Towards a Toolbox for Scholarship of Academic Development (SoAD)

Abstract

Assessing and evaluating educational development actions in Higher Education is at the heart of many issues related to both institutions and educational developers’ own professional development. Scholarship of Academic Development (SoAD) may be a mean to deal with these issues (Badley, 2001; Ricciardi Joos et al., 2016). This paper aims at proposing a general framework to identify different educational developers’ reflective mindsets regarding their practice. We suggest a framework that highlights the relations between the development stages of educational developers’ practice towards SoAD, possible actions of developers to support the development of their practice, and different mindsets developers may adopt regarding the development of their practice. This framework is based on the literature in the SoTL field (Bélanger, 2010), a.o. the teachers’ mindsets (reflexive practitioner, reflective practitioner, practitioner-researcher) proposed by Donnay and Charlier (2006) after Schön (1983). Our paper also aims at proposing not only conceptual tools, such as Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick’s evaluation levels, RUFDATA approach and Kolb’s experiential learning, but also practical tools (activities, scenarios) to support educational developers in pursuing a SoAD approach. This set of complementary tools may help further and appreciate a reflection, evaluation or research about educational developers’ actions and impacts (Condon et al., 2016; Daele et al., 2015). We illustrate the use of the tools with examples highlighting the need for their adaptation to the context of use. Ultimately our communication suggests a framework and a set of tools to inform reflection on educational developers’ practices by promoting creativity rather than prescribing “best practices”.