Academics implementing graduate attributes, and the educational developers who support those academics, may experience graduate attributes and disciplinary knowledge and skills as unrelated dimensions of curriculum. Gestalt conceptions of curriculum, together with a figure-ground understanding of the relationship between disciplinary understanding…

Early career academia is a challenging time, particularly as academics are facing increasing pressures to excel across a range of areas. Boyer argued for the "true scholar" versed in the overlapping areas of scholarship in research, teaching, integration and engagement. Academic developers have an important role to play in assisting the…

There is limited research into the effectiveness of non-accredited foundational courses for new academic staff. An ongoing issue is that of attention and anxiety overload in the critical first period of employment when the challenges of establishing oneself in a new collegial environment are most acute. Approaches to addressing this issue may be…

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 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…

This paper illustrates the use of narrative as a means of examining the complex array of factors that shape academic practice. Through focusing on the personal, using the narrative voice of the participants, a series of situated perspectives on the journey towards academic life, and more specifically teaching, is presented. The paper argues that…

Language is an important way of presenting an identity, either individual or group. This paper explores the language used in the presentation of the identity of academic development. The study is based on an analysis of websites from academic development centres in the UK and Australia and outlines the public ways in which academic developers…

Various discussions at the March 2010 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Commons in Statesboro, GA, led this author to reflect on the relationship between academic development, e-learning, and SoTL. Throughout the conference, she felt a nagging suspicion that each professional community may have created a silo, with a discourse so tightly…

Language can provide an entree into an academic discipline, but can also serve as a barrier to exclude newcomers. How does this apply to academic developers trying to promote teaching and learning on their campuses? Using an online survey, academics at two institutions in the UK and USA were asked to describe their typical and ideal reading in…

This article argues that the theory of cognitive apprenticeship could inform those who teach and work with doctoral students in ways that enable them to provide students with more systematic preparation, more focused guidance and scaffolding, more explicit feedback, and enhanced preparation for participating in a collaborative way in communities…

The claim by universities to be "international" has spread world-wide over the last two decades and this has been largely interpreted to mean the recruitment and support of international students. Little attention has been paid to what this means for curriculum development. This study was carried out to explore disciplinary understandings of the…

More than 40 years after its beginnings, academic development stands uncertainly on the threshold of becoming a profession or discipline in its own right. While it remains marginal to the dominant stories of the university, it has become central to the institution's contemporary business. This Research Note describes an enquiry that uses a…

In this paper we review the current debate regarding the work of academic developers in higher education and their rightful "place" in higher education, particularly with regard to notions of the discipline, research and scholarship of teaching. We describe and compare the work of discipline academics and academic developers and argue that the two…