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Despite increasing research and scholarship in the area of academic development in recent years, it remains an under-theorised field of endeavour. The paper proposes that academic developers take a view on what constitutes academic work and see it as a form of professional practice. It discusses the features of practice theory that illuminate professional practice and identities three foci for the application of these ideas within academic development: practice development, fostering learningconducive work and deliberately locating activity within practice. It also suggests that academic development be viewed as a practice and points to features within its own traditions on which to build.

Much time and effort has gone into trying to demonstrate an empirical link between research activity and teaching performance. In general, the correlations between these factors have been shown to be low. This paper argues that the attempt to find such a link will always be confounded by different conceptions of the two enterprises. The debate about the relationships between teaching and research as presently conceived is not fruitful. If there is a link between the two it operates through that which teaching and research have in common; both are concerned with the act of learning, though in different contexts. Greater emphasis needs to be placed on the ways in which knowledge is generated and communicated. Those aspects of teaching which lead to leaming and the learning which occurs through research provide the vital link. This is important if the debate is to progress beyond a political defence of the status quo and be of practical use to considerations of whether, in higher education, teaching without research is to be encouraged.Investigations of the links between teaching and research, of which there have been a large number, have failed to establish the r~ature of the connection between the two or, indeed, whether there is one. It is not that results are conflicting but they are inconclusive. The fact that further studies continue to be undertaken suggests an unwillingness to accept that there is very little correlation between teaching and research.In this paper our focus is on what we believe to be a common element shared by teaching and research -a concern for learning. In order to place our argument in context we look first at the empirical, predominantly correlational studies which link teaching and research and examine some of the problems which this literature throws up. We consider some of the underlying conceptions of teaching and research embodied in these studies and the ways in which these activities have been measured. To better understand the relationship between teaching and research as interpreted in these studies we identify some of the' underlying values and associated political agendas.Consideration of notions of teaching and learning derived from the literature on student learning research demonstrates the poverty of conceptions of teaching and research embedded in the correlational literature. We therefore look to ways in which the activity of learning is a shared activity in both research and teaching and examine the consequences of this idea for the studies which have been undertaken and for future work. We argue that it is only through an emphasis on learning that the increasingly sterile debate about the links between teaching and research will be refocussed in a productive manner. 262