Haven’t posted for a while, but I have been desperately busy with my real job. I’ve got a sort of chapter 1 in some sort of shape, but it still needs some work. So, now I’m beginning to think about writing the literature review. Now, I’m not short of literature! There are two skips full of photocopied articles in my attic, nearly 300 references in my Refworks database. But, one thing that struck me was that there wasn’t much on “educational development”. I did another search though and turned up an article that kept talking about “academic development”. So I did a search on that.

Uh oh! There were hundreds of articles, books, chapters, although, a cursory glance at the literature, still suggests more interest in legitmising the profession of academic development, than in how units actually do interact with their host university, Of course, legitimising the profession, inevitably strengthens the position of a unit, but it looks like I am going to have to rethink my research questions a bit. I did find some interesting arguments. One article (by Lynn McAlpine) actually proposed that development units be situated within the disciplines to reduce the danger of top down initiatives being foisted on academics who weren’t interested. (Presumably they’d be based within faculties) Admittedly I think there was a bit of Devil’s advocacy going on there. But, another think piece (by Angela Brew) quoted another doctoral dissertation which argued that developers operated in a sort of liminal environment (neither one thing nor the other. But quite definitely something!) I can’t see how a faculty based unit can occupy a zone of liminality for very long.

I did like McAlpine’s critique of the “fixing the teacher” model which she says informed educational development. Actually, I think that model is still quite powerful in some quarters, although perhaps not in educational development itself. (I guess there are probably still poor teachers around…) I much prefer the idea of jointly developing and evaluating innovative ideas with teaching colleagues.

I’ve got to read all these articles in a lot more detail over the holidays and begin to answer some of the questions I have about what the literature is actually saying about educational development units.