ABSTRACT This paper considers the process of professional becoming for an academic developer as a complex transition towards epistemological plurality. This is a necessary step to appreciate and support the lived experiences of teachers across the spectrum of academic disciplines. Viewed through an ecological lens, the complexity of the developmental journey becomes more achievable as it can be broken down into a series of adaptive cycles that move from ‘dependence’ to ‘independence’, and from ‘epistemologically singular’ to ‘epistemologically plural’. We suggest that the descriptive power of the ecological lens may be helpful to academic developers to contextualize their own professional development.

ABSTRACT Students with disabilities are the fastest-growing equity cohort in Australia, and yet they continue to face barriers to their success and completion at university. In this paper, we present a scalable model for one-to-one staff and student dialogue that positions students with disabilities as mentors to university staff. By doing so, we emphasise how students mentoring staff programs can be harnessed to support academic development for inclusive education. The program presented further provides a relationship-rich alternative to accessing and leveraging student voice compared to traditional methods, such as student experience surveys. We conclude by reiterating the importance of generating whole-of-community programs to support diverse learners, which foster genuine conversations between students and staff.

ABSTRACT Recent research has explored the role of gender in educational development. International and national studies have shown that women predominate the field. In 2017, Bernhagen and Gravett analyzed the gendered nature of educational development in the U.S. specifically. What went unaddressed were the identities of the faculty served. Despite recent research from the U.S. that concluded gender is not predictive of participation, past literature, as well as our own lived experiences, suggests that there is an overrepresentation of women in center programming. In this article, we explore possible explanations for this imbalance, as well as potential consequences and solutions.

ABSTRACT Early 2021 was an opportunity to discover how lecturers were planning future in-person teaching following pandemic-induced online teaching and their reasons for doing so. In interviews, six experienced lecturers identified rationales and underpinning evidence for teaching decisions. The strongest reoccurring pedagogical rationales were enabling active learning and fostering student engagement. Lecturers stated they value student feedback and personal observation when forming their teaching decisions. These priorities can be used for future faculty development such as developing courses that focus on their priorities. The role of jargon, providing practical support and use student stories in their work should also be considered.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the role of an academic development programme associated with the implementation of newly designed assessment criteria in the UK-based Arts University. The introduction of new assessment criteria was accompanied by a pan-university academic staff development intervention. In a small-scale qualitative study, we researched staff’s experience of meaning-making and present three interconnected themes: the relationships between attendees; their relationship with the criteria; and relational understandings within the context of expectations of academic development. We deploy Honneth’s theory of recognition and make recommendations for policy makers and academic developers to support the design of socially just academic development opportunities.

ABSTRACT Academics are constantly undergoing identity shifts in response to globalisation, marketisation and the impact of technology on academic work. This study investigates the impact of a Graduate Certificate of Higher Education (GCHE) on academic identity development in an Australian University. GCHE graduates and their educators were interviewed to examine whether such extended and reflective professional development might support the negotiation of complex identity shifts. Findings indicated that academic identity development was enabled through this professional development by re-engaging individual academics in the diverse, traditional components of teaching, research and administration, working against the neoliberal trend of role-compartmentalisation for efficiency.

ABSTRACT Students who regularly plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning demonstrate high academic achievement. Although valuable for effective learning, these skills are seldom taught. Moreover, educators rarely receive professional development on how to develop students’ metacognition. This comparative study investigated the impact of pedagogical training for developing students’ metacognition on a group of educators. As a consequence of training, both groups reported being more cognisant of students’ learning needs and aware of themselves as learners. The benefits of metacognition for students are well-known; we suggest the effects on educators and what it means to their teaching practice can also be considerable.

ABSTRACT The academic voice related to learning and teaching (L&T) professional development (PD) is an important consideration in supporting universities’ pursuit of improving their teaching as a core function of their mission. Framed by a typology of L&T PD in Australian universities, this paper reports on a study that investigated academics’ perceptions of L&T PD in an Australia regional university. A thematic analysis was conducted on semi-structured interviews of both academics and academic developers. The findings suggest that L&T PD has a complex dynamic which impacts on academic development in regional-based universities generally and can inform academic development work globally.

ABSTRACT This systematic review explores what is known about the relationships between characteristics of pedagogical development programmes (PDP) in higher education, context characteristics within which PDPs take place, and teacher development outcomes. Thirty-one peer-reviewed articles were reviewed using the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (IMPG) and curriculum spiderweb. PDP characteristics, context characteristics, and teacher development outcomes appeared to vary widely. Still, several relationships were identified between specific PDP characteristics and teacher development. The review yielded an enriched model (building on the IMPG) of the pedagogical development of higher education teachers. This model and the results of this review can help academic developers to improve the design of PDPs and provide guidelines to further investigate the value of PDP.

ABSTRACT Mentoring (healthcare) research from low-to-middle-income countries is critical for developing evidence-based healthcare solutions. This paper presents findings from a study of the mentoring and supervisory relationships embedded in a South African fellowship program for early career healthcare researchers. The findings demonstrate how, rather than relying only on formally assigned mentors and supervisors, the fellows chose to establish a mentoring community. This mentoring community included a network of mentoring relationships which involved sharing career advice, establishing professional networks and cooperation opportunities, and creating a reciprocal psychosocial support community. We conceptualize these findings from a developmental network and mentoring community perspective.