Creating a collaborative community spirit for the future of academic development

Abstract

We invite you to imagine a landscape with hills and meandering pathways. As you look from your gentle mind's eye, you see not a static landscape, but one that is in movement, that has an energy, a flow, a momentum. As your eyes travel across this landscape you see single paths that interweave with others, where 'there' and 'here' intersect. As academic developers, over the past half century, we have helped to forge many pathways across this rugged landscape of higher education and have brought many academic colleagues along with us through our on-going commitment to deep, caring, and immersive work (Bolander Laksov & Huijser, 2020;Gibbs, 2013;Knapper, 2003). At times, we go back across this already-traversed terrain to meet people where they are, working to ensure the sustainability of our work. Other times, we pause on this journey to revel in what is and to reflect on how far we have come. And yet, at other times, we envision what could be and plough boldly forward, guided by hope (McGowan & Felten, 2021), exploring new horizons that beckon us as we embrace, as Sutherland ( 2018) has suggested, 'the whole of the academic role', the 'whole of the institution', and the 'whole person ' (pp. 261-262).Along the way, a key aspect of academic developers' success has been our valuing of supportive and facilitative approaches, working side-by-side with academic colleagues to build collaborative, community-orientated teaching and research cultures in which we embed our academic development work (Shagrir, 2017). At the same time, we have been increasingly asked to fill leadership roles, both within these communities and in our larger institutions. Are we, as Shelda Debowski (2014) asks, 'agents of change' or 'partners in arms'? We are challenged to stay 'part of' the collegial communities we are invited into and create, meeting faculty where they are at, partnering with them, and celebrating good work, while at the same time, we are increasingly tasked with achieving institutional directives or goals that may not completely align with the collaborative communities of which we consider ourselves to be a part (Sugrue et al., 2018). These challenges remind us of the complexity and intricacy of navigating the interconnected paths of identity, belongingness, and cultural membership inherent in each academic development initiative.Considered collectively, the articles in this issue capture these tensions in our academic development work and compel us to consider the positionalities we might, or must, take up as we move forward. Two articles draw our attention to an enduring need to nurture opportunities for individual teaching and learning development, despite previous and ongoing work in these areas (Gilmore, 2021; Sabourin, 2021). Yet other articles focus on a need for academic developers to build community groups to advance more process-oriented academic development initiatives (Kim et al., 2021; Turner et al., 2021). Finally, two articles beckon us to grow our academic developer identities and roles as cultural change agen...