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In this article, we examine the entrepreneurial self as a response to prevailing neoliberalism in higher education. We draw on positioning theory to explore a case study of an academic language and learning (ALL) advisor at an Australian university. ALL advisors work closely with students and academic teaching staff to develop teaching and learning practices across institutions. On the basis of the analysis, we argue that the adoption of entrepreneurial subjectivity amongst ALL advisors, although highly responsive to conditions within institutions, is not conducive to the ongoing development of teaching and learning in the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While cross-cultural student voice has led to transformations in education, research is scarce about the interplay between student voice, culture, and power. For this reason, student voice informs this study to investigate the benefits and constraints of curriculum co-design with respect to teacher power and higher education culture in Iran. The researcher-teacher deployed qualitative methods for data collection: field notes, students' journals, class recordings, and open-ended questionnaires. The study presents varied findings in implementing student voice: some students took on roles as teachers, while others displayed resistance. This highlights that the way students are repositioned in education is culture-sensitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly publications are a key component of academics' development in their roles as teachers and researchers. Writing groups seem to be effective to accompany this process as participants share their texts to improve them through peer feedback. To help academic developers in the understanding and implementation of faculty writing groups, a detailed analysis of what members talk about during their meetings was carried out with three Ecuadorian writing groups, complemented by in-depth interviews. Results show that in all groups most interactions focused on their common goal, the text and comments, and the organization of their meetings, supported by the facilitator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing an institution's research culture is a challenge that is especially pressing given its prioritisation in the context of contemporary university performance. This paper discusses how academic development teams working with researchers can build meaningful institutional research culture through conceiving of researcher cohorts as members of an organisation-wide community of practice. It focuses on supported development of social media knowledge and skills through a programme that synthesises digital practices, institutional and digital literacies, and identity formations. I argue that this informed, generative approach to building an academic community's digital literacy acts as a catalyst to develop stronger institutional research culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, 10 award-winning post-secondary instructors use narrative inquiry to explore failure individually by reflecting on their own definition and framework of failure, by giving examples of their experience with failure, and by elaborating how they deal with and learn from failure. The outcome of this collective exploration is an article that reflects the reality of life in academia where members of the academic community face failures, their own and those of others, on a daily basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I trace how my teaching has changed as I have become increasingly involved in educational development. I divide my career into three phases (pre-educational development, part-time educational development, and full-time educational development) and analyze qualitative and quantitative data from multiple sources of evidence in each phase: teaching statements, syllabi, and student evaluations of teaching. This self-study reveals specific, primarily positive ways my teaching has changed. The results suggest that educational development may not only improve the teaching of its intended recipients, but also those responsible for supporting them. Implications for the field of educational development are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic development is often seen as a compliance activity, divorced from the teaching context and what teachers are trying to achieve in their classroom. In this case study, we researched Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) as a reflective, non-judgmental approach to help tutors identify coherence between their teaching intentions and practice. Our results provided evidence that IPR helped tutors reflect on ways to improve their teaching. It also led to unexpected 'discoveries' not typically afforded by conventional academic development. We conclude that IPR offers a formative, teacher-focussed and contextual approach that has not been clearly defined in the literature. We offer the IPR model followed in this study for academic developers and researchers alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of research that examined the experiences of staff and students engaged in a novel ‘student scholars’ program established through a university teaching and learning institute in Ontario, Canada. Drawing from participant reflections and focus group data, we describe the benefits and challenges perceived by individuals partnering through this initiative, using the theoretical framework of threshold concepts to understand these experiences. We describe ways in which participants experienced partnering as both troublesome and – in some cases – transformative, and consider the implications of these findings for academic developers engaging in and/or supporting faculty with the process of partnering with students. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using social media platforms to build informal learning processes and social networks is significant in academic development practices within higher education. We present three vignettes illustrating academic practices occurring on Twitter to show that using social media is beneficial for building networks of academics, locally and globally, enhancing information flows, inspiring thinking, and motivating academic practice. Using a reflective and diffractive methodology, we illuminate how different flows of forces and relations are enacted. We argue it is in this fluidity of informal learning that perspectives are contested and shaped, and that academic developers can benefit by encompassing such practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an introduction to the issue in which the editor discusses articles on topics such as how academics learn about teaching in higher education, the use of microblogging service Twitter to support informal learning, and conversations between academic colleagues regarding teaching.

The University of Helsinki established a Teachers’ Academy to reward excellence in teaching. This study focuses on teachers’ significant networks and their meaningful conversations about teaching and learning before the establishment of the Teachers’ Academy. The research data consisted of answers to open-ended questions, and were examined using social network analysis. The teachers’ network consisted of significant relations with (1) colleagues and other teachers, (2) peers in pedagogical courses and pedagogical experts, (3) students, and (4) family members and friends. The conversations with different parties varied in nature, content and the level of confidentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Engaging in informal activities, like conversations with colleagues, is one way that professionals can learn within workplace contexts. Informal conversations present opportunities for academics to learn about teaching. The current study investigated academics’ experience of informal conversations, and their experience of the relations between conversations and one formal development program. Semi-structured interviews with 30 individual academics were conducted and the transcripts analysed using the constant comparative method associated with grounded theory. This analysis provided evidence that conversations play a developmental role in supporting academics to learn about teaching from colleagues, and these conversations can reinforce the learning from a formal development program. The results of this study suggest roles for academic developers in encouraging informal conversations about teaching, and building constructive relations between formal and informal development strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Adopting a pluralistic view of academics’ informal learning that draws on Habermas (1987), this article suggests that a great deal of academic learning results from tensions and incompatibilities between individual interests and those of employing institutions increasingly resonant with the ideology of New Public Management (NPM), with its emphasis on market forces (e.g. student as ‘customer’), enhanced management power, surveillance, and measurement. To explore these ideas further, the article draws on interviews with academics at an Australian university to examine their informal learning about teaching. The academics interviewed had learnt a great deal from the changing context about how teaching is perceived by their institution, as well as about their own personal status and security in the new environment. The paper suggests that the ruthless push of NPM and associated ideologies and pressures impacting on higher education in Western countries represent ‘currents’ running counter to the efforts of academic developers to foster teaching excellence and expertise. The article’s conclusions suggest value in further research into the impact of ideological changes such as NPM on ‘learning about teaching’ in a variety of institutional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Academia is generally not considered a place for expressing emotions, yet emotions are inevitably present in complex activities such as teaching. We investigated whether drawings could be used as a means of gaining access to emotions in university teaching and how. The data consisted of academics’ drawings of themselves as university teachers (n = 86). We examined emotions in university teaching through thematic analysis. Positive, neutral, negative and mixed emotions were identified. Our findings suggest that emotions related to university teaching are contextual. Positive emotions were typically conveyed in a seminar and group work setting. Neutral emotions were mostly connected with lecture settings or had no context depicted. Only four drawings were interpreted as portraying negative emotions, and, with one exception, these were placed in lecture settings. We suggest that drawings can be a helpful exercise for facilitating reflection in academic staff development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 transition to academia, particularly as the diverse pathways leading to academia often mean limited knowledge or skills in curriculum development, teaching or assessment of learning. In a quantitative study, self-identified early career academics from three Australian universities reported attitudes and perceptions of teaching and research, and involvement in academic development. The implications of their responses for academic developers are discussed in terms of institutional and disciplinary differences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although there are programs to prepare doctoral students for how to teach in post-secondary education, the neophyte academic must still adjust to the specific context of a new position. This transition is often characterized by multiple adjustments and corresponding anxiety of moving from the familiar role of graduate student to a new one as faculty member. While the first five years is described as a time of stress and discovery, there are discernible patterns of growth and role integration during this period. This paper outlines how seven pre-tenure professors developed as university teachers. Drawing on Kelly's personal construct theory and Kegan's developmental constructivism, I describe developing a teacher identity as similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an investigation of 'transformation narratives' emerging from early career academics' reflective writing. The pieces of writing analysed describe self-initiated teaching development activities embedded in the early career academics' practice. Using a transformative learning framework, the analysis reveals the following changes in early career academics' practice: a move from non-reflective habitual action to more conscious practice; a more sophisticated view of teaching than was previously held; increased agency where teaching practice is perceived as something that can be developed; increased confidence; and a more multifaceted conception of an academic role than their original conception. The limitations of the transformative learning approach and implications this might have for those designing and delivering these types of programs are then explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that given the complexities and contested nature of contemporary higher education, induction programmes for new academics should move beyond generic approaches to teaching and learning and engage academics in considering the contexts in which they are practising, focusing on developing their agency in these complex contexts. A sociocultural approach that explicitly engages new academics in reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of their agency in the context of a range of structural opportunities and constraints can empower them to become more critical agents as they develop their identities as academics. However, the value of such centralised interventions also depends on the quality of departmental and institutional cultures, and their capacity to create an environment that supports creative engagement by new academics in aligning their own philosophies of teaching with their department and institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses early-career academics' development at a university in Hong Kong. Reflecting the impact of local context, the paper explores cultural and structural influences that can impinge on teaching and learning strategies for new academics. Barriers such as student learning behaviour and publication pressure may discourage new academics from taking an active interest in ongoing professional development beyond the mandatory component. However, the effect of Chinese culture, which places a strong emphasis on 'face' and harmonious human relationships, and the existence of hidden ('ghost') rules can collectively add pitfalls that inhibit new academics' full engagement in their teaching roles. Local contextual capabilities are identified and implications for the design of professional development programmes for early-career academics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on research into academic identities amongst early-career academics in a UK post-1992, teaching-orientated university. Literature around academic identity suggests five major academic roles: teaching, research, management, writing and networking. However, this appears to be a picture of an established mid-career academic in a research-orientated university. Literature focusing on the process of assuming an academic identity proposes that academics, even early in their career, work within strong collegial and disciplinary structures. This research suggests that both notions are problematic, and that for early-career academics in this post-1992 institution it is relations with students, the teaching arena, and organisational practice that are much more central. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the pedagogic learning of a group of new lecturers at an international research intensive university who were participants on a formal teaching development programme. The lens of situated learning theory is utilised to gain new insights into the learning arising from the development programme but also to reveal certain limitations to pedagogic learning in academic workplaces. Initially, it is shown that academic practice can be construed as socially situated and distributed in specific contexts and that learning thus requires participation in communities of practice. While examining the functioning of teaching development cohort groups as communities of practice, further components of situated learning theory are utilised to more fully understand new lecturers' social learning than has hitherto been the case. The lecturers' experiences of learning as social meaning-making and as legitimate peripheral participation are therefore examined. Furthermore, experiences of learning as a process of identity transformation are investigated. Conclusions are drawn which demonstrate the interplay of social and individual learning in the process of becoming an academic teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning-centred education (LCE) has the potential to meet the diverse needs and circumstances of a multidisciplinary faculty cohort enrolled in a certificate programme on teaching and learning by engaging participants in a learning community, and by drawing upon a wide range of appropriate teaching strategies to facilitate learning and development of student abilities. Action research design was employed to examine the theory-practice relationship of LCE within the UBC Faculty Certificate Programme on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education . Research data, both quantitative and qualitative, collected over a 12-month period, suggest that a multidisciplinary faculty cohort exhibits diverse learning styles, and that individual faculty members are at different stages in developing a scholarly approach to teaching and learning. Furthermore, data suggest that LCE can be used to organise a faculty certificate programme around teaching and learning issues relevant to university faculty and that some structuring of the LCE environment can assist in the attainment of course learning outcomes while engaging faculty as active participants in their personal developmental process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on university teachers' beliefs about goals and characteristics of good instruction. A large body of research findings reveals that teachers' beliefs are an important variable to consider when designing faculty development initiatives. A questionnaire was used to measure teachers' beliefs. In the construction of the questionnaire three views on learning and instruction, namely, behaviorism, information processing theory and socio-constructivism were taken into account. The study revealed that, in general, all respondents agreed with all statements, although some statements were considered to be more teacher-oriented and other more student-centred. No influence was found of teaching experience. In contrast, some significant effects were found of discipline. Different explanations might help to understand these findings. Most of them refer to the instrument we developed. The questionnaire did not help to distinguish between student-centred and teacher-centred teachers.

Part-time teachers represent a growing challenge to universities' quality assurance and developmental processes. This paper describes an attempt to meet this challenge through the adoption of 'teaching circles' (TCs) in four contrasting case-study schools. Analysis of outcomes enables identification of the variables affecting the apparent success of TCs as a strategy, some of which are associated with the particularities of context. Underlying these particularities, however, the general question of how participants come to feel 'ownership' of change initiatives emerges as a central issue. Three inter-related processes are shown to be involved: leadership, attribution of causation and social integration. The paper concludes that this analysis has implications beyond the TC project and provides both key practical pointers and, potentially, a useful analytical tool for researchers studying programmes of organizational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper two recent ideas are used to describe an approach to judging the teaching of individuals or small teams of university teachers. The first idea builds on research which shows that good teaching is oriented towards, and is related to, high quality student learning. The second is that good teaching is scholarly. These ideas are at the heart of what might constitute a description of competence in teaching, and both are underpinned by the realization that teaching involves much more than what happens in a classroom or on-line: it includes planning, compatibility with the context, content knowledge, being a learner, and above all, reflection and a way of thinking about teaching and learning. It is argued that judging good teaching involves the effective application of a combination of these qualitative elements in the teaching approach and the quantitative dimension – about how well the teacher is carrying out this approach. It is also argued that unless the criteria being used to judge university teaching are consistent with the criteria being used to develop teaching (for example through formal teaching in higher education courses) little will be achieved through such activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the tensions between the various work activities performed by academics at England's University of Sheffield. Understanding in the academic community of the work of an academic; Extent to which different disciplinary backgrounds influenced perspectives on academic practice; Sensitivity to the needs of colleagues.

Singapore's Temasek Polytechnic recently recruited a large number of lecturers who are required to undertake an accredited part-time 1.5 year award course tiffed Teaching in Higher Education Certificate (THEC). The THEC programme is delivered in-house and assessed externally. Graduates acquire basic teaching skills and demonstrate reflective practice. As part of an ongoing study into the effectiveness of the course, a series of discussion groups was conducted with 13 randomly selected participants and graduates. The qualitative data were analysed and gave eight general perceptions that participants have of the course. The perceptions indicate the course is well regarded because it is relevant by enabling theory to be put into practice and prompts participants to be reflective practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]