The emergence of academic development in Anglophone higher education was linked to post Second World War massification and concerns about student failure. These concerns were driven by increasing statistical investigations into student attrition and degree times to completion, particularly in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. There was a…

Academic development has had an approximately forty-year history within Australian higher education, paralleling the major expansions and changes in the sector, both nationally and internationally. Its principal concerns have been the improvement of teaching and the professional development of the academics who teach. The history of academic…

Researchers of the future will need to be able to work across the increasingly porous boundaries between university, industry, government and community sectors. Concerns have been raised internationally for several decades about the content and approaches adopted in doctoral programs. Innovative doctoral programs that facilitate students'…

The purpose of this dialogue was to begin grappling with notions of neutrality and academic development in three non-western contexts: (1) Jamaica; (2) Ethiopia; and (3) Japan. The authors were asked to describe the political geography of academic development in their countries and to explore questions of neutrality. This dialogue therefore tries…

Academic developers are very often disciplinary migrants, performing hybrid, liminal roles at the "fault lines" between teachers and learners, between academics and managers, and between teaching and research. As a result, their identities as scholars can be described as "unhomely." While this in-between space is uncomfortable…

Educational development for research supervisors is still a recent phenomenon. Early optional sessions on research supervision have now been replaced, particularly in the UK, continental Europe, and Australasia, by comprehensive and, in some cases, mandatory programs. Yet some of these programs focus solely on the administrative roles and…