2008handout


 * While the poster will change, I imagine this handout will be relatively similar to the May 20th version -- feel free to make changes though!!**

__**Engaging the Assumptions of Educational Development: Writing together to theorize a field**__ The Challenging Academic Development Collective

The CAD (Challenging Academic Development) Collective comprises academic developers interested in making theoretical interventions, or developing new theoretical frameworks for the contexts, activities and tasks of the scholarship of academic development. The CAD Collective is involved in theorising the ideas that define the possibilities and limits of the scholarship of academic development as both a field and a set of practices.
 * Who are we?**

It questions how academic development constructs itself as a practice, a strategy, and a technology. In other words: How does it narrate itself or offer itself up to be thought through and engaged with?

The Collective also wants to examine how academic development critiques itself and the ways in which these critiques are both concealed and made transparent within its scholarship. We want to ask how these critiques manifest in the conversations, programs, workshops, and strategic projects we are involved in at local and institutional levels.

The CAD Collective emerged from “Identity,Liminality, Hybridity,” a symposium at the 2004 International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED) Conference in Ottawa, Canada. While several senior colleagues were on a panel about the future of academic development, future CAD members were performing a readers’ theatre piece that drew on the very discourses circulating at the conference, and indeed in all our various institutions. Using drama to highlight issues of identity, four academic developers also presented current work in the field. Video of the event is available on the Institute for the Advancement of Teaching in Higher Education (IATHE) website: http://www.iathe.org/eng/mediasphere.asp Since then, various projects have emerged from post-conference writing retreats or individual efforts that have found some affinity with CAD. One of the important interventions, we hope, is Issue 12:1 of the International Journal for Academic Development: “Thinking Otherwise in Academic Development.”
 * A brief history...**

Although we bring to academic development a great deal of expertise in various disciplines, theories, and methodologies, we are dissatisfied with the way in which our field is being shaped by neoliberal discourses of individual possessivism, global consumerism, and performance-based ideology. Our goal is to experiment as a group with/in textual and non-textual forms to bring about changes in what can count as reason, knowledge, and power in academic development. Tai Peseta asks one of the founding question of our work together: “Why doesn’t the academic development literature feel the way the work feels?”
 * Why do we do this critical work?**

It’s one thing to list a bibliography of members’ works; it’s another entirely to understand how these works came about. The key is collaboration. Writing retreats, readers’ theatre, wikis or blogs, workshops as happenings... we would love to add your own creativity and expertise to the mix! Contact Tai Peseta tpeseta@itl.usyd.edu.au or visit http://mailman.ucc.usyd.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/itl-cad to join the listserv. More information and examples of our work can be found at the address below.
 * How do we do our work?**

(Author details and other listings, including upcoming and recent papers, on handout)
 * Sample Presentations and Publications**

//Symposia:// “Conceptual transgressions: Furtive explorations in the scholarship of academic development.” HERDSA 2005. “Liminality, identity and hybridity: on the promise of new conceptual frameworks for retheorising faculty/academic development.” ICED 2004. “On states of becoming: new academic developers on the scholarship of academic development.” Joint AARE/NZRE Conference, 2003.

//Research Note:// (2005). “The Challenging Academic Development (CAD) Collective.” International Journal for Academic Development, 10(1), 59-61.

//Collaborative Reports on Conferences// (2006). “Light a Candle or Curse the Darkness?” HERDSA News, 28 (2) pp. 12-13. A Report on the ICED 2006 (2005). “The Participants’ Tales: On being at the CAD Symposium.” HERDSA News, 23 (3) pp. 19-21

//ICED 2008 Papers and Workshops// "A Lover’s guide to university teaching: Finding the heart in academic development." "Educational development as a trading zone: tales, issues and possibilites". “Creativity Unbound? Rethinking "Constructive Alignment" as Paradigm and Method,”

//ICED 2006 Papers and Workshops// “Academic Development in the ‘Contact Zone’: post-colonial ways of rethinking academic development” “A thing of beauty: Weaving as a metaphor for academic development work.” “Enhancing academic development: a focus on language.” “Educational development as ‘Slow Rhizomatics:’ reaffirming the critical in critical reflection.” “Key thinkers in higher education teaching and learning.” “Supervision metaphors, nice and nasty.” “Theorising ‘resistance’ to/in educational development: towards a productive conceptual framework.” “Troubling the way we research and write about academic development practice: turning to notions of artfulness.” . //IJAD Special Issue 12:1// (2007) “Thinking Otherwise in Academic Development.” Features essays coming out of collaborative writing retreat post-HERDSA 2005.

//PhD Theses (unpublished)// (2007). Seeking authentic educational development practice: A spiritual and philosophical journey. Concordia University, Montreal. (2006) Technologies transforming academics: Academic identity and online teaching. University of Technology, Sydney. (2005). Learning and Becoming in Academic Development: an autoethnographic inquiry. University of Sydney.

Our collaborative website: