. They address pedagogical conversations that emerge through myriad strategies, from formal peer observation of teaching and student-faculty partnerships to informal lunches and online chat. Some of these conversations are among doctoral students, while others involve senior academics. This variety yields a rich, complex picture of how, why, and in what contexts talking about learning and teaching does – or does not – contribute to meaningful change.

The research articles and reflections in this issue suggest five conditions that individually and collectively form a foundation of pedagogical conversations that can transform teachers’ conceptions and practice:

1. Cross-disciplinary participation

2. Trustful relationships

3. Conducive spaces

4. Co-construction practices

5. Caring attitudes

These conditions might be created intentionally by teachers and academic developers, or they might emerge less deliberately. Unsurprisingly, the presence of multiple conditions leads to greater opportunity for meaningful change.

Cross-disciplinary participation

Significant conversations on learning and teaching are typically encouraged when conversing teachers come from various disciplines and departments. This condition is mentioned in half of the studies in this issue. For instance, Dorner and Belic describe how their institution invested in organising regular lunch-time discussions about learning and teaching, which were attended over eight years by more than 500 faculty members across many departments. Locating these conversations in the Center for Teaching and Learning reinforced the importance of situated pedagogical reflections. Making these conversations interdisciplinary helped to overcome the hierarchies that often hinder teaching development within a department. Dorner and Belic also report that over time these pedagogical conversations evolved from being mostly focused on individual development, to facilitating collective learning and institutional changes.

Mooney and Miller-Young engage teachers in a different type of cross-disciplinary activity: the educational development interview. In this structured conversation, an educational developer and an academic teacher meet to uncover the teacher’s tacit knowledge (the decoding interview), reveal the teacher’s complicit knowledge (the disrupting interview), or to conceptualise the teacher’s experiential knowledge (the storying interview). These conversations are designed to benefit the teacher, and the interviewer always is an outsider to the teacher’s discipline to facilitate questioning. Mooney and Miller-Young show meaningful outcomes from these interviews, illustrating the potential of structured interviews to support conversation-based academic development.

Conversations between colleagues from different disciplines also are central to lesson study. This technique originated in Japan and is mostly employed in primary and secondary education, although the example here is in higher education. Lesson study is an enquiry-based practice that involves careful observation of and discussion about a specific teaching incident. While collaborating teachers might come from the same discipline, a ‘knowledgeable other’ participates in the lesson study to direct the teachers’ attention to student learning. Hervas and Medina report that teachers who participated in their lesson study initiative primarily discussed their lesson design rather than instruction or students, disappointing the programme leaders who had hoped that this method would stimulate teachers’ curiosity about student learning. This paper suggests that academic developers must act intentionally – and perhaps sometimes intrusively – to support meaningful change.

Doctoral students’ conversations are the centre of attention in Soomere and Karm’s study. The authors find that a formal course helped doctoral students to understand the value of pedagogical conversations, opened them to diverse perspectives, and improved their capacity to reflect. The course participants highlighted the value of conversations between colleagues from different disciplines. Many (though not all) said they continued to converse about teaching with colleagues they had met during the course. These conversations sometimes compensated for the lack of opportunities to talk about teaching with supervisors who may resist or neglect talking about teaching. However, in some instances supervisors began to see their doctoral students as advisors for their own teaching (for a similar finding, see the study by Simon and Pleschová in this issue).

Cross-disciplinary peer observation is another tool used to stimulate pedagogical conversations and desired change in thinking and practice. O’Keeffe and colleagues report on a programme that engaged academic teachers from various disciplines in observing and discussing teaching practice. The cross-institutional nature of this study – a novel approach that might be pursued by other academic developers – encouraged authentic, even risky, reflective conversations that allowed participants to uncover teaching-related assumptions and helped them to move away from perceiving teaching as a solitary practice. This study also highlights the significance of reflecting back on learning several years after the programme and underlines the central role of the academic developer in creating an environment of trust to enable teachers to discuss learning. In this way it offers an example of blending several conditions to drive change.

Trustful relationships

Trustful relationships are a second condition for pedagogical conversations that make change. Simon and Pleschová offer a definition of trust in academic development: trust is a willingness to become vulnerable, based on positive expectations of another person’s behaviour or intentions. Drawing on literature from a range of disciplines, Pleschová and Simon identify three dimensions of trust: ability, benevolence, and integrity. This study concludes that participation in an academic development programme increased the trustworthiness of doctoral students by making them expert conversation partners (a finding in line with that reported by Soomere and Karm in this issue). In some cases, programme attendance also decreased participant trust in certain colleagues such as supervisors, course leaders, or other faculty members. Lack of trust was found to limit teaching conversations in general and to constrain attention to certain topics in particular, including such pivotal issues as students, the syllabus, and self-reflection on teaching.

Trust, vulnerability, and intimacy anchor conversations between Spitzner and Meixner, two academic teachers of statistics who work at different universities and who also are life partners. They struggled to have significant pedagogical conversations with colleagues from their own institutions, so they turned to each other. These authors share how collaborative ethnography gave form and depth to their regular talk and encouraged them to reconsider their teaching-related assumptions, particularly related to trust and vulnerability in their pedagogy. Although rooted in the stories of one couple, this article offers generalisable insights about trusting and risky talk about teaching.

Trust also is a key factor in the creation and advancement of an interdisciplinary community of practice (CoP) among the scholars of teaching and learning in the study authored by Boschman and colleagues. Faculty joined the CoP because they trusted individuals in the community, most often the academic developer who facilitated the CoP – revealing how trust develops in and through conversations over time. The authors conclude that curiosity, readiness to challenge one’s own learning-related assumptions, willingness to collaborate, and a commitment to student learning served as foundational pre-conditions for building trust within this CoP, and for the meaningful changes that emerged from these conversations.

Conducive spaces

Thomson and Barrie explore how academics use informal conversations to overcome unsupportive teaching contexts. They find that proximity, similarity, and camaraderie help academics to have significant conversations about teaching. In their study, a frequently mentioned positive factor is a conducive space for academics to talk about teaching – a corridor, meeting room, coffee machine, or other place that fosters informal discussion. However, space alone is not sufficient for meaningful talk. Thomson and Barrie (echoing the studies above) report that trustful relationships, often friendships, also play a crucial role in enabling significant conversations about teaching in an institutional environment that privileges research.

Chadha begins her reflection by observing that in her experience, meaningful informal teaching conversations almost never occur in formal university settings. To initiate significant conversation, the space needs to feel comfortable and safe. In her own practice, she nurtures such spaces by providing refreshments and making herself vulnerable by sharing her own teaching struggles – taking on and mitigating some of the risk that can inhibit these conversations in more ‘frontstage’ spaces.

Finding a place for honest conversations on learning is vital also for Ndlovu, Msiza, and Mbatha. These early career academics created such a space, Room32, for themselves at the outskirts of their campus where they refurbished an old, forgotten room. They explain how conversations in Room32 contrasted with the much less helpful frontstage conversations that dominated other university settings. The liminality in Room32 sparked meaningful conversations and change that were not possible elsewhere on campus.

Gachago and colleagues analyze a convenient space they found for academic development and pedagogical conversations during the disruption of COVID-19: WhatsApp. The authors describe how this group retreated to a ‘third place’ after they could not continue their usual ways of working together. They used this virtual space to build courage and support for each other, and also to exchange ideas about effective practices in new conditions. Because each of them often presented at institutional meetings or workshops, invested considerable time in supporting their colleagues, and provided consultations on teaching innovations, their WhatsApp conversations allowed them to grow as eLearning champions and even to accrue some degree of influence across the institution. The authors conclude with sharing their understanding of the mission of educational developers: to transform institutions into caring places of teaching and learning – for all.

Co-construction practices

Before academic developers succeed in transforming institutions, they often need to work with experienced teachers who have ossified ways of teaching and little motivation for change. Stacey and Chan describe how co-teaching and student-faculty partnerships can become a vehicle for change even for such long-established teachers. While co-teaching presumes willingness to show vulnerability, a student-faculty partnership requires preparedness to share authority and decision-making. The authors show how these two elements frequently fed into significant backstage conversations, building trustful relationships and changing attitudes of academic teachers. Care about learning and trust (resulting from repeated co-teaching experiences, intensive collaboration in many teaching-related areas, and combining co-teaching with student-faculty partnership) also emerged as important conditions for transformative conversations about teaching and learning.

Student-faculty partnerships also are a catalyst of significant pedagogical conversations in the study by Cook-Sather and colleagues. This paper presents a case of three early career academic teachers from different disciplines who participated in a seminar facilitated by an academic developer and who engaged student consultants outside their discipline to improve their classes. Co-creative practices are shown to be essential to building the trustful student-faculty partnerships that make possible deep reflection and lasting change for academics at a high-risk moment in their new careers.

Caring attitudes

Iqbal and Vigna conclude this special issue by weaving together a theme that runs through many of the papers – the centrality of care in significant conversations and academic development. These authors use the story of their ‘peer review of teaching marathon’ to reveal how kindness and mutual care established the foundation for vulnerability, community, and, ultimately, change that moved from their one-on-one work into all of the teaching and interactions in their professional lives: ‘Care progressed outward, through pedagogical conversations, to a larger higher education community’ (Iqbal & Vigna, 2021, p. 386).

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED) for sponsoring this special double issue. The proposal for this special issue emerged from a collaborative international project, ‘Extending and Reinforcing Good Practice in Teacher Development’ (2016-1-SK01-KA203-022551), which was co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission. Lynn McAlpine suggested proposing this special issue and Martin Slobodník, Dean of the Faculty Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava, kindly provided his own office for writing the original proposal. Special thanks to all the contributors as well as the many, many reviewers. Thanks also to the colleagues with whom we discussed this special issue, the editorial, and academic development more broadly – your expertise, critical questions, and generosity of spirit have deeply informed this issue. All final editorial decisions for this special issue were made by the co-editors who did not themselves have manuscripts under review.

Disclosure statement

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