Educational developers tend to be located in centres and units of teaching and learning outside the academic mainstream. They have little opportunity to engage in scholarship. Through an overview of the literature on educational development and educational professional roles and responsibilities, the author suggests that promoting a culture of…

Universities have a long history of change in learning and teaching to suit various government initiatives and institutional priorities. Academic developers now are frequently required to address strategic learning and teaching priorities. This paper asks how, in such a context, academic developers can ensure that work they do in relation to one…

Six academics at a regional university in Australia engaged in collaborative research examining their teaching and learning practices, their current understandings and beliefs about teacher education pedagogy and, specifically, the online teaching and learning environments. This collegial self-study project was guided by the goal of achieving…

With the acceleration of globalization, academic developers from institutions and countries with established educational development programs and networks are called upon increasingly to share their expertise and offer guidance to colleagues in emerging higher education contexts. Based on a higher education conference held in Beijing in 2009, this…

This paper describes a strategy for successfully implementing the teaching portfolio in higher education institutions in Japan. The teaching portfolio has gained recognition in Japan in the last few years as an effective instrument for improving and showcasing teaching performance. It is well known that the implementation process is very important…

Academics in an engineering school at an Australian university participated in peer observation of a teaching program using a partnership approach. The present case study explains and discusses program aims, design, process and outcomes. The success of the program was dependent on four critical elements: educational leadership; a staged,…

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has blossomed as a field of study over the past two decades. In addition to the highly successful conferences of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), there is now a substantial, growing, and diversifying range of refereed published outputs. Additionally, a…

This paper presents the cooperative analysis by a lecturer and an academic development practitioner of a reflective journal dialogue over the 12 weeks of teaching a postgraduate course. Through a retrospective analysis of the journal the present paper explores the following issues: the framing of an inquiry; the personal-professional nexus; and…

This paper argues that academic development is a creative act. Creative acts have potential to inspire, critique, inform and in many cases to change. The creativity literature identifies a number of core features of creative acts that assist in developing independent creative practitioners. Those features are observing, attending to relationships,…

Research into undergraduate research and inquiry in Australian universities was conducted during an Australian Learning and Teaching Council National Teaching Fellowship. In this paper we share experiences of this project as a student and an academic, reflecting on key challenges, including undergraduate research as an immersion experience for…

While the goal of improving student learning in a personal teaching context is considered by many to be a hallmark of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects, the outcomes are almost invariably communicated to other teachers. The intention may be to gain endorsement and support for ongoing implementation of new practices and/or to…

This interview-based study investigates staff perceptions of their involvement in a university centre which focuses on the development of assessment for learning (AfL) approaches. Learning about assessment is examined both as conceptual change and within communities of practice. Involvement in the centre ranged from perceived exclusion to culture…

Academic developers are often positioned as intermediaries who wield value-neutral tools--languages, models, and techniques--in service of decidedly non-neutral institutional goals. We challenge the value of perpetuating the ideal of the neutrality of academic developers and their tools by examining the ways in which our resources and approaches…

Drawing on cartography, urban design and visual data modelling, we consider how people navigate, or fail to navigate, the mental, physical and social spaces of knowledge communities. Cartographically inspired critical thinking offers opportunities to re-examine the assumptions and formal maps of post-secondary institutions, visualizing…

This article presents a humanistic dialogue between the authors that focuses on mapping place and identity in academic development. The authors chose this format in order to capture some of the important work that conversation among intellectual peers can do--work that forms the basis of much learning at conferences and in the corridors and…