Reframing Academic Development for the Ecological University: From ‘Change’ to ‘Growth’

Abstract

This paper contributes to an emerging multi-layered perspective of academic development that embraces the diversity of knowledges that exists across the university campus. However, across these multiple layers there are a few universal characteristics that can provide cohesion and sustainability for third-space practitioners. A focus on growth allows academic development to align with a philosophy of becoming that is supported by the powerful adaptive cycle heuristic. A professional framework that highlights key ecological concepts of resilience and humility draws together the professional endeavours of academic developers. This may help to disengage the university from destructive pathological values that are maintained by neoliberalism.

1. Introduction

The term, ‘academic developer’ is commonly used in universities in the UK and Australia to describe those third-space academics (sensu Whitchurch, 2008) whose central role is to support the professional development of other academics (teachers and researchers) who operate across the range of disciplines within the university. Ever since I initially identified as an ‘academic developer’ in 2004 (after a first career teaching biology), I have been aware that the academic terrain in which I operated was not as solid or well defined as that experienced by my peers working in physics, medicine, biochemistry or a variety of other well-established disciplines. I have observed a tendency among many academic developers towards constant self-justification as a counter to the widespread misunderstanding of their role, while others maintained a foothold in a previous discipline in order to retain academic credibility. During the opening decades of the Millenium, we also had to manage expectations among our course participants who came to us (often reluctantly) for mandatory ‘staff training’—moving the discourse from mechanistic ‘tips-for-teachers’ towards a more fluid ‘scholarship of teaching’. This is something that has been acknowledged to be a ‘hard sell’ (Boshier, 2009). With my colleagues in academic development coming from a range of ‘home disciplines’ colouring their perceptions of academia (Little et al., 2018), the practice of academic development was certainly fluid, and highly variable from one institution to another. Therefore, discussions about our roles and how best to fulfil them were commonplace, and scholarly explorations of the field always initiated lively discussion.

This paper is intended to offer an ecological counter-narrative to the dominant narrative of academic development that has become tied to the neoliberal values of measurement and efficiency—providing a shift in gaze to enrich the overall perspective. By collating and curating a diversity of narratives we can construct a multi-layered (mille-feuille) depiction of academic development that contributes to a rich picture of the field and that can be genuinely ‘frontier-extending’ (sensu Evans, 2024). Or, as expressed by McNaught (2020, p. 83), ‘it is by the scrutiny and juxtaposition of the reflections of several experienced academic developers that new models may emerge’.

While many of the activities that I have engaged in with my course participants use teaching as a vehicle for our discussions, I often feel this is just a setting for our explorations of something that runs much deeper. However, there is still a tendency in the literature for inquiries into academic development to ‘focus on supporting teaching and learning’ (p. 11) with ‘workshops to build the technical competence of academic staff’ (p. 8) (Krishnan & Suri, 2024), rather than raise the discourse to a more scholarly level. Having spent the final 20 years of my career in academic university departments that could be categorized as ‘academic development units’, I am very aware of the constant discussions around the nature of academic development. Arguments about the benefit and purpose of academic development are a permanent feature of the discourse within the neoliberal university where questions about value for money always run near the surface. However, where some commentators search for a definition of academic development that offers ‘a precise, unambiguous explanation that stipulates what something is and that is exclusive in applicability’ (Evans, 2002, p. 64), others have found that ‘a precise and shared definition [of academic development] remains illusive’ (Linder & Felten, 2015, p. 1). In contrast, I have never found the search for a definition to be of central importance as, it can be argued, that a definition ‘that serves as an organizing scheme should even be rather vague and conceptually open to stimulate research and concept development’ (Jax, 2007, p. 352). The possible benefit of avoiding a sedimenting definition of academic development can also be explained using the lens of the ‘travelling concept’ offered by Bal (2002, p. 11), who states that, ‘while groping to define what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it can do.’ This plasticity of concepts and their subsequent behavioural dynamics (explored by Peña-Guzmán, 2018) is useful when we come to consider the curation of academic development and a focus on what it can do, rather than how it can be defined. In addition, my own experience of searching for definitions for such things has been coloured by their subsequent managerial weaponization. Once a definition is nailed down, senior managers then love to develop a summary metric and then they are able to devise a scheme to use those data to ‘assess’ the performance of individual academics within the team. Perhaps one of the defining characteristics of the academic developers with whom I have worked over the years is their ability (or even desire) to work with uncertainty (Lygo-Baker, 2019). This maintains the fluidity of their work and avoids any reductionist tendency in descriptions of teaching, or of teachers (Lygo-Baker, 2025), acknowledging the importance of the art and craft of teaching—even within a data-driven academic environment.

My experiences of academic development over this time are personal and (perhaps) unique, and I find that comments in the research literature sometimes resonate with my experience and sometimes they jar. That is not to say they are right or wrong. It only illustrates the rich, heterogeneous patchwork that makes up the landscape of academic development. Views about ‘what is academic development’ must be coloured by how we see ‘the university’ in which the activities are undertaken. Whether we accept the dominant discourses of higher education and conceptualize academic development as an element of the neoliberal university, or if we align ourselves to a counter narrative that offers a fresh perspective of higher education that reclaims academia for the academics (Morrish & Sauntson, 2020). This will influence how we approach academic development. It is important to reflect on whether we are focused on the present or on a possible future, and whether we view either in dystopian or utopian terms (see Coté et al., 2007; Webb, 2018).

2. Knowledges

Within the ecology of knowledges that includes academic development, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the fluid juxtaposition of ‘official’ or ‘academic’ knowledge that will be recorded and documented in the literature, and the ‘unofficial’ and experiential narratives that inhabit the world of practice. Over the years, my colleagues and I worked together on various publications (as an enactment of academic flocking behaviour—Verfeld et al., 2023) in which we analysed the discourses that represented our practice that allowed for variations in our operational definitions of academic development (e.g., Kinchin et al., 2018). As a team we explored our diverse researcher-led academic development practice guided by the theoretical frame provided by Bernstein’s knowledge structures (Bernstein, 1999), who described the vertical (or regulative) discourse as considering the underpinning values of teaching, and the horizontal (or instructional) discourse focusing on the content being covered. We suggested that an academic development unit which explicitly models both a diversity of disciplinary frames for pedagogic research and a set of shared values can enrich the learning experience of the staff we worked with (Griffiths, 2004).

I also note that not all of our academic development research was published in the core education or academic development journals, but articles were often placed in the disciplinary education journals (such a veterinary, dental, chemical or geography education) where we thought they would have most impact on the teaching communities in those disciplines, rather than on the academic development community per se. This reflects an ‘objection to … an academic developer-centric perspective’ (Evans, 2024, p. 458). Therefore, an exclusive concentration the ‘core’ academic development literature offers an incomplete picture of what goes on and under-represents discussion of the absorptive capacity of colleagues within the disciplines to accommodate the academic development agenda (however that might be perceived), and the difficulties that can be experienced when asked to work outside one’s own epistemic community—particularly for those rooted in the natural sciences (Skopec et al., 2021; Rowland & Myatt, 2014). This exemplifies what has been described as ‘reciprocal incompleteness’ (Santos, 2016, p. 212) of knowledge. While ‘narrative knowledge sees scientific knowledge as a legitimate part of the wider pool of knowledges, scientific knowledge cannot reciprocate because the claims of narrative knowledge cannot be demonstrated in scientific ways’ (Meredith, 2024, p. 50).

3. Becoming Teachers

Teaching is a highly variable and context-dependent activity that varies in form across disciplines and evolves with each individual teacher over time. For example, Waghid describes his own development from teaching science, that was dominated by processes of ‘indoctrination, explanation and persuasion’ towards an approach in the social sciences that was dominated by ‘deliberation, deconstruction and disruption’ as he responded to changes in context and gained maturity during his own pedagogic pilgrimage (Davids & Waghid, 2019). ‘Teaching’ will, therefore, justifiably mean different things to different academics across the campus. Similarly, the ongoing discussion of what it means to be an academic has been the subject of considerable debate within the literature (e.g., Fanghanel & Trowler, 2008; Macfarlane, 2021), with no definitive conclusions reached. And so, trying to tie ‘teaching’ to ‘academic’ in a definition of academic development seems a fruitless endeavour, the results of which would satisfy few stakeholders.

Within the constraints of the neoliberal university, the search for a definition of academic development seems to be a way of justifying expenditure by generating a metric to summarize effectiveness of the endeavour. Here ‘effectiveness’ is often assumed to be presented by a linear relationship between delivery and measured effect. A non-reductionist model of evaluation that accepts complexity and rejects simplistic linear cause-and-effect measures offers a greater appreciation of the complexity of educational contexts, leading to an understanding that academic development activities, ‘can impact instructors and their practices in non-linear and unpredictable ways, with outcomes that may not be immediately tangible’ (Miller-Young & Poth, 2022, p. 387). This builds on a number of complexity science principles described by Lewin (1999):

• Small inputs can lead to dramatically large consequences.
• Global properties flow from the aggregate behaviour of individuals.
• Slight differences in initial conditions can produce very different outcomes.
• Complex adaptive systems can produce very different outcomes.

These principles are consistent with an appreciation of non-linear, ‘rhizomatic’ (Drumm, 2025) or ‘ecological’ systems (Kinchin, 2024).

Becoming academic is often allied to professional development and so it is helpful to consider what is meant by professional development in the context of university teaching. Evans (2024) offers an interpretation of professionalism in this context and concludes that it is ‘quite simply, a description of people’s “mode of being” in a work context’ (p. 460). For me, this definition appears to emphasize ‘being’ as the dominant philosophy in higher education, as opposed to ‘becoming’. It also considers the people separately from the work context—as such it is profoundly anti-ecological (sensu Morini, 2020). In order for it to align with an ecological view of the university in which the academic development occurs (Kinchin, 2024), then we need to reframe professionalism in more fluid terms as a ‘mode of becoming alongside evolution of the work context’. This replaces a philosophy of being with one of becoming (Kinchin, 2024, pp. 13–16). It recognizes the interplay between academics and their influence on their working context, where the individual is a constant work in progress (Adams, 2021), in the generation of a braided identity (Hatch et al., 2023). The philosophy of becoming also better aligns with the concept of career sustainability, that has been defined as ‘the extent to which an individual attains happiness, health and productivity at work, and maintains these experiences over the course of a career’ (Greenhaus et al., 2024, p. 482). Without career sustainability, becoming cannot be a long-term process.

4. Curation of the Third Space

Many of the staff working in universities fit into one of two groups: they are either academics (teachers and researchers) or support staff (including groundskeepers and catering staff). However, there is a third space (sensu Whitchurch, 2008) that is occupied by a diverse group that includes, for example, academic developers, librarians, IT specialists and learning support tutors. Such staff roles are filled by degree-holding colleagues, often termed ‘professional staff’,

who are primarily responsible for developing, maintaining and changing the social, digital and physical infrastructure that enables education, research and knowledge exchange.

(De Jong, 2024)

A key role for academic developers, in particular, is the active curation of the third space. Rather than acting as a passive buffer zone between policy and practice, the third space can be viewed as an active interface between students and management where academic developers influence relationships within the institutional ecosystem (Figure 1). This builds on the idea that the pedagogic frailty model (Kinchin & Winstone, 2017) provides a valuable heuristic for the exploration of the interactions between teachers and various other actors in the university that maintain its healthy function—the institutional natural history. However, the application of the pedagogic frailty model exhibits an epistemological split across the four dimensions of the model (Kinchin & Correia, 2025). Two dimensions, ‘regulative discourse’ and ‘locus of control’, fall within the purview of management and are influenced by an epistemological position dominated by a search for generalizable truths supported by quantitative data. However, the two central dimensions of ‘pedagogy and discipline’ and ‘research-teaching-nexus’ will typically be the focus of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)-type enquiry undertaken by teachers (Kinchin, 2017). This type of enquiry is often rooted in sociomaterialist, feminist research cultures that are rooted in context. Accessing the whole model and, therefore, constructing a comprehensive understanding of the institutional natural history, requires a sophisticated epistemological gaze that can cope with a plurality of epistemological perspectives. The dynamics of this interface is something that can be uniquely curated by academic developers (Kinchin & Pugh, 2024).

5. The Structure of Academic Development

Explorations of academic development across the literature typically have ‘change’ at their core (e.g., Smyth, 2003; McGrath, 2020; Fossland & Sandvoll, 2023). This resonates with the emphasis on ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’ that I have discussed above. Where ‘being’ is seen as the ‘resting state’, then change from state A to state B is the goal. However, if there is acceptance of ‘becoming’ as the normal condition, the focus on observable change through academic development is rather redundant. While some things (and some teachers) evidently do need to change, I feel it presumptive to consider ‘change’ so prominently as a goal for academic development, unless we are thinking about a change in philosophy, from being to becoming. An overemphasis on change also fails to recognize the punctuated nature of developmental trajectories (Brock & Mallinson, 2024), in which relatively brief periods of change are typically separated by much longer periods of stasis that are characterized by minor restructuring of processes that often have the aim of maintaining the status quo. Relentless change is unsustainable and so management of stasis is something that needs to be acknowledged. Much academic development is, therefore, concerned with the long-term management of stasis rather than the shorter-term management of change.

In my years in academic development, I have encountered many novice teachers who demonstrated impressive classroom skills early in their careers and from whom I learnt much. Sadly, such colleagues often have their early enthusiasm for teaching crushed by middle managers who push the tired trope of ‘research trumping teaching’ when it comes to academic prestige. For many of these eager novices, the emphasis does not need to be on ‘change’, but rather on ‘growth’ by helping them to increase their repertoire of classroom strategies, confidence in the classroom, and their agency to make decisions about their own career trajectory as they move from a state of dependence towards a state of independence (Kinchin, 2022a).

Where change is desirable, it is essential to place it within the particulars of each context. I have observed how unhelpful it can be to encourage a novice teacher to invest too much energy into change in a given direction if that places them at odds with their immediate colleagues in their department. It can place individuals in an uncomfortable tension, particularly with senior colleagues who may hold a ‘traditional’ view of the teaching-research hierarchy of prestige and make the novice feel like an outsider in their own department. Therefore, the direction and speed of change needs to accommodate the inertia of the ‘old guard’ who I have heard make inhibitory proclamations to their colleagues that conflict with contemporary views of teaching and active learning, including comments such as ‘the internet has no place in the lecture theatre!’. Bohlmann (2022, p. 2) reflects on the tensions in her role as an academic developer and the inherent duplicity of this remit in which personal development can replicate colonial values such as individualism, competitiveness and striving for originality, while academic developers simultaneously seek to encourage academics to challenge the status quo; ‘If our role is to develop academic literacies by training students to conform to dominant reading and writing conventions, can we at the same time be decolonisers?’. Change (or becoming) can never be isolated; it has to respect the relationships that are important to each teacher and these relationships may temper the trajectory and rate of change, as the academic developer role is uniquely bound up with the curation of relationships within the university ecosystem.

Within a philosophy of becoming, I suggest that dimensions within a conceptual model of academic development can be adequately summarized and clearly allied to the values of the ecological university using just three concepts:

• Ecological resilience is concerned with learning from and developing with disturbances that are recognized as a normal component of a fluctuating environment (Folke et al., 2021). This is achieved by focusing on characteristics of persistence, adaptability, variability and unpredictability (Holling, 1996). These are characteristics that can ensure continuing viability in an environment where important factors lie outside the control of individuals within the system. It might be given the short-hand label of ‘futureproofing’ or ‘sustainability’.
• Epistemic humility requires that one examines assumptions of cognitive authority to ensure that we do not suppress diverse or minority viewpoints (Potter, 2022). This can create a valuable rhythm of alternating knowledge and ignorance (Parviainen et al., 2021) that allows the academic developer to simultaneously acknowledge the subject expertise and cultural knowledge brought by course participants within their novicehood of teaching.
• Epistemological rehabilitation refers to an appreciation of the many facets of epistemology and the way in which some facets can be used to maintain a limited perspective while others open the door to fresh ideas and new possibilities. The constructs of epistemological injustice (Fricker, 2007) and epistemological narrowing (Mormina, 2022) help to maintain islands of knowledge while epistemological vulnerability (Gilson, 2014) and epistemological flexibility (Osborne et al., 2021) offer a wider and more fluid perspective. Recognition of this complex epistemological cartography can facilitate an epistemological rehabilitation (Kinchin, 2025), representing a trajectory for the epistemic development of the field.

These three components may be less comprehensive in scope than other frameworks described in the literature (e.g., Evans, 2024) but offer a more portable model that will support academic developers in their curation of both segments of the third space (highlighted in Figure 1) and reinforces the concept of ‘teaching as an ecological consilience’ (Kinchin, 2025).

6. Resource Impoverishment

We may like to reflect upon a healthy perspective of academic development and consider how it should proceed within a well-resourced university environment. Given how keen universities appear to be to highlight indicators of excellence in their teaching provision on their web sites and promotional materials, one might assume that teacher development within academic development units is well supported, well-funded and well resourced. However, in practice and following years of neoliberal management; austerity; efficiency cuts; financial crises and COVID restrictions, we can state that academic developers (at least within UK universities) typically work within an environment dominated by resource impoverishment. My own department has been subject to budgetary cuts each year for the past decade, and this inhibits the breadth of work that can be undertaken and has implications for what academic development can be in practice. It also has an influence on those academics engaged in development activities in terms of their expectations and for their capacity to engage in scholarship.

The utility of ecological metaphors to aid the description and analysis of teacher development in the university (Illes, 1999) fits well with the concept of resource impoverishment. Particularly useful is the explanatory value of the adaptive cycle of ecosystem maintenance (Kinchin, 2022a, 2022b). This is related to the ecological concept of life-history patterns indicated by the letters within the lazy-eight cycle (Figure 2). Of particular interest are the sections indicated by r (growth) and K (conservation). The release (Ω) and reorganization (α) phases relate equally to r- and K-selected individuals and do not require additional discussion here. The r/K concept is based on there being two contrasting habitat types, each favouring a different proportion of the community: r-selecting and K-selecting. A K-selecting population exhibits a preference for a constant or predictable habitat where investment in the status quo is high, and change is slow. In contrast, an r-selecting population has more success in an unpredictable or ephemeral habitat (see Begon et al., 1986).

In moving the r/K concept from the ecological to the sociological, some license has to be taken when describing the characteristics of the populations involved. To illustrate examples of r- and K-selected academics, just think back to variation in the personal responses to the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, representing the largest disturbance to the teaching environment that most of us have experienced in recent times. There were colleagues who thrived during this time: accommodating emergency online teaching while, for example, also finding the energy to learn a new language, write a novel or develop a podcast. In contrast, there were also colleagues who were overwhelmed by the sudden change in their lives and became withdrawn or depressed. This, I argue, illustrates the two extremes along the r/K continuum of life history strategies: the former being r-strategists and the latter K-strategists whose optimum positions in the adaptive cycle can be seen in Figure 2. This dichotomy is, of course, an over-simplification, but there is enough illustrative value to make it worth examination and to initiate dialogue to consider repercussions for academic development. While colleagues will be aware of how they fit into the diversity of the university community (e.g., gender, race, age, nationality, etc.) they may be fully unaware of how they would relate to the r/K concept prior to experiencing a major disruption in their lives, such as that generated by COVID. Of course, many colleagues experience personal disturbances in their lives (such as ill health or divorce), but COVID was a shared experience that made us more aware of inequalities experienced by our peers.

The consequence of this examination of the r/K concept in the academic community is that it makes explicit the idea that some colleagues will thrive in the conservation phase of their adaptive cycles, while others will thrive in the growth phase. In addition, as our working environment becomes more impoverished, we may find that those colleagues who thrive most in development programmes may be increasingly r-selected, with K-selected colleagues being more conservative in their approach to scholarship that threatens to challenge their perception of teaching (particularly where ‘change’ is seen as the aim of the endeavour). In contrast, those colleagues who already have dominant positions in the university (senior managers, Faculty Deans, etc.) are likely to exhibit characteristics of K-selection so that we can predict a social stratification (sensu Ellis, 1991) across the university. This stratification will contribute to tensions across the university ecosystem so that a single disturbance will be viewed simultaneously as a ‘threat’ and an ‘opportunity’ by different individuals depending on their tendency towards r- or K-selection.

7. Conclusions

If we take an ecological dynamics view of knowledge curation in the third space (Kinchin & Pugh, 2024), then academic development can be viewed from a relational perspective that fits with a post-neoliberal perspective on the ecological nature of the university (Kinchin, 2024). Relationality needs to be fostered within the teaching community and also to consider the relationship between teachers and students and with the ecology of knowledges. So, whether we are considering the curriculum, the students, or the teachers, the teaching discourse needs to be reclaimed by supporting the relationships between the key elements. This also requires a high degree of trust in our colleagues so that we feel confident enough to exhibit flexibility, vulnerability and humility in our work (Kinchin, 2025).

Historically, we appear to have accepted a scenario where a few voices direct what academic development does and hence directed academic developers’ thoughts about who they are. In consequence, it has been observed that academic development programmes (particularly in the UK and Australia) have been guided by a small number of key theorists (see Kandlbinder & Peseta, 2009). This narrow focus forces most academics on these programmes to engage with theorists who sit outside their own epistemic communities. I have argued that this invalidates the lived experiences of teachers’ own student journeys and effectively erects a barrier between theoretical and experiential knowledges of teaching (Kinchin, 2025, p. 210). This does not encourage colleagues to exhibit the essential qualities of flexibility, vulnerability and humility in their teaching. Success in academic development programmes is, currently, preconceived as demonstrating ‘change’ (e.g., Evans, 2024; Fossland & Sandvoll, 2023). However, if we could encourage colleagues to work with a greater range of theorists, particularly where they can re-purpose (or ‘exapt’, as explored by Gould, 1991) concepts from their own discipline, then the focus turns to ‘growth’. This offers greater alignment with the adaptive cycle (Figure 2). The ensuing epistemologically diverse counter-narratives will generate a richness of perspectives that better reflects the epistemological mosaic that can be found across the university campus. Engagement with such a diversity of counter-narratives also supports growth of academic developers, ensuring that the academic development discourse does not become sedimented within the narrative monoculture of the neoliberal university by juxtaposing this dynamic perspective with previous and forthcoming narratives from the field. Within this framework, the adoption of a dynamic philosophy of becoming offers more than a stagnant philosophy of being.