Spheres of Influence: Ventures and Visions in Educational Development*

3-6 July, 2002
The University of Western Australia
Perth, Western Australia

Abstract

Educational development in universities: Issues of purpose

Peter Taylor, Griffith University, Australia

This paper explores the purposes of educational development, as represented in the discourses of learning, lifelong learning, the learning organisation, improvement and change. These discourses tend to be taken-for-granted aspects of educational development focused on improvement and change. This discussion engages with the emergent conditions of supercomplexity (Barnett 2000) and postmodernism (Lyotard 1994). And invites a consideration of additional purposes that might be associated with development. Thus, this exploration invites a questioning, rather than a celebration, of 'the various ways in which educational development acts to improve teaching and learning in higher education'.

The thesis is that 'development' activities tend to invite academics to reconstitute their views of themselves as learner-workers, and their learning-working environment, in particular ways. In the context of this thesis, the paper provides an argument for the extension of notions of educational development in a number of directions. One involves an extension to more effectively engage with the complexities of the organisational and intellectual context of academic work, acknowledging the tentativeness and partiality of all knowledge, including that underlying educational development. A second proposed extension involves issues of sustainability, both organisational and environmental. Here the suggestion is to extend the sense of academic professionalism to include ethics of care for the sustainability. Thus the paper provides an argument for educational development that is more balanced and inclusive.

Peter Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in the Griffith Institute for Higher Education where the focus of his work is staff, student and organisational development for flexible learning. He has 30 years of teaching experience, 20 of which were spent in high schools. His current work includes the development of a national scheme for peer-review of ICT-based teaching resources, while 'making sense of academic life' remains a constant challenge and opportunity.

Contact: Peter Taylor, email: peter_taylor@bond.edu.au