Conference Theme:
Institutional Change: Voices, Identities, Power, and Outcomes
Institutional change. Academic development seeks to engineer a systemic shift from a teaching- and content-centered paradigm to a learning-focused one in higher education. What does this shift look like globally? How do we harness rapidly changing environment and technologies, to proactively respond to new generations of students and accountability movements? What how do we cultivate excellence in our role as change agents? How do we envision new possibilities and bring in new voices?
Voices. How are we helping academics and students find their voices? How do we support those who feel voiceless in the system? Whose stories are we telling? How do we help people live out their identities in academia?
Identities. How do we nurture our multiple identities? How do our disciplinary and transdisciplinary identities inform our work? How do our social identities (e.g., gender, race, sexuality) impact our efficacy? How do leverage our identity as intermediaries between the professoriate and the administration to be a source of power rather than of marginalization?
Power. Where does academic development get its power? Its positioning inside higher education and its relationship with government vary around the world, so we can all benefit from sharing models. And what about more fluid ways of growing power? How do we leverage content expertise, strategic knowledge, relational skills, and empathy to reach tangible and intangible outcomes?
Outcomes. We have traditionally aimed for an elusive holy grail, student learning. But our profession has broadened its scope. What other parallel outcomes have we been able to achieve? In a time when centers can be shuttered, what data is effective in documenting, disseminating, and celebrating our outcomes? What innovative, textual and non-textual ways of documenting our impact have we devised?