Currently reading Bolander Laksov et al. (2026) on “Educational leadership of, for, with, and through academic development”

Oh, someone else playing with prepositions like we are in “teaching about, with, in, through, for sustainability”! How do they interpret them here?

Educational leadership of academic development

Bolander Laksov et al. (2026) explain educational leadership of academic development as the top-down management of academic development units, where there are located in the university structure, e.g. in HR, libraries, or service organisations, what type of qualifications employees have, whether they are allowed to do research, what kind of agency they have, and how all of that changes when new leadership comes in place.

Educational leadership for academic development

For, on the other hand, includes the continuum of participation, with the tensions that come with that: how much participation and agency is wanted, allowed, taken? Do academic developers implement goals they’ve been given (e.g. lead the implementation of a new LMS) or do they shape them, both in theory and in practice?

Educational leadership with academic development

With is the partnership approach where educational leadership is a shared process, for example between academic developers and teachers. This requires awareness of power hierarchies and good conversations as well as trusting relationships.

Educational leadership through academic development

In the through approach, academic development enacts educational leadership bottom-up, for example through communities of practice. This is what we are attempting with the initiative Teaching for Sustainability, but as Bolander Laksov et al. (2026) also highlight, this requires a longitudinal perspective.

What I find especially intriguing is how different stakeholders might perceive where a given university is located in this framework. Do all agree, for example, that there is top-down educational leadership, or is there still the one little village that holds out and leads bottom-up? Or is the official version a partnership approach but it is perceived as top-down? There are a lot of interesting tensions to explore here!!

Bolander Laksov, K., McGrath, C., & Serbati, A. (2026). Educational leadership of, for, with, and through academic development. International Journal for Academic Development, 31(2), 165–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2026.2665877