Academic developers and HE change by Roni Bamber

Academic
developers
and HE
change: a
postcard
from the
past to the
future
From
Roni Bamber
vbamber01@outlook.com
https://mymodernmet.com/brexit-stamps/
To SEDA
Conference,
Autumn 2024

My position
1. Scary times for universities: Armageddon?
2. My experience: 40+ years of scary times in HE
(Armageddon?): my postcards
3. Changing academic development landscape
– Insights: if I’d known then…

Scary times: some current challenges in HE
Public accountability, managerialism, strategic planning,
targets
Globalisation of HE, competition
Structural change(tertiary sector))
Funding
Students: work-education balance, diversity, mental health
Staff: overloaded, exhausted, casualisation
Whole purpose of HE…
Technological revolution

Working in higher education
UCU (2022) survey of 7,000 university staff, 100
institutions:
• 90% pessimistic about the future of HE
• 2/3 likely to leave HE in next five years (pension cuts,
pay, working conditions)
• 1/3 of academic staff employed on fixed-term contracts

My position
1. Scary times for universities
2. My experience: 40+ years of scary times in
HE

A personal look back
Informed by
scholarship, of
course!
Sector
constantly
changing
15th
Century –
21st
Century:
little change

Was there ever a
golden age of HE?
Pre-1980:
golden age for
some
academics in
some subjects
in some
institutions

1940s: no golden
age of HE for
working classes

Robbins aim:
13% of age
group in HE by
1973 (from 4%)
1950s:
changing for
some of this
generation

And
beyond:
elite to
mass HE
40 years of change, requiring
changes, inter alia, in:
• Purposes of HE
• Size of institutions
• Nature of institutional
boundaries
• Administration and
governance
• Student homogeneity
• Modes of attendance
• Curriculum
• Student experience
• Academic standards
• Forms of instruction
• Staff - student relationships
(Trow 1973)
Up to 15%
of school
leavers
(Trow 1973)
15-50% of
school
leavers
(Trow 1973)

Push factors:
government
intervention in
university policies
and practices
Pull factors:
from within the
sector, eg non-
elite institutions

My position
HE: my postcards

Things were different
40+ years ago…
• No credit and
qualifications framework
• No learning outcomes
• No Bologna
• No assessment
specifications
• Little clear written
information for students
• No lecturer development
• Very little pedagogical
scholarship
• No behavioural guidance

https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/six-flags-joker-roller-coaster.jpg?quality=85
Academic
developers
riding the roller
coaster of HE
change
Roni Bamber
vbamber@qmu.ac.uk
Student and
lecturer
support:
ad hoc, random
Open
inequality,
sexism
Laissez-faire
management
1980s

https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/six-flags-joker-roller-coaster.jpg?quality=85
Academic
developers
riding the roller
coaster of HE
change
Roni Bamber
vbamber@qmu.ac.uk
Massification
Dearing, learning
outcomes,
modules,
accountability,
expectations
Quality:
adversarialism
Restructuring,
mergers,
Polys, colleges
– universities
1990s

Managerialism,
neoliberalism,
Growth,
globalisation
Skills,
employability
Social
justice.
WP,
Tuition fees:
consumerism
. student
loans,
market-led
HE (England)
Quality -
tied
funding:
institutiona
l L&T
strategies,
public
information
Governance,
Formalisation
of
expectations,
CQFs
2000s

Technology,
graduate
attributes
Student
voice
Institutional
targets
Era of data,
evidence /
benchmarking
Measurement /
metrics
Belt tightening,
Workload
pressures,
performativity,
casualisation
2010s

Student
mental
health,
staff
workload /
burnout
Covid,
TEL
AI, nature of
Knowledge,
LLL
Competition,
‘low value
degrees’
Tertiary
sector
Purpose of
HE?
2020s
But universities
fairer places
than when I
started?

Question:
What other
big changes
have you
seen /
experienced,
during your
time in HE, in
whichever
setting?
Post your
reflections /
answers on
the chat

What
brought
about all
those
changes?

Major HE strategic changes of direction
1960s
Robbins Report,
Access to HE,
Staff training,
quality,
RvT
1990s
HESA,
Dearing: Staff training,
ILTHE,
Professionalisation,
Devolution to 4
nations,
Bologna
2000s
Labour: 50%
participation,
IMD data,
NSS, PTES, PRES,
Diamond Review –
shared services,
University league tables
and ranking systems
2010s
Browne review – student
finance,
White Paper - market-led HE
system, Quality Code, REF,
TEF, Augur Review
(funding,tertiary sector), OfS
2020s
Covid:
digitalisation
accelerates,
“Crack down on poor
quality courses” (OfS),
Student expectations

My position
HE: my postcards
3. Changing academic development landscape

Changing landscape of academic
development
‘When HEDG was formed in
1995 there was a strong
sense of a vulnerable and
emerging group of people,
mostly newly appointed to
positions with institution-
wide responsibility for
enhancing learning and
teaching, who needed to
meet to share experience,
provide mutual support in a
hostile world and plan their
survival.’ (Gosling, 2010)

Building
scholarship
and theory
Building
credibility
Building
confidence
in our
practices
Building
WTP
(McCune &
Hounsell,
2005)

Generation 0
(pre 1990s): Nothing in many institutions
Generation 1
(till approx. 2000): Workshops
Generation 2
(2000 on): PG Cert in L&T
Generation 3
(2011 on): CPD Schemes
Generation 4
(now): Post PG Cert? Leadership?
Academic
development
generations

Conceptual +
contextual +
practical
extension of
activities, thinking
& language.
2020s
PSF,
mainstreaming
academic
development, ‘a
voice at the
committee table’,
broadening of
scholarship and of
roles (eg research
dev, TEL, learning
cultures, whole of
institution etc)
2010s
Institutions –
L&T Strategies
(TQEF- funded),
Academic dev units,
PG Certs L&T,
probationary
requirements.
National - Licence to
practise?, NTFS,
LTSN, growing
population of
academic
developers,
scholarship of L&T,
researcher dev,
Pedagogy!
2000s
Dearing, staff
development, ILT,
HEQC Quality
assessment, birth
of IJAD, ICED
1990s
No training or
guidance for new
lecturers, narrow
conceptualisa-tion
of academic
development,
‘tips and tricks’
1980s
Gradual ‘frontier extension’ (Evans, 2023)

Identity shifts in academic development
• Range of activities: from L&T to research development, learning
support, TEL, strategy dev, employability, data analysis,
scholarship, projects
• Reach: individual, dept, institution, partner institutions in UK,
global partners
• Relationships: Senior management, Quality, Planning, Student
Support, SU, national agencies (QAA, OfS…)
• Roles: institutional imperatives, increasingly mandated by senior
management (Bamber, 2020)
• Ways of thinking and practising: change management,
collaboration, evidence-informed, lower hostility to academic
development, bridging

My position
Changing academic development landscape
– Insights: if I’d known then…
Culture
change
Constant
adaptation

If I’d known then…
‘There is no all-
enveloping safety-
zone identified for
the future’
(Martin, 2018, p.17)
How should
developers respond
to the blizzard of
signs from the
future?
(Baume, 2016)

Insights: what I wish I’d done better in
academic development
Need to:
1. Work with uncertainty in changing contexts
2. Work with systems and cultures, to leverage
change
3. Foster collaborations
4. Balance strategic – operational work
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503373/12-secrets-roller-coaster-designers

‘the new
normal’
1 Work with uncertainty in changing contexts
(Barnett, 2000)
• Organisational agility in our VUCA world
(volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous)
(LeBlanc, 2018)
• How to ‘navigate changing seas’ (Groen et al,
2023)

Policy ‘ball’ going down the
Implementation Staircase
Targets achieved
Staff implement policy
Departments accept policy
Policy disseminated
Committee makes policy
recommendations
Saunders &
Reynolds,
1987

Principled, pragmatic opportunists
(Baume, no date)
• Build systems and processes, but anticipating
disorder, to survive and ‘enact key points of
leverage’ (Peseta and Grant 2011)
• Use currents of political energy and change to
leverage academic development within changing
environments
• Remember it’s not managerialism OR collegiality
(Land’s (2004) spectrum of orientations to
academic development) = BOTH

2 Work with systems and cultures, to leverage
change
• We are agents of change!
• Working in shifting
territories with / across
mutating academic
disciplines, fluid identities
in a ‘multi-layered
network of identities,
relationships, values,
discourses and practices’
(Kleiman, 2009)
Scholarship, scholarship,
scholarship to develop
openness to changes,
new angles / approaches
to academic development
(Bovill & Mårtensson, 2014)

Working with and within our (complex) context: 7S
(Peters & Waterman, 1982)
Students

International / National
Institutional
School /Dept /
Programme
Individual
Academic
We’re key parts of a system with interacting layers of
activity and cultures: Don’t underestimate your influence
Top
down
Bottom
up
Middle out
How to
support
change at
each level?

National
Institutional
School /Dept /
Programme
Individual
Academic
Example: metrics Rankings
League
tables
Benchmarking
across / between
subjects. Pressures
from institution
Metrics re
student
evaluations,
research,
impact…
See Bamber (2020)
SEDA Paper on
Metrics

Insist on
systematic
evidence
‘Building in the systematic
collection of data as part of their
habitual actions, educational
developers have begun to
transform snapshots of
practice (often taken every
few years) into motion
pictures of impact that serve
the growing needs of reporting
as well as increased interest in
processes of continuous
improvement.’ (Groen et al,
2023, p.81)
See Bamber (2013)
SEDA Special on
Evidencing Value

If not?
• “Changes to your
L&T development
resources and/or
funding due to
metrics?”
• 65%: Yes
• Funding follows
institutional
strategic priorities +
evidence of impact

3 Foster collaborations:
communities in purposeful action
• Academic development
= ‘joint enterprise‘ of
academic developers
and members of
university communities
(Sutherland, 2018)
• Holistic, whole of
institution approach
needed, working in
borderlands

It takes a whole institution to educate a student (Thomas 2020)
https://x.com/KiftSally/status/1588041661132656641

4 Balance strategic – operational (human) work
‘large scale institutional and structural
transformations produce a
psychosocial and somatic catastrophe
amongst academics (and other
university workers) that manifests in
experiences of chronic stress, anxiety,
exhaustion, insomnia and spiralling
rates of physical and mental illness…
the ‘hidden injuries of the neoliberal
university’.’
(Gill and Donaghue 2016, p.91)

“we have a duty of
care towards each
other in a world where
things just keep on
changing so quickly”
(O’Brien and Guiney, 2018, p.7)
“we have to look after
each other, otherwise we
have managers creating a
culture where everyone is
out for themselves”.
(O’Brien and Guiney, 2018, p.7)
BUT watch out for
balance of personal /
operational versus
strategic focus

What
insights can
you share,
to light the
way
forward?
- Post your
reflections /
answers in
the chat
My insights:
1. Work with
uncertainty
2. Work with systems
and cultures, to
leverage change
3. Foster
collaborations
4. Balance strategic –
operational work

Universities changing enormously, in their
• Cultures
• Politics
• Ways of doing things
• Revolution in academic developers and
development
• We have grown, expanded, learned and built
knowledge to support our institutions and
colleagues
Conclusion: 40 years of
Change
will
continue!
Sector and
academic
development
constantly
changing

So universities
really need
principled,
pragmatic
opportunists,
with expertise in
working with…
Evidence
Caring + Strategy
Uncertainty
Collaboration
Systems for change

I look
forward to
reading your
postcards
(and working out
what will be on
my own – open to
suggestions!)
Thank you,
SEDA,
from Roni

References
Archer, L. (2008) The new neoliberal subjects? Young/er academics’ constructions of professional identity. Journal of Education Policy, 23:3, 265-285, DOI:
10.1080/02680930701754047.
Bamber, V. (2020) Our days are numbered: Metrics, managerialism and academic development. SEDA Paper 125.
Bamber, V (Ed) (2013) Evidencing the value of educational development. SEDA Special No 34.
Barnett, R. (2000) Realizing the University in an age of supercomplexity. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Baume, D. (2016) Analysing IJAD, and some pointers to futures for academic development (and for IJAD), International Journal for Academic Development, 21:2, 96-104, DOI:
10.1080/1360144X.2016.1169641.
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