Specialissue2009

As promised, I have added some suggested ways (in purple) we could re-orientate the special issue for the journal Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. See what you think. Please feel free to add or change anything. I've mainly had a go at the overall rationale. I haven't finished what I was thinking of adding and I'm not sure how I save but don't make it go live. So... Wendy, Gail's and I are meeting now about our paper and I'll get back to the site again late. It might be easier if everyone waits until I've finished before making any more changes. Back again later this avo - Brisbane time. Thanks, Catherine

OK I'm back again after a great meeting with Gail and Wendy. So here now are all the bits we would like to add. I think the next step might be for each group to insert how they see their paper[s] linking with the theme of applying humanities understandings of third spaces to TL. The new title needs work - I couldn't think of a nice short punchy way of putting it so it would be great to get other people's suggestions about this. ... Regards, Catherine

I have added some comments in Red below. I think it represents a great starting point, but my understanding (quite possibly flawed) was that we were aiming at both an academic development as well as broader higher education teaching and learning audience. The changes I made are aimed at including the broader higher education teaching and learning audience, but if my understanding was incorrect then all of the red can be deleted! Thanks, Brad  Trevor responds: I think there is great value to some of the red additions. However, I think we were saying that we were trying to expand our audience, which to my mind means explaining to people other than only developers what the tenor and tone of academic development might be in a quality/accountability-obsessed era. that is to say we're explaining what we do and the fissures, fractures, and affirmative joys of our work (theoretically and practically) -- explaining it to others, and in the process perhaps demonstrating that the us/them thing is kind of silly. What we are not doing is theorizing all of higher ed. These papers were all delivered at ICED, for an AD audience, and most were written for that audience. So if they do "broader field" theorizing, that's grand, but it's not what I at least set out to do. Not that I can't or don't want to, but are we writing new papers or revisiting our ICED papers? I think we're theorizing AD for a broader audience than AD'ers -- Trevor (we can move this into the "discussion" tab for this page now if you like).

Based on the papers from ICED 2008, the work begins in October 2008 on a Special Issue of some journal (aimed at tertiary educators or at academic developers, or both). Editorial team in alpha order: Arvast, Anita Holmes, Trevor McCormack, Coralie

Proposal draft:

1. Working title: Performing Between: Applying Humanities Understandings of Third Spaces to Teaching and Learning

2. Focus:

This special issue explores how humanities theories have recently been applied to the field of higher education, enriching an area of study once dominated by educational psychology and phenomenography (particularly in the UK, Australian and New Zealand contexts). While Mills and Taylor Huber (2005) argue that there has been a one-way impact of anthropological and ethnographic approaches on the wider field of Education, this special issue demonstrates how the sub-discipline of Higher Education has largely been cut off from these theories and methodologies until recently. Following on from its first special issue in IJAD (2007), the Challenging Academic Development (CAD) Collective proposes with this special issue to continue the task of applying humanities understandings of third spaces to higher education teaching and learning practice. All the contributions take their cue from our prior collaborative special issue in IJAD 12:1 -- “Thinking Otherwise in Academic Development: Critical Reflections on Practice” – but with a transformative difference. Instead of building directly on the content of that collection, the authors represented here all work on an affirmative engagement with the slippages, alienations, and unspoken assumptions of both academic development practice as well as the broader field of higher education teaching and learning practice. A significant grouping of papers takes its cue from the recuperative work of Stephen Rowland’s “Lover’s Discourse” on university teaching. Another paper draws on anthropological concepts to rethink academic development as a “trading zone” between academic disciplines by enacting in two workshops on two continents the very zone about which it is speaking. Constructive Alignment (Biggs) is the subject of a paper that describes the results of a self-consciously artistic and creative experiment with deliberate misalignment in a workshop. And Goffman’s dramaturgical theory forms the basis for an engagement with self and identity in both academic practice and academic development.

The articles and creative pieces in this special issue are from the higher education conferences ICED 2008 (Salt Lake City, Utah) and HERDSA 2008 (????). They are written by various members of the Challenging Academic Development Collective, a group that formed in 2005 and whose active members have been highly successful in conference and publication record since.

3. Value: The twelve authors of the eight articles work (or have worked) as academic developers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand,<span style="color: rgb(51, 28, 176)"> <span style="color: rgb(184, 71, 10)"><span style="color: rgb(4, 108, 60)"><span style="color: rgb(0, 255, 130)">the United States,   <span style="color: rgb(184, 71, 10)">  and the UK, and so the collection as a whole will offer an international perspective to theorizing academic development<span style="color: rgb(247, 38, 38)">, as well as theorizing about the practice of teaching across the disciplines.

These articles strike a certain kind of stance in relation to<span style="color: rgb(247, 34, 34)"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0)"><span style="color: rgb(247, 34, 34)">the practice of both academic staff across the disciplines as well as academic development, one some of us characterize (following Erica McWilliam) as “thinking against”. This refers to a mode of thinking which is always restless, consistently challenging current practice and belief <span style="color: rgb(141, 24, 231)">and draws upon humanities theories and methodologies. The value of such a mode is that, while unsettling fields of enquiry and practice, it keeps new ideas flowing through them.

A second value of the collection is that, in their responsiveness to the social and political context of higher education in a global frame <span style="color: rgb(125, 21, 203)">reflective of humanities understandings and perspectives, the respective articles raise issues that will resonate with <span style="color: rgb(255, 3, 0)">academic staff as well as academic developers in many regions of the world.

Yet another value of the work is the diversity of the viewpoints that emerge: what is offered is not a coherent or collectively agreed view of <span style="color: rgb(244, 31, 31)">either teaching and learning or academic development but a fragmented, lively and partial field. Working both with and against postmodern and critical theories, these essays proffer theoretical tensions and different world views that gather effect in their very relation to one another and to the field as a whole. They are fruitfully divergent openings within the shifting network of meanings that pattern the landscape of academic development<span style="color: rgb(248, 42, 42)">, and more broadly of higher education teaching and learning.

4. Proposed contributors: The proposed contributors are (in alphabetical order): Valerie Clifford, Wendy Green, Trevor Holmes, Anna Louise Jones, Peter Kandlbinder, Catherine Manathunga, Kim McShane, Tai Peseta, Kathryn Sutherland, Susan Wilcox, Gail Wilson, Brad Wuetherick. The Special Issue will open with an editorial co-authored by Anita Arvast, Trevor Holmes, and Coralie McCormack.

Table of contents:

Links to paper workspaces