Category Archives: academic developer

Ed Tech must reads – Column 16

First published in Campus Morning Mail on Tuesday 30th November 2021

Edtech people weekend challenge – Twitter discussion

I found this stimulating discussion started by @BenPatrickWill on the weekend. “If you (hypothetically) had 15 mins to address your university senior managers about the future of edtech, and it was your best chance to bring in some critical perspectives, what would you highlight?” If you’re a leader, and you ever wondered… (Or if you ever wondered what you’d say if you were trapped in a lift with them)

How to hold a better class discussion from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Class discussions can be a lottery – one day everyone is excited and engaged and the next, you struggle to extract one-word responses. Jay Howard shares some invaluable practical advice in this piece that draws on 30 years of research. Some top tips – put the work back onto the learners, ask more complex questions that support creativity, encourage students to call out great ideas from their peers.

 Why aren’t Professors taught to teach? from Tech & Learning

The fact that I thought twice about sharing this piece, which is fairly inoffensive in itself, says something about the politics around this in Higher Education. Institutions do, of course, offer a range of services and specialists that provide support to academics in teaching and ed tech – this is part of the work that I do and this is my community. This article asks the questions that I’ve been hearing a lot recently – are we doing enough and where do we go next?

Pedagogy for Higher Education Large Classes (PHELC) 2021 proceedings from PHELC (Open Access)

One of the areas where pedagogy/andragogy and technology enhanced learning veers dramatically away from K-12 learning is when it comes to large classes. The PHELC21 symposium was held in June and the full proceedings are now available. This collection of papers includes work on engagement, course redesign, problem-based learning at scale and drawing classes.

Ed Tech must reads – Column 7

First published in Campus Morning Mail 28th Sept 2021

How Dx Powers the Post-Pandemic Institution from Educause   

We started with UX (User Experience), moved on to LX (Learner Experience), and now the ed tech world is talking about Dx, which appears to stand for Digital Transformation. (Don’t ask me why). Meaningful change to learning and teaching involving technology requires an approach encompassing technology, pedagogy and institutional culture. In the absence of a large body of academic research or models relating to how these kinds of educational change projects work at scale, a lot of these kinds of projects lean on generic IT project management strategies. This post from Educause, and the rich resources that it links to, presents discussion and frameworks for undertaking Dx specifically in educational institutions.

Why captions are everywhere on TikTok: ‘Glasses for your ears’ from Los Angeles Times

With some reports indicating that people now spend more time watching videos on TikTok than YouTube, it’s worth keeping an eye on the ways that the format of video content on this platform is evolving. This article from the LA Times dives into the widespread use of text captions – both automatically and manually generated – to augment video content on TikTok for all users, for a variety of reasons. While educational institutions still largely use captioning for accessibility and research findings about the impact of them on learning is mixed, the fact that it is becoming commonplace for people to turn captions on for Netflix as we multitask while viewing shows suggests that more thought needs to be given to text in videos in education.

Why are hyperlinks blue? From dist://ed Mozilla blog

While they aren’t always blue and underlined, the default setting for a link to another page in HTML is resolutely underlined blue. In our years online, we have doubtless seen tens or hundreds of thousands of these links and seldom given this a thought – it is simply a convention of the web. This deep dive from the people at Mozilla (creators of the Firefox browser) travels back to the origins of hyperlinks in the 1960s and traces the design decisions that led us to this convention.

An OPM Debate: 11 Colleagues in 32 Tweets from Inside Higher Ed

Online Program Management (OPM) is a rapidly expanding sector in Higher Education that is not widely discussed. In a nutshell, they are businesses outsourced by institutions to provide services including learning design, course building and student recruitment, support and administration, among others, in the online course space. In Australia, this includes Kaplan, Keypath and OES. I recently came across this post from 2019 that summarises a Twitter discussion about OPMs between executives and academics in the US that still has some relevance. It crosses a range of issues including HE values, where innovation comes from, who pays for risk and how academia and industry see each other.

Stem Mixer from Courtney Barnett

Courtney Barnett is a big-name Melbourne indie-music darling with a new record coming out. She’s done something interesting to promote this, putting up a virtual mixing desk allowing fans to play with a new song (or an old one) by isolating different instruments, looping sections, and raising and lowering levels. Tools like this are great for teaching people how audio production works and creating opportunities to play while doing so.  

Reflecting on: The Academic/Professional divide

YouTube captioning tries so hard but sometimes it doesn’t quite get there

I ran a webinar for the ASCILITE TELedvisors network on Thursday, with a focus on Academic Developers. One of the things that I’m enjoying most about the research process is the way that it lets you put the existing research literature and your own ideas to the test.

Of the three broad edvisor types that I believe reasonably sum us up (Academic Developers, Learning Designers, Education Technologists), it seems that ADs are the most clearly defined. I’d suggest that this is because they are almost entirely academic roles, which makes it much easier for ADs to undertake research relating to their work. One of my go-to references has been the International Journal of Academic Development. I’ve never come across a journal for educational technologists.

Based on the literature, my experiences and those of my colleagues, I’d say that one of the biggest barriers to effective collaboration between edvisors and academics is the academic/professional divide. I’d characterise this as an underlying tribalism that comes from a sense of one side not really understanding the drives and day to day experiences of the other. At its worst there can be an element of snobbery at play but for the most part it seems to come from Higher Ed culture that has customarily been relatively siloed and ‘us and them’.

All of the presenters noted that they felt that by holding an academic role as ADs, academic teaching staff were more likely to take their advice seriously. When I asked what professional staff might do to earn this kind of relationship of trust, most of the answers were variations on a theme of spending 1-1 time with academic teaching staff and demonstrating your knowledge. Which I appreciate but at the same time, this seems to have significant limitations.

Discussion about how professional staff can develop same relationship of trust with academics as Academic Developers have

Another recurring idea was that academic teaching staff will respond more to advice about teaching and learning when it is tied to evidence based research and theory. I can see the value of this and I wonder if there is a case for more effective use of it when it comes to the dissemination of institutional learning and teaching initiatives in particular. Part of me does wonder though, whether this creates an escape clause for some of the less engaged academic teaching staff who might just pick holes in the theory to justify not doing something they had no interest in doing in the first place. But maybe that happens anyway. And maybe worrying about the worst cases at the expense of the greater population isn’t that helpful.

One more area that I think the academic/professional divide is manifested is within edvisor circles. While all the presenters seem respectful of edvisors in professional roles, there did at times seem to be a gap in understanding of the depth of the pedagogical knowledge and skill of learning designers and education technologists. One of the aspects of my research that I’m hoping will shed more light on this is exploring the way that edvisor units are organised in institutions. Whether ADs work alongside LDs and ETs or whether they are all separate. I have a feeling that we lean towards the latter and that this can lead to these understanding gaps. The fact that we had representatives of two AD only communities of practice that there is a strong sense of operating in a specialised domain. (Though I have noticed similar gaps between LDs and ETs at times, in professional roles).

I’ll be very interested to see if there are differences in the levels and types of collaborations based on organisational structures. I think I need to explore organisational theory a little more deeply here – it’s moving away from education to an extent but I suspect that it might be enlightening. Do you have any suggestions about this? Leave a comment (if commenting works) or say hi on twitter – I’m @gamerlearner

Research update #51: Been a long time Been a long time Been a long lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely time*

Actually it hasn’t been that lonely at all, life is pretty good on that front, but it certainly has been a long time since I last posted here – coming up to 3 months.

So why is that? Well, I moved cities and changed jobs for one thing. After 16 years in Canberra and three at ANU, I’ve finally returned to Melbourne to work as a Senior Learning Technologist at Swinburne University of Technology. It’s a step up in many ways and it also gives me an opportunity to develop some insights about how a centralised TEL support unit works.

In the times that I have found to work on revising my thesis proposal, which my supervisor has assured me can be a little late because life changes are factored in, I’ve been looking at some significant structural issues and fleshing out the core areas that have been a little thin or overlooked. Conducting more empirical research on edvisor numbers, origins and edvisor unit structures absolutely makes sense, given the paucity of existing data – it’s virtually all feelpinions, the closer I look at it – and I’m also starting to realise that while I like Bourdieu’s ideas about power and belonging, I have nothing to say that smarter people haven’t already said about it or used it for.

I’m also trying to work out how this research can dovetail with the wider objectives of the TELedvisors SIG and how both can inform the other. It hadn’t occur to me that this was something that I could talk about in my research proposal but Peter sees it as a strength, so that sounds good to me. This does mean that I need to explore some new ideas (such as Participatory Design and Development) to see if that can give this a framework but my ducks are now all in a row and I’m well into the process of actually rewriting draft 2.

There is a mountain more to learn in my new role – far more management and operational responsibility than I’m accustomed to – and we’re in the midst of some massive projects (transitioning from Blackboard to Canvas, rolling up Echo360 ALP upgrades and training, looking for an ePortfolio, looking at badges, developing an education technology evaluation pipeline) but I’m incredibly glad to be here.

Yesterday’s TELedvisor SIGs both look like they could be particular helpful in both work and study as well. Check them out below.

 

Research update #48: Proposal writing day 16 – Hitting paydirt

So you know how they say that you’ll never feel like you’ve read enough for your lit review and there comes a point where you just need to stop and work with what you have? Well I’m glad that I ignored that advice, the stuff that I’m finding now just keeps getting richer and richer.

I came across some work done a decade ago that took a deep dive into the nature of academic developer roles, practices, units and everything else here in Australia and brought together the heads of most of the teams to thrash through the ideas.

https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/afda4788-9421-4ee5-a3d4-fb055bfc4dfb/1/PDF%20%28Published%20version%29.pdf

The good news is that this backs up a lot of what I’ve found and experienced, I guess the bad news is that with all this data, little seems to have changed. Now it’ll be interesting to see what has and hasn’t been achieved since then and I’d say it also offers an opportunity to conduct similar research to get a longitudinal sense of what’s gone on.

That said, I will stop looking for new things for now as I’m keen to rewrite / revamp the existing lit section and want to give myself the time needed to get this done before 2018.

Research update #39: Proposal writing Day 3: “Rest day” but with some interesting revelations nonetheless

Well it was more a day where I’d made a previous commitment to sit on an interview panel for an Education Technologist position for a friend, followed shortly afterwards by a farewell party for a friend in the same unit.

I was able to take a couple of hours to glance over some of my earliest blog posts relating to this research, which were helpful in that I could see how much my question has evolved over time but perhaps lacked a little something in terms of direct relevance to the work that I’m doing now. Fortunately, the responses to the interview questions themselves did align more closely, albeit more in terms of gaining some additional background insights.

My assigned question to ask was along the lines of what technology do you see having an impact on higher education in the next 3-5 years? Something calling for a little crystal ball-gazing and my inclination was far more to give extra points to those who were unwilling to commit to specific products or brands. It was more about getting a sense of who is keeping an eye on things than getting the (impossible) right answer. Responses ranged from mobile devices (fairly likely though parts of my institution seem mystifyingly resistant to this) to AI, AR and drones. One candidate tried valiantly to steer this conversation around to rubrics and assessment and points for trying I guess.

The more revealing question was what do you think the role of an education technologist is? This was interesting because these were all people that had applied for a position with a specified set of criteria but the responses were still relatively varied. Clearly advising on and supporting the use of technology was a common theme in the responses but from there we seemed to veer into whichever areas the candidates felt they were strongest in. Fair enough, the point of the interview is to sell yourself. This included research, production of resources and information management skills. When we asked some to expand on their answers, by differentiating the technologist role from an ed designer or ed developer, things got more interesting. Before I started digging down into this field, my take was that a developer was more like a software or web developer than the more commonly used professional developer. One candidate felt that the ed dev would be building apps. Most got that the designer had more to do with course or curriculum design to varying degrees but most also recognised that there is a lot of overlap between all of these roles and the fact that they all had slightly different takes was good for me in that it reinforced what I’ve seen in the literature (and experienced in the day to day) about the fuzziness of most of these definitions.

I guess another interesting aspect of the interviews was in seeing where everyone had come from. We had people that had entered the field from graphic design, web and multimedia design, teaching and librarianship. For me, none of this disqualified anyone though the harsh reality is that in looking for someone able to hit the ground running, it’s hard not to favour someone with experience working with academics. How you get that experience in the first place is the real challenge I guess and I think I can probably expand a little on the pathways/entry point ideas section – though I don’t feel that there has been a lot of discussion of this in the literature that I’ve seen to date.

So while I didn’t write much and I didn’t find a whole lot in my previous note-taking blog posts, I still feel like I came away with a few more ideas.

Research update #38: Proposal writing Day 2 – more on edvisors, less on edvisors & institutions

I’m kind of just staring at the screen now with 27 different tabs open across two browsers so I guess it’s time to take a mental break at the very least. Going by my schedule, I was meant to have knocked out 750 words on the relationship between edvisors and institutions – or my precisely I guess institutional management/leadership. I currently have 129.

But that’s because I only wrote about 500/1000 yesterday on edvisors more broadly. I think part of my challenge is that, first draft or not, I still like to try to turn out a moderately elegant sentence that flows smoothly into the next one and advances the story or idea. What I need to do is worry less about this and just get the brutish ugly ideas down so that they might be prettied up later.

The bigger issue though is that I didn’t put enough time into getting all my sources, quotes and ideas into a single location before I started writing. I’ve spent enough time with the literature to know broadly what it says and how I want to bring it together and I know I have the citations to support this but I didn’t put them all into the notes document. They are instead, scattered through this blog, Zotero and assorted stacks of paper with pencil notes scrawled all through them. The point of blogging about many of these papers was to create a searchable archive of these ideas but with the way that the question has changed over time, the way that I have tagged these posts has not quite kept pace.

I’m still enjoying the writing and being forced to commit to particular ideas and language, I’m just slightly up in the air about whether it would be more beneficial to stop and spend the time assembling everything before I proceed or if I should just press on, write what I can as a first draft and then come up with a much improved second draft by bringing all the stray elements together. The latter seems the way to go as I’m well versed in the fine arts of procrastination and preparation, endless preparation is absolutely one of my go-tos in this regard. The other advantage of just writing is that it will let me work out the structure a little better which should make the process of searching for and gathering the quotes and citations a lot simpler.

I hit the 1000 word target for the edvisors section just before lunch but later felt that a discussion of the place of credentialing might sit better in the edvisors and institutions section. I was also a little concerned that I was discussing literature without really explaining why or what I was looking for in particular, so once more I spent a little more time than planned on that section. I had initially planned on 2000 words for my discussion of edvisors in the literature but revised this to 1000 on advice from Lina. I have a feeling that I could probably hit the 2000 without too much trouble as I dig deeper into the tensions between academic and professional edvisors.

Most of my thinking until recently revolved around the bizarre love/hate triangle between academics, institutional management/leadership and edvisors and how this impacts upon collaborative relationships. I’d kind of put aside the internal tensions both between academics and professional staff – particularly in the academic developer space where there’s a big question about where scholarly research fits into edvisor practices – and also between variously located teams within institutions. Most commonly central vs college/faculty based but there is also some toe-treading that occurs between rival disciplinary teams. The good news is that it’s all just more material to work with.

So while I’m not hitting my perhaps ambitious writing targets yet, the ideas are flowing.

 

Research update #37: Proposal writing Day 1 – Edvisors lit review

writing plan dates

I’ve booked in two weeks leave from work to get at least a first draft of my thesis proposal together. There’s a loose structure in place and I’m all about just getting the words down at this stage. As a first draft, I’m allowing for it being relatively terrible – which is probably the hardest part because I do like the words that I use to work well together – and the plan is to have something to send off for feedback just before Christmas.

Given that I’m aiming for between 750-1000 words a day mostly, I think I’ll be spending the morning pulling together the various ideas, quotes and references in the morning and doing the writing writing in the afternoon.

Today the focus is on edvisors in the literature, which isn’t as easy as I’d thought given that part of the reason for the thesis is their lack of visibility in the research. Or, more to the point, the fact that a lot of what I’ve been looking at is more closely related to where they/we sit in the institution, our relationships with institutional leadership and academics and the strategies that we do and could use to improve this. What I’m left with is more the descriptive, defining kind of work. Breaking this up into the three core role types of academic developer, education designer and learning technologist should help and there’s still plenty of time to move things around.

Mostly I just need to remember that this is the literature section, so I’m really only to talk about what other people have been talking about. I guess I can talk briefly about what hasn’t been discussed but that seems like a trap in some ways as maybe it has and I just missed it. (Pretty sure this is a universal refrain among PhDers though)

If you do read this post and are aware of a strikingly significant article or book etc about the nature of edvisors (academic developers etc – I wonder how long I’m going to need to add this), please let me know.

 

Research update #36: Playing well with others

The nature of my research topic, with a focus on the status of professional staff in an academic world, feels risky at times. While I know that academic staff occupy edvisor roles as well, I have a feeling that I’ll be digging into sensitive areas around the academic/professional divide that often seem to be swept under the carpet because they raise uncomfortable questions about privilege and class in the academy and some entrenched beliefs about what makes academics special. It would be incredibly presumptuous for me to think that my ideas are all necessarily right and the point of research is to put them to the test and see where they take me but there’s a fair chance that some of what I’m going to have to say won’t always be well received by some of the people that I work with and who pay me. The other big issue is whether if my findings demonstrate a blind spot to professional staff in academics, those same academics responsible for assessing my research will see the value in my work.

Fortunately at this stage I don’t have my heart set on a career as an academic – I really do like doing what I do – but it seems imprudent to prematurely cut one’s options. I am conscious that I need to be more researcherly or scholarly in the language that I use in this space. I sent out a slightly provocative tweet yesterday, prompted by a separate (joke) tweet that I saw which said that the fastest way to assemble a bibliography was to publicly bemoan the lack of research in topic x. 

After 36 hours I’ve had no literature recommended but a university Pro Vice-Chancellor replied suggesting a collaboration on this area of mutual interest. Which surprised and flattered me greatly, considering that I was concerned that I’d come across as a little bolshie in my questions. Maybe it’s wrong of me to see academics as some kind of monolithic whole.

Maybe the trick is to just worry less and be honest. You can’t please everyone and if you can stand behind your work, maybe that’s enough.

I’m not sure. We seem to live in incredibly sensitive times.

 

 

Thoughts on: Agency and stewardship in academic development: the problem of speaking truth to power (Peseta, 2014)

In some ways this is a ‘thoughts on thoughts on’ as I’m writing about Tai Peseta’s summary reflection at the end of a special issue of the International Journal of Academic Development focusing on the politics of academic development. Specifically, it asked writers to respond to this theme:

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 (p.65)

I’ve been going to IJAD a lot in my reading because of those that I consider to be the three main edvisor roles – academic developer, education designer and learning technologist – it is academic developers that appear to dominate the research space. Which does make me wonder whether it is a role that is more dominated by people in academic (rather than professional) positions than the other two. Something I’ll be keeping an eye on.

The more time I spend looking at this particular role-type, the more I’m seeing the terms academic and educational developer used interchangeably, which doesn’t help my current line of thinking about education designers/developers primarily as people working with academics to design and built learning resources and online course sites. However it does fortunately still work with my other ideas that titles in the edvisor domain are all over the shop. 

Anyway, much of this is by the by. Peseta elegantly ties together the core ideas of five papers about academic developer practice across Europe, Canada and Australia into a wider discussion about how much power or influence ADs can or should exert in their institutions. The broad tone is that this power is far more than I have personally seen but she does note that there can often be a tendency in these kinds of papers to be slightly celebratory and overstate things. 

A second reading however is that while the collaboration portrayed in this account contains all the hallmarks of a cautious victory narrative, there remains an underlying question about the possible kinds of representation of academic development initiatives. In reflecting on our modes of justification, I find myself asking who is offering this story? How is the discursive field organised to enable this particular account of it?My goal is not to be cynical but rather to open up the spaces and meanings that illustrate the spectacle of academic development’s political power (p.67)

This mention of cynicism in particular brings me to what I found to be one of the most interesting parts of the author’s reflection. I must confess that in working in an environment where cynicism seemingly abounds, it is easy to travel down the same path. When mystifying decisions are handed down from on high with minimal or laughable consultation, information is fearfully hoarded by people that lack the capacity to use it well and there is a generally pervasive belief that most people don’t care about teaching and learning (vs research), it can seem like a natural progression to simply go with the cynical flow. Fortunately my job leads me more often than not to those people who do care about education and who are capable, so this at least tempers those inclinations.

It was revealing to see today in the results of the National Tertiary Education Union survey of 13500 university workers that only 27% expressed confidence in the people who run their various institutions. Sadly, clearly cynicism is the dominant culture. When we get to this state, I suspect that our ability to understand and empathise with the people that we work with and the cycle only worsens. Peseta discusses the Polish study in this issue where educational reform leaders described three institutional responses to change and characterised academics variously as:

…traditionalists, individualists, unaware, in pain, irrational, lazy, or inert. Each of these three logics permeates the policies of academic development in different ways with different reasons and leads to any number of reactions about the merits of institutional initiatives: pernicious, naive, neutral, welcome, celebratory and necessary. What is to be (or has been) our response to the contradictory reactions about our work as academic developers? What conceptual tools are at our disposal to understand the origins of these perceptions and to see arguments about them as a necessary part of an academic developer’s political repertoire. (p.67-68) 

 

There are some big ideas to unpack in this. The educational reform leaders in this study may well be right in their summary of many of the academics that they have tried to work with but they may equally have misunderstood what has led to these behaviours. They may be grossly oversimplifying the nature of their academics, which is a human thing to do when we find ourselves in opposition to someone who doesn’t share our vision. Their rejection of this vision then calls our own abilities into question and so rather than interrogate those, it’s far more comforting to attribute resistance to lesser personal qualities. (Which isn’t to say that they can’t be present as well, just to complicate matters).

At the heart of these issues (for ADs) I would suggest is the triangular relationship between institutional management, academics and academic developers. ADs are routinely forced into a position where they are tasked with effectively driving compliance to institutional policies and initiatives by offering training in ‘doing things the new/right way’ or trying to advocate best practices to the powers that be. This, to me, seems to be the issue of where and whether ADs should assert their political power. When things take the former route

Too heavy an emphasis on compliance without critical engagement leads to dull, bureaucratic box-ticking , and effectively hollows out academic development of its intellectual contribution. Similarly, accepting and lamenting resistance without considered debate or challenges entrenches tradition unthinkingly. Although both positions are productive and necessary for academic development to flourish as a critical encounter, they each contain an uneasy energy characteristic of Di Napoli’s (2014) agonistic spaces. Yet is in in precisely these spaces tha academic developers realise and grasp the power they have to form and practise their judgement, developing a feel for the game and what it means to be in it. In these spaces, the question which usually lurks is ‘what do I do with the power and influence I have?’  (p.66)

This is also perhaps where Peseta and I diverge a little – and I’ll readily accept that my experience in Higher Ed is limited to one institution – but, as a professional staff member, I’ve never had a feeling of any political power. This may simply be a reflection of my particular context or my lack of experience in politicking and the fact that the author and most of the authors of the papers in the special issue do feel that they have some degree of power has to make me wonder if ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. So this in itself has been something of a breakthrough in some ways and is giving me a lot to consider.

The author and the authors of the papers in the special issue spell out a number of strategic approaches to developing and exercising their power that are worth exploring. Many of them seem highly valuable but a handful I’d question.

From them we learn something about how teaching and learning issues unfold into urgent institutional problems; we develop an insight into the different ways academic developers read the rhythms of their contexts, draw on research, assemble arguments, and galvanise people and resources to reformulate and address the challenges before them. Most importantly, we get a sense of how a particular course of action is justified and argued for over others (p.67)

This to me positions ADs as providers of frank and fearless advice that draws on scholarly practices that senior academics and institutional management (generally the same thing) are more likely to respond to. It puts advocacy front and centre (alongside research) as a key practice of ADs. This is something that I’ve rarely seen specifically listed in job advertisements and position descriptions for these kinds of roles, although maybe it sits under ‘advise’. This certainly lends weight to my feeling that Peseta and the other authors largely see AD roles as being occupied by academics. This is extended in the discussion of the Norwegian paper

… we are privy to the insights of a very experienced group of academic developers and this shows in several ways: in their description of the political context and their participation in it; in their deployment of expertise (institutional know-how and educational research); their sense of what to argue for and what to withdraw from; and more generally, in the way they understand the possibilities and limits of academic development (through their choice of a sense-making framework: discursive institutionalism. This piece really shines when the sense-making apparatus kicks in: levels of ideas (policy, programme and philosophy); types of discourses (coordinative and communicative); and types of ideas (cognitive and normative)… It seems to me that one of the compelling lessons from this paper is about inducting academic developers into the scholarship of the field as an opportunity to debate and defend a set of views about higher education (p.68) (emphasis mine)

This quote leaves me a little unclear as to whether Peseta is suggesting that ADs should be inducted into the scholarship of the discipline being taught or broader scholarship about teaching and learning. (That’ll teach me to only read a summary of a paper and not the paper itself. Fear not, it’s on the long list). One question or idea that has come up a number of times in discussions within the TELedvisor community is whether academics need to better understand what edvisors do but I can see a strong case for going the other way. (Even when we assume that we know). If it is about delving into disciplinary scholarship (e.g. microeconomics) I’m less convinced, as much for the sheer feasibility of it all. Maybe being to ask questions about approaches to teaching and learning that align better to disciplinary practices and scholarship is a practical middle-ground.

Moving on to the study in the special issue by Debowski, Peseta notes a different strategic approach being taken by Australian ADs.

We find an Australian academic development scene keen on a model of partnership with its political allies: from external quality agencies to teaching and learning funding bodies. The politicisation is plausible enough but the distributed nature of the political game carries noteworthy and worrying epistemological effects. The first is that the job of academic development shifts to one of ‘translation’ and ‘implementation’, suggesting in part that the intellectual puzzles of learning and teaching in higher education have more or less been settled. Moreover the thorny and substantial issue of what (and whose) knowledge is being ‘translated’ and ‘implemented’ is left unattended. A second effect is tying oneself too closely to the external political game is that it can divert attention away from a commitment to the project of knowledge-making. (p.68)

Part of me has to wonder whether this different approach – between Norway and Australia – is reflective of national cultural characteristics or if it is simply a matter of the specific examples being examined. If my feeling that ADs don’t carry a lot of power in Australia is widely true, it would make more sense to lean on other authorities to help get things done.

Peseta draws her reflection to a close by reasonably asking

whether academic developers are eager to imagine themselves in the role of steward, where there is a job to be done in caring for the field – its history, ethics and politics – in ways that are future looking. It does seem to me that a condition of scholarship lies in academic developers’ disposition to scholarliness and scholarship, as well as a desire to know and immerse themselves in the peculiarities that comprise the field. If we are to better support academic developers in navigating the messy politics of the agency game, then we need more occasions to dispute, debate and deliberate on what it is that we offer learning and teaching in higher education. We need occasions to test our politics with others in and outside of the field. (p.69)

I would love to see this happening but having had a taste of institutional and academic culture where this absolutely does not happen, I can completely understand ADs wanting this but choosing to spare themselves from banging their heads against a brick wall. (And I thought I was going to be less cynical in this post). Maybe banging our heads against walls is a necessary part of a practice though.

I’ll wrap this post up with one more quote that I want to include but couldn’t find a way to fit into the discussion. I’ll certainly be reading more of this special issue as it clearly speaks directly to my research and hopefully I can also use it to spark wider discussion in the TELedvisor community.

What feels fresh and thrilling to me is that the lens of political ontology unlocks two important aspects of the work. First, it draws attention to the matter of justificatory politics, inviting us to interrupt the discourses that structure the accounts of our work as academic developers. While institutional capture provides academic development with much sought-after leverage and profile, it has the uncanny effect too of infantilising academic developers’ professional imagination such that our identities, values and actions can appear to outsiders as inseparable from what an institution requires. Second, the focus on ontology locates these interruptions as individual and collective acts of political agency, inciting us to lead more public conversations about our values at exactly the time when higher education’s purpose has multiplied. Without these conversations, there may be a temptation to position academic developers flexible and enterprising operators advocating on behalf of greedy institutions (Sullivan, 2003) regardless of their own professional and personal values. Many of us would baulk at this suggestion while reflecting on its distinct likelihood (p.66)

No punches pulled there.