What is academic development? Contributing a frontier-extending conceptual analysis to the field’s epistemic development

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2014 the International Journal for Academic Development (IJAD) issued a call for papers for ‘Beyond learning and teaching: Extending the frontiers of academic development’. Though it was never published, the conceptual and definitional opacity that this special issue was expected to address, along with prevalent epistemic parochialism, remain problematic for academic development scholarship, and this article focuses on them. The article incorporates a critique of the field’s scholarship within a conceptual analysis of academic development that culminates in presentation of the author’s original conceptual model of the componential structure of academic development. Academic development scholarship, it is argued, is poised at a crossroad; its epistemic development is dependent upon its adopting a wider focus and agenda that its critical scholars are calling for, to diffuse the mainstream focus on teaching and learning. Mainstream scholarship is ripe for epistemic expansion into neighbouring fields, to encourage academic developers to shift their focus from what it is they do , to what they do is .