LAUSR

The increasing reliance on sessional staff (the focus on the last issue of IJAD) is just one of several significant trends transforming higher education globally. Emerging technologies, changing student demographics, expanding demands for quality assurance, spreading neoliberal administrative values, and other factors are fundamentally altering the contexts of academic development and academic developers. The articles in this issue prompt us to reflect critically on our own and our field’s power and purposes in this dynamic environment. What is the responsibility of the academic developer to be an advocate for faculty? For students? For excellence in teaching and learning? For administrative agendas? For equity in higher education? For institutional change? Questions like these are more than rhetorical; they act as signposts in our professional journey. The destination we set will shape the path we walk. The articles here challenge us to evaluate both the means and the ends of our work to determine whether we adapting to new contexts while staying true to the foundational aims of academic development. In their article “Agency and structure in academic development practices: Are we liberating academic teachers or are we part of a machinery suppressing them?” Roxå and Mårtensson explore the kinds of power afforded to academic developers via their placement within institutions. Through a discussion of a study by a social anthropologist at Lund University in Sweden, the authors examine the ways in which academic developers are “power-holders linked to expertise, institutional management, and policies” through which teachers “encounter the language and perspectives of these forces, policies, and worldviews” (p. 102). Roxå and Mårtensson end the article by suggesting counter discourses that might signal a way forward that align with the values of our field. In “Outsourcing academic development in higher education: Staff perceptions of an international program,” Dickson, Hughes, and Stephens analyze a case of academic development programming at an Australian university being outsourced to a U.S.-based transnational, private non-profit company. Through 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the authors explore staff reactions to the program specifically in relation to its cultural context, efficacy, disciplinary context, institutional context, and other realms. Given that outsourcing of academic development may be a rising trend, this article offers an important view into the possibilities and perils of such programs. The eight authors of “Strategies for leading academics to rethink humanities and social sciences curricula in the context of discipline standards” test the effectiveness of disciplinespecific professional development in response to new curriculum standards in Australia. Thomas, Wallace, and colleagues combine the principles of first-year curriculum, threshold learning outcomes, and disciplinary priorities to create workshops that could be facilitated for instructors across disciplines. Using decoding the disciplines methodology and conversation maps, the authors ground this work in discipline-specific concerns, avoiding some of the resistance that can arise in the face of ‘standardisation’ of curriculum and outcomes.