As academic developers, we rely on colleagues' trust to a considerable degree. In this study, we explore how a person-centred approach to academic development, grounded in relational pedagogy, both relies upon and builds trust between staff and an academic development team. We discuss empirical data -- from colleagues with whom we have worked --…

Conversations between colleagues, significant for academic development, do not always take place centre stage. In fact, these serendipitous collaborations are often brief and fleeting, but can start a dialogue that has the potential to influence lives in academia and can lead to qualitatively different conceptions of learning and teaching. This…

Located at the place where excessive entitlement and the "best-loved self" intersect, this research illustrates what happens when the excessive entitlement of one educator trumps that of another. Then, in a perverse sort of way, those who are excessively entitled may even imply that the other is acting excessively entitled. This is how…

Health professions faculty are traditionally experts in their respective fields and are prepared to teach students from their own profession, but rarely receive training concerning implementation of interprofessional education. The problem addressed by this research was that most health professions educators are not prepared to facilitate…

Adjunct faculty at colleges and universities in the U.S. are quickly outnumbering full-time faculty. This new faculty majority often struggles with low pay and sub-par working conditions. Recognizing this issue has a number of negative impacts for higher education, researchers at a comprehensive university in the southeastern United States…

We are a group of teaching-focused academics who share a passion for learning, teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in Higher Education (HE). In order to understand how practitioners from a diversity of backgrounds and disciplines came to be in their present LTS (Learning, Teaching & Scholarship) academic roles, we…

This paper provides a small-scale exploration of the evolvement of leadership roles in higher education academic units (AUs), namely Departments, Schools & Faculties. A literature review provides theoretical examples of the evolution of professional services (PS) staff. Changes in PS leadership roles are also explored alongside the emergence…

This paper outlines the personal transformation that occurred when three university educators from very different fields (education, midwifery, and oral health) and world views, established a common understanding of their research topic and subsequent development of a research question to improve health educators' capability when teaching…

The faculty sabbatical leave has been present in many institutions of higher education since its inception at Harvard University in 1880 but is relatively underexamined in the literature related to the outcomes not only to the institution but also to the faculty member. This study included interviews with 12 faculty members at one research…

Despite community colleges being a feminized space (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2017), women are still marginalized (Aiston & Fo, 2021) in senior-leadership positions (ACE, 2017), but also as faculty members, who play a key role in the institution. One way women faculty members navigate their careers and overcome these barriers is by having a…

Previous research has shown that teachers' informal learning in social networks is of great importance for their professional development. Participation in social networks is often characterised by knowledge exchange between employees with the aim of dealing with work-related challenges or improving the work practice. In this study, attention was…

Early career investigators (ECIs) in the Social Sciences and Humanities need to receive adequate information so that they will be empowered to progress in their academic career and deal with the various evaluation processes that constitute an essential part of their professional development. This article relies on an informational-ecosystemic…

It is important that professionals, especially at the university level, use their expertise and experience to become mentors to their colleagues and students. The literature on mentors focuses mainly on professional mentor-mentee relationships but there is much to be gained from fostering more informal mentoring relationships especially at the…

When higher education instructors introduce changes in teaching and assessment strategies to meet either personal or institutional goals, they often navigate practical and political challenges alone. This study investigates the perspectives of Norwegian university instructors in their effort to replace lectures and exams with a series of…

In Research Group Meetings (RGM) and other professional activities, sometimes positions are fluid, but stances illustrate international scholars' bilingual competence in an RGM in Microbiology. In stances, people index sociocultural values by evaluating discursive figures in talk, proffering epistemic/affective assessments, and positioning each…