Academic Developers and Pedagogical Content Knowledge (according to the Talking Learning and Teaching podcast)

Talking Learning and Teaching is quickly becoming one of my favourite podcasts! This morning, I really enjoyed the episode with Erik Brogt on “Pedagogical Content Knowledge in the Third Space”. Actually, I was really surprised how much I enjoyed listening to it; I usually get bored pretty quickly by academic developers trying to figure out who they are, and if so how many… But this perspective today somehow resonated with me.

In the episode, they talk about Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK; I write about the model here in a slighly different context) as something that is co-created between experts — experts on content, pedagogical experts, plus possibly even experts on technology, or culture. In this partnership, the academic developer is a critical friend scholar-practitioner who might have a lot of experience with teaching in different context, but does not need to be a model teacher themselves, because they bring the scholarship and body of knowledge from academic development as a discipline. They are experts on something as a basis for their credibility in academia, and they balance that with broad competence in academic development. And they meet the teachers as the experts on content, and as experts on how that content is being taught. I hear a lot of lip service being paid by academic developers to teachers knowing best what works for their content and their classroom, but that typically seems to only hold for as long as they are also willing to try whatever the academic developer suggests…

Anyway, in this episode they make a strong argument for a scholarly approach to academic development, rather than a general practitioner approach. Good practices are all nice and well, but we need a scholarly approach to a) develop and test them, and b) adapt them to each specific context. As they mention — even for people who are worried about how GenAI is making their take-home essays invalid, the solutions to that will be dramatically different depending on context!

I also felt seen by the description of academic development as proactive, where the main part of the job is to be out there, to talk to people, to have coffee, and to recognise and act on emerging topics. Maybe because I might be having a bit of a “who am I, and if so how many” moment myself, and it felt refreshing to hear someone describe my job the way I see it.

And now some images from this morning’s swim.

I love this weather, when the water is calm and looks almost oily, but still we have the dramatic sky and intense showers. Also, the images above and below are taken at the same time but just to the right of the featured image in this post. Isn’t it impressive how slightly different angles show such dramatically different scenes?