Researching the experiences of teaching focused academic (TFA) roles reveals challenges and alienation. Investigating their practices can enrich theorisations of their role. We conducted a focused ethnography capturing data from institutional materials, focus groups, and key informant interviews. We present two vignettes demonstrating the…

This article reviews studies that have addressed academic developers' professional identity, focusing on the period 1996-2020. Our intention was to evaluate and synthesise the claims made in this body of research in order to inform theory as well as the work in which developers are currently engaged. Thirty-four peer-reviewed papers were included…

While the literature acknowledges the central role of academics in internationalization of the curriculum (IoC), little has been published regarding training of academic developers themselves to support IoC initiatives. However, higher education institutions around the globe are responding to strategic demands for IoC that prepare students as…

We interviewed 13 university teachers who research their teaching practices or their students' learning to identify how they understood their development as teachers. We interpreted recurring themes within the data as three ways of conceptualising university teachers' development as teachers. We use a theoretical model to arrange these…

Lecturers may be exposed to the same Academic Development Programme but their course of action at personal and professional level vary. In this paper, I analyze the lecturers' contribution in shaping their learning to teach. I interviewed twenty-five lecturers in four private universities in Kenya using semi-structured interviews. The analysis…

Employing part-time and casual academics is now a widely accepted practice in higher education globally. We explored the issue of the identity of part-time academics in Indonesian higher education through interviews with 14 part-time and 11 full-time academics. Both groups identified more strongly with their teaching roles than with other roles.…

This study explores the impact academic teachers' writing of a teaching portfolio can have on their professional learning. Through an open-ended questionnaire, 26 academics from three faculties reported on insights, effects on teaching practice, and effects on collegial exchange that the portfolio writing entailed. We discuss how the experienced…

To cope with the rapidly changing higher education climate, teachers need agency to act proactively in initiating and steering changes in practice. This paper describes an academic development activity in the form of a Change Laboratory, an intervention method based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, to facilitate agency among teachers. The…

The current focus on identifying criteria for academic teaching practice is influencing performance goals for teaching academics. This has produced a strong imperative to engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning; however, it is not always clear how teaching academics continue to build capacity to do this during their academic career.…

As pressures on new academic staff members increase and change, academic developers need to find different ways of working with them. This paper offers for discussion a new way of supporting early career academics in their negotiation of liminality, the betwixt and between space separating old and new roles. We call this innovative approach…

This paper discusses a case study in teacher education in Sweden, focusing on creating spaces for student engagement through co-creating curriculum. It highlights democratic values and a multidimensional learning view as underpinning such endeavors. The main findings are that co-creating curriculum is an ambiguous process entailing unpredictable,…

It is often assumed that academics working in a research intensive university are unlikely to invest in the professional development of their teaching. Institutional structures and culture tend to undermine investment in academics' teaching role. This study, conducted at the University of Cape Town, draws on an analysis of the environment within…

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…

This paper builds on discussions of academic developers' identity experienced as a discomfiting, troubled, and often marginal space. Three experienced academic developers, located in research-intensive institutions in three different countries, using auto-ethnographic writing and a shared narrative inquiry, explore moments of congruence and…

In 2004, Ray Land produced extensive literature on the 12 orientations of academic developers. These orientations provided academic developers with a useful tool through which they have been able to better articulate their roles and their place in academia. We have used the orientations model to establish, compare, and contrast the identity of…