A call for promoting ownership, equity, and agency in faculty development via connected learning

Abstract

For transformation to occur in learning environments and for learners, higher education must first consider how such transformation will occur for the designers and facilitators of learning experiences: the university teachers or educators we call faculty (in the US), instructors, lecturers or professors or, in some instances, university staff. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to them as educators or faculty, and the process of their professional development as educational development or faculty development (more historically common in the US context). We aspire towards universities in the future that cultivate connected, participatory educational development that crosses institutional and national boundaries, and which takes equity, social justice and power differences into consideration, promoting educator agency. We propose theoretical underpinnings of our approach, while also highlighting some examples of recent practice that inspire this direction, but which are small in scale, and can provide springboards for future approaches that may be applied on a wider scale and become more fully integrated, supported and rewarded in institutions. Our theoretical underpinnings are influenced by theories of heutagogy and self-determined learning, transformative learning, connectivist and connected learning, and an interest in equity. We share models of alternative approaches to educator development that take advantage of the latest advances in technology, such as #DigPINS, Virtually Connecting, collaborative annotation, and dual-pathway MOOCs. We then share a semi-fictional authoethnography of our (the authors') daily connected lives, and we end by highlighting elements of the models we shared that we feel could be adapted by institutions to achieve educator professional development that is more transformative, participatory, and equitable.

Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective

“…However, VC challenges the importance of the formal scheduled sections of conferences and elevates an alternative element of informal hallway conversations. While VC can, for some participants and conversations, challenge academic gatekeeping and redress epistemic injustice, this is not always the case (Bali et al 2019) and a long-term transformative effect cannot be predicted, but is aspirational (Bali & Caines 2018).…”

“…However, Marginal Syllabus is an example of a project that explicitly centers social justice focused texts (Kalir & Perez 2019), and as such, has a cultural social justice purpose. Collaborative web annotation can have a political social justice purpose if the choice of articles to annotate are crowdsourced by participants from marginalized groups (see Bali & Caines, 2018). One way Marginal Syllabus has tried to enhance diverse participation in "annotatathons" was to change from hour-long sessions (found to be unfriendly for certain time zones and not helpful for deep, slow reading) to sessions taking place over several days, opening up participation across time zones and for people with less flexible schedules and allowing more room for give and take among participants (Kalir 2018).…”

Online teaching in response to student protests and campus shutdowns: academics’ perspectives

“…There is certainly an existing body of literature on the ways in which the uncritical embrace of technology traps universities in a neoliberal, techno-determinist paradigm (Hayes and Jandrić, 2014) as well as a scholarly community framed as a "critical pedagogy" where online learning is not only dissembled but can also be used as a form of resistance (Boyd, 2016). This literature has been explicit in its advocacy for educators to engage in a deep and critical exploration of the relationship between the digital sphere and online pedagogy, in order to "cultivate connected, participatory educational development that crosses institutional and national boundaries, and which takes equity, social justice and power differences into consideration, promoting educator agency" (Bali & Caines, 2018). In South Africa, there is also scholarship theorising how new technologies are implicated in new forms of digital neocolonialism linking colonial pasts and neoliberal futures (Adam, 2019).…”

A Systematic Review of Higher Education Academics’ Use of Microblogging for Professional Development: Case of Twitter

“…One way to address these challenges is through professional development of academics. Academic development is a key strategic lever for ensuring institutional quality and supporting institutional change in higher education and is central to the development of the academic staff (Frick & Kapp, 2009;Beach, Sorcinelli, Austin & Rivard, 2016;Bali & Caines, 2018) Professional development, sometimes referred to as academic professional development (APD) (Frick & Kapp, 2009), faculty development, academic development, educator/educational development (Bali & Caines, 2018) or professional learning (Oddone, 2019) is concerned with developmental activities aimed at improving practice (Cervero, 2000). These practices include updating skills and knowledge, preparation for new roles in organisations, and general competence development in the wider academic context (Challis, 1999), and collaboration (Shagrir, 2017).…”