ABSTRACT. This paper examines systems for recognizing and rewarding teaching excellence in higher education. While previous research has highlighted the potential of teaching recognition as an institutional tool, recent developments indicate a shift in reward structures driven by changing priorities and policies. Our study investigates merit systems at three research-intensive Swedish universities, analysing how motivational factors influence educators’ engagement. Using a framework of six incentives—status, recognition, power and influence, financial compensation, autonomy, and personal development—we explore both institutional and individual motivations. Findings from document analysis reveal an emphasis on external motivators such as status and financial rewards, while interview data suggest that autonomy and personal development are increasingly valued. By mapping these dynamics, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions about aligning institutional strategies with educators’ intrinsic motivations. This alignment is crucial for creating sustainable reward systems that not only acknowledge teaching excellence but also foster meaningful engagement and agency in academic development.

ABSTRACT. Pedagogical merit systems have become an increasingly common strategy for recognising and rewarding teaching excellence in higher education. In Sweden, such systems have been established at many universities as alternative or complementary career pathways to research-based advancement. This paper explores how teachers who have been formally recognised as excellent perceive the pedagogical merit process and its consequences for their professional identity, teaching practice and institutional engagement. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with sixteen excellent teachers at a Swedish university, the study examines motivations for applying, experiences of the assessment process and perceived outcomes following recognition. The findings reveal a complex picture: while pedagogical merit is widely experienced as affirming professional identity and enhancing confidence and status, its impact on teaching practice, collaboration and career development varies considerably. In particular, the study highlights tensions between individual recognition and organisational utilisation of pedagogical expertise. The paper contributes to academic development by foregrounding excellent teachers’ perspectives and by discussing how pedagogical merit systems can be more strategically aligned with institutional structures, cultures and educational development goals.

ABSTRACT. The professional growth of academic staff is central to fostering teaching excellence, curriculum innovation, and student success. In many higher education institutions, staff development opportunities exist in silos, limiting their collective impact. At the particular institution, the Centre for Teaching and Learning offers a range of initiatives — including Continuous Professional Learning programmes, Teaching Awards, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects, and International Teaching Mobility opportunities. While participation in CPL has tripled between the 2021–2025 only 35% of staff engage in more than one intervention, signaling fragmented growth pathways and missed opportunities for systemic transformation. Using an exploratory mixed method research methodology, this study integrated multiple datasets into a unified analytics dashboard, enabling comparative and disaggregated analysis across faculties, campuses, career stages, gender. Quantitative data were analysed using SAS and Excel PivotTables, complemented by stakeholder validation sessions that provided qualitative insights into gaps and patterns of engagement while qualitative data was analysed using NVIVO. Findings reveal strong uptake among junior lecturers, but minimal participation from senior academics. Moreover, a lack of structured progression between induction, Continuous Professional Learning (CPL), Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), International Teaching Mobility, and recognition initiatives prevents the creation of coherent career pathways. The study concludes with a Sustainable Career Path Development Framework that breaks down silos and links interventions into an agile, equitable ecosystem. This research contributes to academic development by demonstrating how evidence-based planning and continuous evaluation can create future-ready professional learning systems, advancing both individual careers and institutional excellence.

ABSTRACT. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was early to see the possible conflicts of “thinkers” and the “transmitters of knowledge” (Gottlieb & Keith, 1997). Max Weber’s reminder about research becoming a profession was a signal of the increasing dominance research would have over teaching. In Norway the two orientations towards teaching – and doing research as primary orientation has been formalized as two distinct career paths since the rapid expansion of HE institutions began in the 1960-ies. Academic developers are working in a field with little focus on historical and political contexts of their efforts. While pedagogical skills are deemed necessary for succeeding as a faculty member, skills and merits in doing research have overshadowed the pedagogical tasks of “transmitting knowledge”. Even if many proponents of the philosophy of higher education praise the unity of the two, there are a number of structural factors that maintain this imbalance. This paper describes how teaching has been assessed and used for the academic staff choosing to follow a career path as university teacher in Norwegian higher education.

ABSTRACT. Academics in UK Higher Education often have limited time and space to develop as professional educators, a situation shaped by discipline-driven teaching cultures, heavy workloads, and longstanding assumptions about academic identity. Within our research-intensive institution, the requirement for new staff to achieve AdvanceHE Fellowship offers a structured mechanism for evidencing teaching practice and contributes to institutional priorities around teaching excellence, including probation and promotion. Although frequently perceived as a performative exercise, many applicants report that the fellowship process enables a deeper articulation of their teaching with reflection on their influence on the student learning experience as well as acknowledgement for further development, recognition of their accomplishments, and increased confidence as educators.

Our ongoing empirical work examines these developmental experiences through systematic evaluation of over three hundred annual applications, post-submission surveys, and follow-up interviews. The rationale for this study stems from early anecdotal findings which suggest that the process of writing a fellowship claim prompts academics to surface tacit dimensions of their practice, articulate professional values, and develop a clearer sense of agency.

We argue that academic development practices centred on deciphering practice can strengthen professional identity, legitimise educators’ knowledge, and foster cultures of inquiry. Reframing fellowship recognition as an empowering rather than purely regulatory process has the potential to support more meaningful and sustainable educator development across the sector.

ABSTRACT. Higher education institutions worldwide are investing heavily in AI literacy and digital adoption strategies for faculty and staff. Yet emerging evidence suggests that these initiatives frequently stall, not because of technological barriers, but because of unaddressed human capacities: self-awareness, emotional regulation, reflective decision-making, and relational intelligence. This paper introduces Human Literacy as a foundational capacity framework that positions these human dimensions as the necessary precondition for authentic agency in AI-mediated educational environments. Drawing on Bandura’s agentic theory, polyvagal theory (Porges), cognitive load theory, self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan), and Kahneman’s dual-process model, the paper argues that current AI readiness efforts operate primarily at the outer, behavioral layer of competence while neglecting the inner architecture of perception, regulation, and meaning-making that determines whether educators can exercise genuine agency in their professional practice. The proposed framework organizes human capacities across three interdependent domains: Inner Capacity (self-awareness, emotional regulation, interoception), Outer Capacity (relational intelligence, communication, collaborative action), and Unlimited Capacity (purpose alignment, integrative meaning-making, adaptive resilience). A complementary four-step reflective method, organized around the sequence Recognize, Examine, Align, and Decide, provides educational developers with a practical protocol for cultivating these capacities in faculty development programming. The paper positions Human Literacy as the foundational center of a concentric model, with AI Literacy, Digital Literacy, and Digital Adoption as successive outer layers that depend on the inner core for sustainable integration. Implications for educational development strategy, institutional policy, and the scholarship of academic development are discussed.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces the GROW curriculum model, a didactically grounded and institutionally embedded framework developed at a University of Applied Sciences in Germany. In response to global transformations, the model systematically integrates Future Skills Literacy into all undergraduate programs, fostering student agency through competence-based, project-oriented learning. A distinctive feature is the mandatory implementation of collaborative, real-world projects each semester, guided by academic mentors who support reflection and the transfer of knowledge into practical settings.

The GROW model transforms passive learning into participatory, interdisciplinary, and purpose-driven experiences. It enables learners to make informed decisions, solve authentic problems, and engage in critical reflection—empowering them as active agents of change within and beyond the university context. Conceptually rooted in a strategic model of academic development, positioning academic developers as key agents in curricular transformation processes and operationalized through strategic curriculum design, the model also supports educator agency and institutional transformation.

Empirical insights are based on a continuous, institutionally embedded evaluation within the university’s quality management system, combining quantitative student evaluations, semester representative feedback, and qualitative data from focus groups and interviews with students and faculty. The findings indicate consistent improvements in students’ perceived self-efficacy, collaborative problem-solving, and engagement, while also highlighting the relevance of mentored, longitudinal project formats for fostering knowledge transfer and reflexive learning.

ABSTRACT. We present a global comparative synthesis of 11 character education initiatives in higher education, examining how contemporary programs draw on philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical frameworks to support formation. Character education has experienced a significant resurgence in recent decades, reflecting renewed interest in the formative aims of higher education and the integration of virtue-ethical, empirical, and relational approaches. Triangulating data from interviews, field engagements, institutional materials, and a systematic review of 213 publications, we chart the theoretical foundations, institutional models, strengths, and challenges that shape current practice.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how Student-Centred Learning (SCL) can be operationalised and evaluated as a quality framework that fosters student agency and curriculum transformation in higher education. Although SCL is strongly endorsed in European policy and quality assurance discourse, empirical approaches to assessing its institutional implementation remain limited. Using a mixed-methods evaluative design, the study integrates administrative student data, documentary analysis, and qualitative evidence from institutional actors. The paper proposes a set of indicators to analyse student-centred learning across teaching, assessment, and student support practices. Findings show substantial variability between academic units in the degree to which student agency is supported, particularly in formative assessment, feedback, and curricular coherence. The study offers a transferable framework for academic developers and quality agencies seeking to align student-centred learning with curriculum design, quality enhancement, and institutional decision-making.

ABSTRACT. There is a growing academic discourse on how to prepare individuals to exercise their agency and navigate contemporary complexity through transdisciplinary and transformative collaboration. Much of this work highlights competencies linked to particular contexts, roles, and methodologies. Yet the literature has become saturated with extensive and fragmented lists of skills, raising concerns about their coherence, feasibility, and the trade-offs involved in attempting to master them all. This study challenges the uncritical expansion of such lists by revisiting two central questions: what are we preparing individuals for, and how should higher education foster these capacities? Crucially, these are framed by a more fundamental why. Drawing on conceptual debates, reflections from practitioners navigating shifting roles and positionalities in transdisciplinary projects, and interviews with a diverse cohort engaged in addressing complex societal issues, this study argues for moving beyond a narrow competency discourse. It proposes that transformational readiness should not be reduced to a checklist of skills, but instead be grounded in the development of self-directed, reflexive individuals equipped with both capabilities and purpose to meaningfully navigate and shape complex societal change. Thus, it emphasises the cultivation of a sense of purpose as a guiding compass, one that provides learners with ownership, direction, and resilience in transformative contexts, while fostering a mindset of lifelong learning.

ABSTRACT. Across the globe, postsecondary students have experienced increasing disruptions to their educational trajectories for a variety of reasons including but not limited to COVID-19, wars, conflicts, and political agendas. Faculty are often on the frontlines of supporting students through these educational disruptions and may themselves experience disruptions to their careers. Based on a systematic literature review and data from faculty focus groups, we highlight key recommendations for educational developers to support faculty in minimizing the negative impact of educational disruptions.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how an educational development centre (EDC) in a UK research-intensive university led a two-year institution-wide programme review (PR) pilot and its complex effects on agency among different actors. The analysis reveals a paradox: while the EDC successfully developed agency for itself and devolved it to programme directors, some educational developers experienced diminished agency despite functioning under the aegis of the EDC. The study builds on the notion of structure and agency in educational development, a theme that is particularly relevant in the UK given the current UK higher education (HE) landscape where funding challenges and increasing regulation loom large. In tracing the structure and process of the PR pilot, we unpack the complex interplay of structural-agentic interactions contrasting how the same structures can create conditions that are favourable for the EDC to develop agency, but not always for educational developers. Due to a mix of factors - a neoliberal and managerial culture in UKHE, professional identity in a liminal third-space role, and differing educational development outlooks and approaches - there was variability in how educational developers exercised agency - enhanced for some and diminished for others. Uncertainty and change are inherent in the current HE climate and being comfortable in such liminal spaces confers agency. Moving beyond structural and institutional factors, this study contributes to our understanding of educational development practice by detailing how individual factors play a role in developing, devolving, and diminishing agency.

ABSTRACT. This paper reports findings from a multi-year evaluation of an institutional Active Learning Initiative (ALI) at a mid-sized undergraduate Canadian university. The initiative combined the creation of high- and low-tech active learning classrooms (ALCs) with structured faculty development and a systematic investigation of their use. Using a convergent mixed-methods design, data were collected from student and faculty surveys, open-ended responses, workshop field notes, and interviews with instructors across disciplines. Students consistently reported high engagement and valued the opportunities for discussion, collaboration, and instructor circulation afforded by ALCs, while also noting that unclear activity design or technology failures amplified confusion. Faculty described significant emotional and cognitive work in adapting to ALCs, with some experiencing identity-level shifts and others retreating to lecture when institutional supports were misaligned. The study argues that ALCs can function as pedagogical amplifiers, and that educational developers must engage learning spaces as part of a coordinated institutional ecosystem in their roles as change agents.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the strategic role of Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) in shaping institutional responses to the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in Hungarian higher education.

Initially, the development of AI-related guidelines was slow and inconsistent following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. A significant shift occurred after a government regulation, effective from December 2024, mandated all higher education institutions to update their internal policies on AI by September 2025. Consequently, by autumn 2025, nearly 60% of institutions had issued formal AI guidelines.

The study draws on two empirical investigations. The first is a biennial survey of CTL leaders, conducted in 2022, 2024, and planned for 2026; the most recent wave, carried out in late 2024, gathered responses from CTL leaders across 62 institutions, with a 61% response rate. It explored AI-related educational development strategies, incorporating elements from a European staff development project. The second study, conducted in early 2025, analyzed 37 AI regulatory documents from 33 institutions to assess the scope and depth of institutional policies.

Findings reveal that these documents range from 1 to 52 pages, typically 3–7 pages, and have grown more complex over time. Most were issued through formal institutional mechanisms and often include practical examples to support implementation. The presence of CTLs correlates with more comprehensive and diverse AI policies, as well as broader training and support services.

The research underscores the pivotal role of CTLs in aligning professional development with institutional strategies and advancing digital transformation and innovation in higher education.

ABSTRACT. This empirical study explores how academic development (AD) leadership was shaped and constrained during two major higher education mergers in Norway. While previous literature frames academic developers as potential bridge-builders in institutional change, this research reveals how AD leaders were sidelined during two merger processes where university colleges merged into larger universities. Drawing on 29 interviews with faculty, leaders, and ADs, the study uncovers how an emphasis on managerial integration, lack of strategic mandates, and inter-unit competition limited the role of academic development in supporting institutional transformation. The findings point to missed opportunities for leveraging AD leadership in negotiating organizational culture and identity, and they highlight the need for inclusive and strategic involvement of academic developers in future reforms. This paper offers critical insights into how the field of academic development can strengthen its agency and strategic position during times of systemic change.

ABSTRACT. The rapid and widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) by students presents an urgent challenge for academic development, particularly where institutional regulations and pedagogical practices lag behind actual usage. We conducted a faculty-wide mixed-method survey to examine how students and educators utilise AI, how well they understand existing regulations, and what support they require to apply AI responsibly.

Students report frequent AI use, mainly to deepen understanding, obtain explanations, improve writing, and support thesis-related tasks. Despite this high uptake, fewer than half know where to find the relevant regulations, and most do not apply the prescribed referencing conventions for AI-assisted work. Uncertainty surrounding assessment expectations leads to avoidance behaviour, especially among bachelor students. Demand for support is strong, with preference for clear rules, centralised communication, and curriculum-embedded guidance.

These findings directly informed programme-level and institutional interventions, including centralised information access, revised academic integrity guidance, curriculum-integrated modules on responsible AI use, and professionalisation initiatives for teaching staff. The project demonstrates how systematic evidence-collection can drive coherent, sustainable and equitable academic development responses to AI-driven change.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a curriculum redesign project that reimagines an undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) course at a Canadian university through the combined lenses of Critical Digital Pedagogy (CDP) and Students-as-Partners (SaP). As generative AI (GenAI) tools such as GPT variants, DeepSeek, and Grok 3 increasingly shape how students learn and produce knowledge, higher education faces an urgent need to develop ethically grounded, participatory approaches to AI education. Traditional AI courses remain technocentric, emphasizing algorithms and coding while overlooking the sociotechnical and political dimensions of AI systems. At the same time, AI literacy research highlights the importance of reflective, ethical, and critical competencies, yet these are rarely implemented in undergraduate curricula. Grounded in CDP, the redesigned course treats AI tools not as neutral technologies but as political and value-laden systems requiring critical interrogation. Students investigate model behaviour, bias, and data assumptions through hands-on experimentation, treating GenAI as both a tool and an object of inquiry. Using SaP as a methodological framework, students act as co-designers of ethical guidelines, learning activities, and case studies. This approach foregrounds agency, reciprocity, and shared responsibility in shaping the curriculum. Preliminary findings indicate that students develop heightened ethical awareness, deeper engagement, and an expanded understanding of AI as a sociotechnical system. The project demonstrates how combining CDP and SaP can meaningfully transform AI curriculum, empower learners as critical agents, and contribute to institutional conversations about responsible AI integration in higher education.

ABSTRACT. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly through generative tools such as ChatGPT, has produced an epistemological disruption—transforming how knowledge is constructed and taught within higher education. This theoretical paper examines how the use of ChatGPT in advanced mathematics teaching enables a shift from the traditional algorithmic emphasis toward a more intuitive, numerical, and graphical understanding, aligned with the historical origins of the discipline. It argues that this transition fosters a new form of epistemic agency, understood as the capacity of students and educators to think, question, and construct knowledge autonomously by promoting exploration, argumentation, and technologically mediated critical thinking. From a sustainable and inclusive perspective, AI is conceived as a cognitive agent that expands human ways of thinking and communicating. It is sustainable because it promotes autonomous and adaptable learning, and inclusive because it allows more students to access, engage, and construct knowledge according to their diverse modes of understanding. In this sense, AI not only automates tasks but also cooperates with humans in reasoning and expression processes, provided that its integration is grounded in ethical and pedagogical principles. The paper also examines how these practices redefine curriculum development and strengthen students’ argumentative skills, proposing a more reflective and creative model of learning in contemporary university contexts.

ABSTRACT. Student teachers in Sweden often feel they lack tools in teacher education to address pupils’ challenging behaviours. To break negative behaviour cycles, specific and evaluable models are needed. Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS), grounded in systems theory and democratic values, offers a structure for teachers and children to identify and express underlying reasons for problems and work collaboratively toward solutions. This project uses simulations as a pedagogical method to support student teachers’ professional development. Simulations provide a safe, structured environment to practise complex interpersonal and problem solving skills, make mistakes without real consequences, and receive targeted feedback. Furthermore, using simulations in higher education can expand university teachers’ repertoire of teaching and learning activities, bridging theory and classroom practice in higher education settings. This iterative practice deepens understanding of CPS while strengthening professional confidence, reflection, and adaptive communication, promoting agency in university teachers and student teachers alike. Student teachers engaged in two real time simulations with student avatars: one before learning CPS and one after a workshop with certified CPS experts, who also offer live supervision. Both simulations were video recorded and analysed for CPS fidelity. Semi structured interviews then explored experiences and perceived usability of CPS. The project presents results from the simulations and the interviews and discusses the role of a Simulation Teaching Lab in teacher education.

ABSTRACT. This ICED Talk presents a transformative case study from the Department of Engineering at the University of Staffordshire, where ANSYS engineering simulation tools were embedded across eight newly validated engineering and computing courses. The initiative directly addresses socio-economic inequity by offering students from underrepresented backgrounds, in one of England’s most deprived regions, access to industry-standard digital engineering platforms. Drawing from a cross-departmental collaboration funded by Ansys, part of Synopsys, the talk highlights the pedagogical innovations, staff development, and student outcomes linked to integrating tools, such as ANSYS Fluent, Granta, EduPack, and DesignXplorer, into undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. The central message emphasises how universities can rethink curriculum design to democratise access to advanced engineering tools, making digital literacy and employability accessible for all students. The initiative also reflects academic development practice by supporting staff capability building, assessment redesign and inclusive digital access, offering a transferable model for educational developers working on curriculum transformation. Attendees will take away strategies for aligning pedagogy with industry needs, fostering inclusive digital transformation, and scaling similar models across disciplines and institutions.

ABSTRACT. This paper reports on a Quadruplet Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) partnership connecting universities in China, South Africa, Turkey, and Chile. Specifically, it focuses on Phase 1 of the collaboration between a Sino-British Transnational Higher Education (TNHE) university and a South African University of Technology. Based on intersectionality, cultural humility, and inclusive facilitation, the second author, who is an educational developer, assisted COIL teachers in designing and implementing an SDG-aligned project (SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production). The case study demonstrates how educational development fostered intercultural abilities, enhanced teamwork, and integrated curriculum design with equity-centered internationalization, all while drawing on qualitative student feedback from Padlet reflections and post-training evaluations. Findings highlight enablers such as mentoring, reflective practices, and intercultural scaffolding, alongside challenges including time zones, linguistic differences, and uneven participation. The study positions educational developers as change agents who mediate structural constraints and enable transformative, equity-centered internationalization in TNHE contexts.

ABSTRACT. Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) enables students to exercise agency while interacting across cultural and institutional boundaries. This paper reports on a four-week COIL project that integrated social-emotional learning (SEL) with global citizenship education (GCE). Fourteen postgraduates from a Sino-British Transnational Higher Education (TNHE) university mentored twelve Portuguese secondary school students through activities centered on empathy, intercultural awareness, and collaborative problem-solving. Qualitative reflections revealed that multiple forms of anxiety, linguistic, technological, intercultural, evaluative, and teamwork-related, that shaped engagement. However, these anxieties often shifted into opportunities for growth. Findings indicate that SEL competencies, particularly empathy and patience, reduced anxiety, sustained social presence, and enabled learners to act as co-creators of global learning. The paper aligns with the sub-theme ‘Agency and Students – Empowering Learners and Transforming Curriculum’.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how critical agency manifests as academic development through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) partnerships. Drawing on a quintuplet COIL project linking three South African universities, one Kenyan university, and a Sino-British transnational higher education (TNHE) university in China, the study applies Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to examine how educators’ dispositions, professional experiences, and contextual conditions shape their agency across design, implementation, and reflection. Using a qualitative, interpretivist case study, data were generated from participants’ narratives posted on Padlet (October 2025). Findings reveal that COILers’ agency emerged as they navigated tensions across digital tools, institutional rules, and intercultural collaboration, tensions that became generative spaces for transformation. These contradictions catalyzed professional learning, pedagogical renewal, and collective ownership of knowledge. The paper argues that such disruptive enactments of agency constitute academic development itself, showing that when teachers co-create transnational learning ecologies, they transform themselves, their institutions, and the broader field of academic development.

ABSTRACT. This study examines the development and impact of the UTokyo Global Future Faculty Development Program (UTokyo Global FFDP), an English-medium faculty development initiative designed to prepare emerging educators for teaching in diverse international and multicultural contexts. As English-medium instruction (EMI) expands in Japan, there is increasing demand for FD programs that support both Japanese educators engaging in EMI and international participants. Building on prior research highlighting limitations in EMI-related FD (e.g., Brown, 2015; Roloff Rothman, 2020), UTokyo Global FFDP addresses the gap through active learning, peer feedback, and intercultural collaboration. Drawing on two years of post-program survey data (2022 and 2023), this study employs a mixed-methods analysis to explore participant experiences. It explores two research questions: (1) How do participants evaluate their learning and overall satisfaction with the program? and (2) How are their learning attitudes, engagement and sense of belonging reflected in the qualitative feedback? Quantitatively, satisfaction levels were consistently high across both years. Qualitatively, discourse analysis of open-ended responses revealed a shift toward more agentive and collaborative language in 2023, with participants more frequently using first-person singular or plural forms. These patterns suggest an emerging sense of learner agency and stronger community-building within the cohort. This shift may reflect program adjustments, including clearer emphasis on valuing diverse English varieties, revisions to learning activities, and a more stable classroom environment. While the program offers a promising model as an English-mediated FD program, the limited participation of Japanese EMI educators means it does not fully meet broader national FD needs.

ABSTRACT. This paper presentation examines how university teachers are given agency in the Capacity Building for Research-Based Teacher Education (CABUTE) project, which provides academic development opportunities for Ugandan teacher educators via partnerships between universities in Norway and Uganda. The primary purpose of the project is to strengthen teacher education in Uganda, but one of its main features is to offer university pedagogy courses for university faculty at Makerere University, Kyambogo University, and the Uganda National Institute for Teacher Education (UNITE).

We will present the designs and outcomes of two of CABUTE’s academic development offerings: 1) an introductory course on teaching at university and blended learning and 2) a more advanced course on student interaction and engagement that were offered between 2022 and 2026. Each of these courses was offered once online and once on site. We will discuss how the courses were set up and share data from follow-up focus group sessions with course participants where participants share how these sessions impacted their teaching practice. We will also give more information on the CABUTE project and its impact on teaching and learning both in higher education and in schools through the transformation of teacher educators’ pedagogical practices, mentorship, and research.

ABSTRACT. This paper will explore effective ways that academic and non-academic staff—including those in formal and informal educational development roles—can collaborate to support meaningful and sustainable academic program design, development, and approval at institutional and government levels. Using our institution’s Decision Support Team as a case study, this paper will discuss a) the function of the Decision Support Team as a collaborative, informal (but mandatory) first stop for all program proposals moving through our institutional governance process; b) the benefits of this holistic approach to educational development work; and c) the ways in which educational developers can collaborate with other academic and non-academic staff members to produce sustainable and impactful programs to the betterment of the student learning experience.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents FPD-Include (Faculty Professional Development for Inclusion in Pharmacy Education), a European cooperation project that addresses inclusive teaching through faculty development. Although inclusion has been widely discussed in pharmacy education, educators often lack sustained, discipline-specific support to translate inclusive principles into everyday teaching practice. FPD-Include responds to this gap by supporting teaching reflection, faculty agency, and shared professional learning across four European universities.

The project integrates an international needs assessment with a faculty-focused Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) course structured around five areas: collaboration in diverse student groups; intercultural competence and communication; inclusive assessment and feedback; inclusive teaching in STEM contexts; and building trust and repairing relationships in the classroom. The COIL engaged 48 educators from six institutions. Participants valued the opportunity to exchange experiences with peers in different countries and reported that recognising shared challenges strengthened their confidence and awareness, particularly in relation to inclusive teaching and supporting students with neurodivergence and disabilities. Educators also highlighted the importance of structured dialogue and masterclasses and noted the limitations of individual work given teaching workloads.

The paper argues that faculty development for inclusion can have a meaningful impact on educators’ awareness, language, and reflective practice, while also demonstrating that one-off interventions are insufficient for long-term change. The contribution offers transferable insights for academic developers designing inclusive faculty development programmes and points to the need for sustained structures that support implementation and retention of inclusive teaching practices.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents initial findings from the EDUflow program, a two-semester long initiative launched at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, aimed to enhance sustainable educational development in higher education. EDUflow supports academics to become skilled course designers and pedagogical change agents through a structured learning journey that combines facilitated self-paced courses, in-person trainings, and personalized mentoring. In the Hungarian higher education context, where formal pedagogical qualifications are not a prerequisite for academic teaching positions, EDUflow offers a novel approach by supporting continuous professional development embedded in institutional learning. Participant academics are also given dedicated timeframes to form communities of practice. The educational program integrates perspectives across institutional levels (micro, meso, macro) and is grounded in the theoretical framework of ecosystem thinking and reflective practice. We conducted semi-structured interviews and used the DigCompEdu survey to collect data from volunteering participants (N=20). Initial results suggest self-perceived improvement in digital teaching competence and increased pedagogical agency. Further, initial program outcomes are a growing multidisciplinary network of course designer experts, reusable online self-paced courses, and emerging interfaculty collaborations. The paper identifies some limitations – such as reliance on self-reported data and short-term evaluation windows and proposes further research directions as a longitudinal impact tracking and involving student learning analytics. We will also offer insights beyond the immediate context which may be of interest to others working in educational development.

ABSTRACT. Faculty development (FD) in research-intensive universities often struggles to reach faculty members due to entrenched academic silos, limited time, and a lack of shared understanding of FD as a collegial practice. In response to these challenges, this study explores an alternative, low-barrier format for FD that allows faculty to engage without formal commitment. To this end, we designed and implemented a 12-episode podcast series titled “FD for UTokyo Faculty: 30-Minute Teaching Refreshers.” Each episode features a casual yet informed dialogue among FD specialists on timely topics such as generative AI, active learning, course and syllabus design, inclusive teaching, and TA management. The series was designed for busy faculty members and emphasized reflective listening rather than active participation. As an exploratory case study, we analyzed listener feedback, download data, and informal post-listening interviews to examine patterns of engagement and initial responses. Preliminary findings suggest three key outcomes. First, the initiative reframed FD as collegial and dialogical rather than evaluative. Second, the use of broad, cross-cutting themes supported horizontal engagement across disciplines. Third, the podcast enabled micro-engagements—brief, low-barrier interactions—that reached faculty members who had previously remained distant from formal FD activities. While initial responses indicated increased accessibility and interest, sustaining engagement over time remains an ongoing challenge. Taken together, the findings suggest the potential of an audio-based, conversational approach to FD as a form of “gentle engagement,” particularly in research-oriented institutions. The study highlights how such approaches may support voluntary faculty reflection and create entry points for cross-disciplinary learning.

ABSTRACT. Microcredentials (MC) are being adopted globally to update skills quickly, making them a powerful tool for academic development and innovation as well. The growth of online education has given rise to new types of credentials such as MCS, badges, and recognition of professional competencies. In higher education, this trend creates strategic opportunities to strengthen faculty agency, enabling teachers to take an active role in their own professional development. Teachers, including those that deliver their education virtually, often lack effective teaching skills due to insufficient preparation. Addressing this requires significant changes in higher education faculty training that fosters innovation in teaching and learning. The project presents a proposal for a 3-year training plan, based on stackable MCs, founded on a survey of training needs and evaluated by participating teachers. Results are positive and demonstrate that MCs are a valuable, innovative and strategic tool for the continuous training of university faculty, allowing them to remain competent, empowered and engaged in a constantly evolving educational environment.

ABSTRACT. In higher education, student agency is shaped by socio-political conditions and historical processes that define the role and purpose of the university in specific locations. This paper engages an African Feminist framework, in dialogue with decolonial theorists, to explore the politics and contestations around student agency as a pedagogical objective in South Africa. In a context marked by structural inequality, “under preparedness”, and high graduate unemployment, universities often reinforce individualistic and competitive behaviours that promise advantage in environments of scarce opportunities. But alternative values, that run counter to the neoliberal ethos, imagine collective forms of agency that inspire transformational and sustainable change for both students and institutions. Such a reorientation situates the purposes of teaching, learning, and academic development, within broader struggles for social justice and decolonisation. Conscientisation and communal orientation are explored as onto-epistemic tools for critical thinking that extend agency beyond the confines of individualised meritocracy. They will be explained by drawing on experiences in academic development, teaching practice, and student reflections. The paper theorises collective agency as a transformative resource for restoring meaning among students repeatedly disillusioned by the empty promises of neoliberal meritocracy and reductive notions of agency as mere resilience. It opens the door to institutional collaborations based on developing collective agency in teaching practices and curriculum design.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces a living framework for decolonizing teaching and learning practices in higher education. Drawing on my own lived experiences as well as the results of a diffractive conceptual analysis, I outline five core guiding principles as essential to decolonizing curricula and pedagogy: reflexivity, epistemic disobedience, epistemic uncertainty, relationality, and ethical solidarity. During the paper presentation, I will unpack these five terms and further outline how the framework is being used to guide curriculum decolonization efforts at my university at both the course and program levels.

ABSTRACT. This qualitative case study investigates how academic readiness and learner agency among non-traditional international graduate students can be fostered through collaborative curriculum co-design and Communities of Practice (CoPs). The focus is on the PINNACLE Project, a partnership between an Irish university and women educators from India and Pakistan, designed to meet the distinctive needs of experienced professional adult learners transitioning from established careers in the Global South to postgraduate study in Ireland. Rather than positioning students as academically deficient, the model draws on an academic literacies perspective (Lea & Street, 1998) to build upon students’ prior professional agency as a foundation for developing robust academic agency. Using a staged transition model that aligns with Bandura’s (2001) principles of human agency and the CoP framework developed by Wenger (1998) and Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015, 2020), the study maps participatory curriculum design (Bovill, 2020) and CoP engagement to readiness and agency cultivation. Data from reflective student essays are analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019; 2022) with hybrid deductive–inductive coding, revealing increased agency, emerging identities of student‑teachers as scholars, and developing leadership capacity. The study also examines how the academic developers involved interrogated and reframed their own assumptions and practices through engagement with this cohort, foregrounding researcher reflexivity as an integral dimension of the case. The paper offers an equity‑oriented, transferable blueprint for academic developers seeking to design competence‑driven, inclusive curricula that align with institutional priorities and Sustainable Development Goal 4, while empowering learners as co‑creators and transformative agents.

ABSTRACT. The value of translanguaging as a tool for enhancing epistemic access in multilingual societies, such as South Africa, is now commonly recognised. However, what has been a huge challenge has been the lack of a common framework to guide the implementation of translanguaging in a policy and constitutional environment that exists in the country. The paper proposes a pragmatic framework, the Translanguaging Matrix Framework, which prioritises strategic interventions such as language training for staff and students, development of multilingual learning resources, and enhanced awareness of language policies. The framework highlights the importance of institutional support through a supportive policy environment, as well as professional development opportunities for staff and students through short language learning programmes and translanguaging pedagogies training. Additionally, it emphasises the need for inclusive curriculum design and enhanced awareness of language use as a tool for promoting equality and social justice. The paper further recommends that universities allocate sufficient resources to enable the implementation of these interventions. The paper concludes that translanguaging has significant pedagogic value, which can effectively challenge colonial language hierarchies, create inclusive learning environments, and enhance academic success in multilingual contexts.

ABSTRACT. This paper reviews ongoing initiatives designed to promote international and intercultural communication education between Japanese institutions and partner schools overseas. It also presents a case study of classes at Japanese and Thai universities conducted in November 2025. Launched in 2020, the intercultural collaboration project has involved over 3,000 students thus far. Its purpose is not only to enhance students’ communication skills but also to foster friendships and mutual understanding within a global society. Student engagement and outcomes have been measured through various methods, including participant interviews, surveys, and text-mining analyses of activity logs collected via a custom e-portfolio system. The survey results showed a net promoter score above 40%, indicating strong enthusiasm among participating students. The case study outlined in this paper demonstrates how the program functions in practice. It also highlights student feedback aimed at further improving the project. Their suggestions and insights provide valuable guidance for instructors interested in implementing similar educational initiatives.

ABSTRACT. At the Research on Higher Education Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2025, we shared our self-reflections and analysis of relevant studies on the establishment of ‘trust’ among educational developers and university teachers from different disciplines participating in the program of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (TLHE). In this conference, we aim to discuss how trust can be fostered and developed among the participants, as well as between educational developers and participants, and the possible factors for the lack of trust or distrust. Given this, our participation, founded on data collected through a questionnaire, provides insightful responses to these research inquiries: 1) What are the factors for the development of trust among participants and between participants and facilitators? 2) What are the possible factors for the lack of trust, or even distrust, among participants and between participants and facilitators?

ABSTRACT. This paper reframes academic development as a relational practice grounded in trust, collegiality, and care. Drawing on a redesigned foundational programme for early-career faculty, we present a trust framework built on credibility, identity, and value, and explore how these elements foster a compassionate, collegial community. Through thematic analysis of participant interviews and reflective dialogue, we show how modelling trust in academic development can counter deficit narratives, strengthen faculty identity, and build institutional belonging. This modelling helps faculty translate these values into their teaching. In doing so, academic development becomes a catalyst for cultural change—empowering faculty to resist instrumental discourses and reimagine higher education as a space of kindness, connection, and shared purpose. We argue that designing deliberately for trust enables academic developers to shape more inclusive and intellectually generative educational environments. We end by highlighting how this framework formed the foundation for the (re-)design of existing and new programmes.

ABSTRACT. Since the early 1980s, reports by prominent organizations and work done by educational developers have promoted evidence-based and equity-minded teaching practices. Yet instructors frequently struggle to move from awareness of the need to change to sustained implementation of those changes in their teaching. Drawing from the EPIC adoption model (Exposure–Persuasion–Identification–Commitment; Aragón, 2017), a framework to understand the process faculty go through to adopt new teaching practices, in this session we present the model as well as an additional key element that underpins successful adoption of new teaching practices: trusting and supportive relationships. We discuss how we cultivated trust and support among faculty participating in a year-long community of practice focused on evidence-based and equity-minded teaching.

ABSTRACT. With a mass market model increasingly dominating the university sector, education-focussed (EF) roles have emerged globally as a response to enhance teaching quality, foster educational innovation and improve student learning experience at scale. EFs must address these pressures while also navigating critical emerging issues, such as the use of artificial intelligence or new teaching models for subject delivery because of the recent pandemic. However, EFs’ capacity to respond in an agile manner to such demands may be hindered by workload models and structural constraints within universities and an academic hierarchy that privileges research output over teaching, This leads to questioning how and what makes educational change sustainable and adaptable in the short, mid and long term. In this session, four academics with different disciplinary backgrounds (music, education, healthcare, and social sciences) reflect on an innovative EF program that was charged with creating educational change at a large Australian research-intensive university, as a case study. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography (CAE), they reflect on their experiences as change agents and explore how relationships, networking and capacity building (a not uncommon practice for the third space) across the broader academic community—including academic colleagues and academic developers—intersects and synergises with contextual enablers that support their work. These findings support the idea that achieving educational transformation at an institutional level is not only a complex task, but it also requires a multifaceted approach that integrates human and contextual dimensions.

ABSTRACT. Burnout in higher education is frequently treated as a personal resilience problem—an issue to manage through individual coping strategies. Burnout is not a personal failure; it is an organizational signal. In many higher education environments—especially teaching-focused institutions—people are not “burning out” because they lack grit. They are burning out because work conditions have become chronically misaligned with capacity. When this happens, individual resilience strategies can help people survive the week, but they cannot solve the underlying problem. The talk, therefore, aims to shift the storyline from “how do we cope?” to “what is the system communicating, and what are the levers we can influence?”

ABSTRACT. This study investigates current academic development (AD) practices, institutional strategies, and expert perspectives on the role of AD in supporting artificial intelligence (AI) in teaching and learning within higher education across Germany, Italy, and Romania. Although generative AI presents significant opportunities, previous research highlights uneven levels of awareness, confidence, and readiness among educators, indicating the need for comprehensive and culturally responsive AD. To explore this landscape, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 academic developers (six per country), examining existing institutional strategies, current AD practices, perceived needs, and future directions for AD in the age of AI. Interviews were conducted in participants’ local languages, transcribed, and analysed inductively through qualitative content analysis. Findings show heterogeneous institutional strategies: policies are emerging but unevenly formalised, with Germany demonstrating the greatest coherence, Italy ranging from informal to formal approaches, and Romania displaying mixed levels of development. AD practices are widespread but largely reactive to rapid technological advances, particularly generative AI. Academic developers emphasised the need for discipline-sensitive guidance, especially for redesigning assessment with AI and ensuring academic integrity. Across all contexts, participants argued for incremental yet consistent AD evolution rather than radical change, highlighting priorities such as fostering AI literacy, peer- and expert-supported collaborative learning environments, and discipline-aware communities of practice. Overall, the study identifies both cross-national commonalities and contextual differences in AD responses to AI. It provides insights for designing culturally sensitive AD initiatives, informs alignment between policy and practice, and supports future European cooperation on AI-focused academic development.

ABSTRACT. As generative AI (GenAI) accelerates across higher education, instructors are being asked to make complex ethical and pedagogical decisions amid evolving and often ambiguous institutional guidance. This paper examines how academic developers can act as strategic change agents by providing the ethical infrastructure needed to support faculty sensemaking and decision-making in this context. Drawing on practitioner inquiry and informed by the COVER ethical decision-making model, the authors analyse a cross-institutional workshop—Communicating about Ethical AI Use with Students—designed to help instructors align GenAI course policies with their pedagogical values, disciplinary norms, and institutional priorities. Data from two workshop offerings (n ≈ 220) reveal that faculty entered with uneven knowledge and a narrow focus on academic integrity, but left with broadened ethical awareness, increased confidence, and actionable communication plans for students. Nearly half drafted or revised a course policy during the workshop, and confidence in addressing ethical concerns, developing policies, and communicating expectations increased by 20–30 percentage points. The study demonstrates how short, scalable academic development interventions can foster pedagogical agency, expand ethical reasoning, and support alignment between institutional priorities and course-level practice during periods of technological disruption. We argue that academic development units are uniquely positioned to function as ethical infrastructure, shaping institutional responses to GenAI by designing responsive, values-based professional learning that connects policy to practice.

ABSTRACT. Somewhat paradoxically, Luciano Floridi, one of the most influential AI philosophers and policymakers, proposes not using the term "intelligence" to qualify AI: we do not fully understand what intelligence is, and AI does not replicate human intelligence itself but rather reproduces what human intelligence produces. In this sense, AI should be understood as agency. Only such reconsideration can preserve space for human autonomy and responsibility (Floridi 2023). This reframing has profound implications for higher education, where student agency is central to educational success (Klemenčič 2023). Faculty agency also plays a crucial role in enabling student agency, though it is sometimes conceptualized in narrowly instrumental terms (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson 2015). If AI now operates as a form of agency within educational spaces, how should we reconceptualize the agency of students and faculty? This paper examines this question by comparing AI policies across several countries, seeking to reimagine human agency in higher education for an age when multiple forms of agency coexist.

ABSTRACT. Responding to post-pandemic expectations for flexibility, digital transformation, and inclusivity, academic developers worldwide face the challenge of addressing emergent themes in their programs – such as digitalization, AI-supported teaching, diversity and inclusion, and relationship-rich education. In this paper, we present a practical approach for how educational developers in higher education can integrate cross-cutting themes – e.g., Future Skills, Digitalization and AI, DEI, and Relationship-Rich Education – sustainably and resource-efficiently into existing development programs. We illustrate this through the design rationale and implementation strategies of a 15-ECTS Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) in Higher Education. The CAS strengthens instructors’ agency in shaping knowledge, pedagogy, and professional practice. Structured as a two-year blended program, it combines core modules on course design and complex teaching settings with elective pathways, teaching portfolios, collegial consulting, expert/peer observation, and a capstone project. This scaffold enables participants to embed emerging priorities into their own teaching while balancing individualized learning pathways with collaborative learning opportunities. Personalized pathways and projects are complemented by peer exchange, collegial consultation, and joint reflection to foster a community of practice. A central design principle is the explicit enactment of emergent topics through a double-level approach: • The program design itself serves as a role model. • Participants deepen these themes in individual projects. The CAS offers a scalable model for future-ready, evidence-based academic development, combining flexibility for individual learning paths with the benefits of relationship-rich, collaborative learning in a digitally transformed higher education landscape.

ABSTRACT. The mission of the Educational Developers in Ireland Network (EDIN), established over 20 years ago, is ‘to support, enhance and influence the field of academic development and practice’, through ‘creative, critical, collaborative and professional approaches in supporting teaching and learning’ (www.edin.ie). In 2024, EDIN leaders and members began an intentional reflection on the changing nature of the higher education landscape, and on (re)imagining the future of educational development. Initial discussions, sparked by ‘provocations’ including Bass (2020), Baume (2023) and McNaught (2020), surfaced key themes in our enactment of educational development (EDIN 2024) but also indicated disillusionment with the enterprise, its methods, effectiveness and impact. Further collaborative enquiry, which we report on here, asked what had changed in academic development since 2004, and what this could tell us about the future. To answer this question, we drew on three of Brookfield’s (1995, 2017) four lenses: individual reflection through concept mapping (n=16) (Heron et al., 2018); reflection with peers in two EDIN member focus groups (n=15); and reflection through engagement with the literature including Trowler’s work to scaffold the insights for future practice. Our findings, which benefit from well over 250 years of collective experience, are reflective of the concerns articulated in the initial provocations and more broadly in the field. Furthermore, they expand that thinking specifically suggesting insights associated with engaging process as a measure of success, exploiting the potential to influence policy, optimising collaboration, and re-visiting agency including what bolsters or undermines it.

ABSTRACT. Enhancing students’ learning experiences and supporting their success is a central concern in Higher Education (Bilham et al., 2019). Yet, within the Academic Development community, institutional priorities often focus efforts on short-term, context-specific quality enhancements (Hamshire et al., 2017; Harvey, 2022). While valuable, these localized solutions may lack scalability and fail to address broader systemic challenges.

Considering the connections across quality enhancement and how the efforts of academic developers are shaped by factors at a systematic, institutional, pedagogical, and personal level across educational ecosystems is vital to enhance student success and develop inclusive learning communities (Hamshire et al. 2024). This presentation explores how academic developers can act as strategic change agents by bridging policy, pedagogy, and practice. At the University of Salford, we have developed models and frameworks that connect institutional policies, teaching practices, and student support systems through a longitudinal, wicked problem theory lens (Hamshire et al., 2019). This concatenated research approach (an iterative, multi-layered method for understanding and addressing complex challenges) was used to co-create actions, build trust in the changes needed for long-term improvements and ensure that we built inclusive learning communities.

Participants will engage in small-group activities to explore how these models and frameworks can be adapted to their own institutional contexts. The session will support attendees in identifying strategic connections between teaching practices, student support, and quality enhancement, with the goal of fostering agile, responsive practice across the institution.

ABSTRACT. The literature foresees that services provided by academic development units (ADUs) will become more diversified in combination with higher demands on scholarliness in each action taken. ADUs are asked to engage in an increased variety of activities and content and the days when knowledge about classroom teaching or courses were enough are gone. However, the literature discusses less HOW ADUs should orient themselves in this turmoil of demands. In this paper we share experiences of such a reality; a reality that is largely driven by how the organization we serve evolves and thereby becomes more advanced in its educational considerations, but also because the society at large changes its expectations on academic organizations. For increased ADU agency and even survival we suggest an intensified critical reflection concerning the strategy for change chosen by each ADU. A more integrated understanding of the strategy’s implications allows for a) a possibility to foresee future demands with positive effects on recruitment and internal training, and b) a prioritization among demands placed on the unit and an ability to explain better why the unit responds the way it does. We share our own experiences of such critical reflection and its implications, both strengths and weaknesses identified.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how an innovative governance model in Germany, has transformed academic development into a strategic, cross-university endeavour. Using a regional higher education alliance as a case study, it demonstrates how network governance and distributed leadership can empower academic developers to act as agents of change, align teaching initiatives with regional and institutional goals, and establish robust structures to promote teaching quality and innovation. Drawing on interviews and governance analyses, the study illustrates how transparency, trust and shared accountability can sustain collaborative enhancement of teaching, even in the face of funding pressures and societal shifts. The model provides valuable insights into designing agile frameworks that can support transformative teaching and learning while preserving institutional autonomy.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the complexities of shared agency and managerial direction within large scale educational change processes. While there is a recognition that teachers sense of ownership and agency are central to change processes, this is enacted within organizational frameworks which legitimize and give impulsion to such change. How people experience their own sense of agency in such environments is also shaped by their sense of phenomenological time within the change process. By applying concepts of shared agency and phenomenological time, the authors examine facilitatory methods for involving students and educators in large-scale reform, identifying opportunities and limitations within collaborative processes.

ABSTRACT. The target of the workshop is to build shared understanding of effective approaches and structures that universities have for educators to support peer learning and peer support. University teachers consider peer support and collegiality as important aspects of developing pedagogical expertise and well-being but often face barriers such as time constraints and a lack of systematic structures for pedagogical dialogue with significant communities. The participants of the workshop will have an opportunity to engage in a pedagogical dialogue with peers and share best practices and co-develop the topic of the workshop. The outcomes of the workshop will provide insights for higher education institutions in their development of peer learning culture and practices and overall well-being of the pedagogical community.

ABSTRACT. Abstract. This poster presents the first exploratory survey on the Scholarship of Academic Development (SoAD) in the German higher education context. Conducted by the SoAD Working Group of the German Society for Higher Education Didactics (dghd), the study aims to map how academic developers in Germany engage with research and reflective inquiry into their own professional practice. Based on the conceptual framework proposed by Daele and Riccardi Joos (2016), the survey investigates the current understanding, scope, and goals of SoAD across diverse professional fields such as higher education development, media didactics, quality management, and academic leadership.

The questionnaire, distributed in October 2025, explores who conducts SoAD, with what intentions, and how SoAD is integrated into professional roles and institutional mandates. Preliminary results will provide a first empirical snapshot of SoAD activities and orientations in Germany, offering insights into emerging scholarly identities and epistemic agency among academic developers. The poster will outline the survey design, present key descriptive findings, and reflect on implications for strengthening SoAD networks, visibility, and future research within the German-speaking academic development community.

ABSTRACT. The Norwegian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (NorSoTL) was established in 2025 as a national publication platform designed to strengthen SoTL capacity, visibility, and scholarly agency among university teachers and students in Norwegian and Scandinavian higher education. The journal serves as an academic development initiative by offering an accessible, peer-reviewed arena for disseminating systematic inquiry into teaching and learning practices, thereby contributing to evidence-informed pedagogical development and community knowledge exchange. A distinctive feature of NorSoTL is its format diversity, consisting of Inquiry Articles, Interactive Posters, Thinking Pieces, and Original Ideas, enabling participation from early-stage reflection to more mature research projects. Equally important is the journal’s multilingual publishing policy, allowing authors to submit in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, or English. This approach lowers the threshold for scholarly publishing by enabling colleagues to write in familiar and comfortable settings using their native language, supports the development of national and regional SoTL dialog, and contributes to the expansion of Scandinavian-language pedagogical research. This poster presents the rationale behind NorSoTL, its format-diverse publishing model, and accessible entry routes work as strategic mechanisms to broaden participation and strengthen SoTL across Norway.

ABSTRACT. Many academic developers seek a stronger scholarly grounding for their work. While textbooks offer excellent overviews, they cannot fully address emerging debates. Research articles, on the other hand, often assume extensive theoretical knowledge, which can make them hard to interpret. Against this backdrop, the Center for University and Academic Teaching at the University of Regensburg launched a blog in 2021, which offers evidence-based insights and inspiration for higher education teaching on a monthly basis. Its author team consists of experienced academic developers with expertise in educational science, complemented by guest authors and award-winning teachers. The platform integrates research, practical experience, and teaching support. All contributions undergo systematic quality assurance, including compliance with standards of good academic practice, internal editorial standards, and peer review. The structure and design of the articles follow pedagogical principles and didactic standards comparable to formal training. User data indicate an increasing number of readers among academic developers and lecturers. As a flexible resource, the blog supports self-study, enriches informal learning, and enables academic developers to share their expertise as contributors. Furthermore, it supports their daily work: Centres for Teaching and Learning incorporate the blog’s posts into faculty development programmes in various ways.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how faculty professional development (FPD) is currently conceptualised, implemented, and recognised across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). In a context where teaching quality has become central to institutional accountability, innovation, and sustainability, the professionalisation of university teaching remains unevenly embedded in academic career structures. Using a mixed-methods sequential exploratory design, the study integrates qualitative interviews with academic staff and educational leaders from European universities and quantitative survey data collected from faculty members and programme coordinators. The findings reveal substantial cross-national variation in the organisation, mandatory nature, and accreditation of pedagogical training, as well as persistent tensions between voluntary participation and institutional recognition. While structured and compulsory models are more prevalent in Northern European systems, Southern contexts continue to rely largely on fragmented and voluntary approaches. The paper argues for an integrative European framework that aligns pedagogical training, mentoring, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) with academic evaluation and career progression, and discusses implications for policy and institutional practice.

ABSTRACT. Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) have been recognized as a powerful model for fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue, reflective practice, and collaborative professional learning. While studies have documented the theoretical foundations and institutional benefits of FLCs, less is known about how small and newly established Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) enact the “hub” function that activates such communities within fragmented institutional cultures. This study employs insider action research to analyze four years of activities at a Japanese CTL established in 2021. Using annual reports, workshop records, consultation logs, and newsletters as institutional artifacts, the study examines how the CTL created opportunities for cross-unit interaction; supported instructional consultation and professional development; and gradually cultivated faculty learning cultures through low-threshold, dialogic initiatives such as Faculty Cafés. Findings show that the CTL’s hub role emerged incrementally through (1) consistent consultation services, (2) intentional design of informal and inclusive dialogue spaces, and (3) connections with institutional committees that enabled broader organizational learning. While participation patterns fluctuated by year, evidence indicates growing cross-disciplinary collaboration and the emergence of a campus-wide sense of belonging and shared responsibility for teaching. The study illustrates how insider action research can illuminate the micro-processes of CTL strategy enactment and offers implications for strengthening the complementary functions of the HITS framework in diverse higher education contexts.

ABSTRACT. The 20th anniversary of the REDICE call has been an opportunity to conduct a global analysis of the impact of the research projects on university teaching funded by the REDICE call of the University of Barcelona (UB)'s Institute for Professional Development (IDP). The main objective of the study is to analyze the impact of the research projects on university teaching funded by the REDICE call in order to (a) guide future REDICE calls and enhance the impact of research on university teaching at the UB, particularly through the REDICE projects; and (b) inform practice and policy decisions at the institutional level. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data analysis approaches has been used. Also, a research impact assessment was conducted through a research impact assessment framework. The findings lead to the identification of the characteristics of the research teams and projects, their scientific production, and the bibliometric impact of their outputs; also to the identification of 59 barriers and enablers to research in university teaching. These barriers and enablers are present in 4 contexts, going from the micro-level to the macro-level. Additionally, the analysis of the projects' characteristics (general and methodological) allows the identification of a profile of a prototypical project. Recommendations oriented to minimizing barriers and maximizing enablers are indicated and classified according to the two levels identified: UB and IDP levels. As a final conclusion, the achievements of the REDICE call identified through this global analysis are highlighted.

ABSTRACT. The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), where the presenter is affiliated, marks its tenth year since establishment. During this period, CTL has accumulated data such as participant demographics, immediate post-session survey responses, the number of training sessions, and changes in its operational scale, including staffing and budget. This presentation analyzes these data through the lens of agency in educational development, focusing on how CTL has expanded its role across three dimensions: (1) organizational agency, (2) teacher agency, and (3) the cultivation of a training participation culture. The age distribution of participants aligns with national faculty demographics, while the higher-than-average proportion of women participants reflects the substantial participation of nursing faculty. Higher satisfaction ratings for face-to-face sessions compared with online formats demonstrate the continued value of in-person interaction. Meanwhile, lower self-ratings of the likelihood of behavior change compared with satisfaction highlight the challenges of applying newly acquired knowledge to practice and the need for mechanisms that further support teacher agency. The increase in annual sessions (from 17 to over 50), the growth in participating institutions, the high proportion of internal participants, and the expansion of staff illustrate how organizational agency has been enacted and how a sustainable participation culture has taken root within the university. By visualizing these indicators, the presentation aims to illustrate how the three layers of agency interact and to provide an opportunity for dialogue on the evolving roles of educational development units.

ABSTRACT. This study examines current trends in the roles assumed by organizational units responsible for faculty development (FD) at Japanese universities. In Japan, universities are required to undergo accreditation at least once every seven years. Using data from “self-inspection and evaluation reports,” FD-related organizations at 768 universities were identified. Among these, 274 universities have made their official regulations specifying the purpose and role of their FD units publicly available. This study analyzes the content of these documents to investigate what responsibilities, beyond FD, are assigned to these organizations. The results indicate that the most common additional role is staff development (SD), including training for administrative staff and senior leadership, identified at 33.6% of the institutions. This was followed by institutional research, higher education research, internal quality assurance, curriculum management, and general education. The high prevalence of SD is likely attributable to the mandatory nature of SD for all universities, similar to FD, as well as the strong synergy between FD and SD, given their shared core function of providing professional development. Furthermore, national universities tended to assign a greater number of roles to a single FD organization than public and private universities. This trend appears to stem from organizational structure: while private universities often establish committees specialized solely in FD (e.g., “FD Committee”) to serve as their FD unit, national universities are more likely to adopt broad organizational frameworks (e.g., “Institute for Education and Student Support”) that encompass multiple functions.

ABSTRACT. This paper advances the importance of instructors’ approaches to teaching and conceptions of teaching as valuable data to consider in the development of educational development programming for sessional instructors. Drawing on data from a larger phenomenographic study that explored sessionals’ educational development needs, on data collected through two online surveys and a series of interviews, the author will present key theoretical amendments to Light et al.’s (2009) model which highlight opportunities for continued integration of sessionals into institutional models of teaching and learning. Structural changes to the model include the bi-directional influence of instructors’ approaches to teaching and conceptions of teaching position educational development as an ever-important catalyst for change in higher education. Considerations for future practical implications will be discussed.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this symposium is to bring together an international collaboration of colleagues exploring trust within and for academic development. Trust-building is an inherent aspect of academic developers’ practice and may be an anchor in uncertain times (Pleschova et al. 2025). Trust-building is a process of continuous attention to fostering relationships, and trust is fundamentally reciprocal. In that reciprocity, we imagine an environment where trust is manifested as a key value for both academic developers and teachers and how we can demonstrate and cultivate scalable approaches which bridge scholarship, practice, and policy to foster trust-building in our own work and across educational communities.

Although trust is generally under-researched within both teaching and academic development in higher education (Pleschova et al. 2025; Sutherland et al. 2024), recent research has explored how academic developers can act as brokers for trust (Lohman 2024) and analysed strategies for building trust (Cook-Sather et al., 2021; Lee and Ragupathi 2024). But questions remain: how can trust develop and flourish in our current turbulent times? How does hope and mattering converge in trust? How is trust established and cultivated within relationships? How do we build and foster trust within our higher education systems and processes? And perhaps most pressing, how do we support teachers to develop agency for their own trust-building?

We advocate for trustful spaces to foster creativity, freeing us up to do imaginative work, to be vulnerable, to imagine something different is possible and to share our hope with colleagues.

ABSTRACT. This symposium examines how transnational collaboration can strengthen pedagogical training for early-career academics within a European university alliance. High-quality teaching in higher education depends significantly on the professional development of academic staff, particularly those new to teaching roles. Teaching and learning centres play a crucial role in cultivating scholarly informed and reflective teaching practices (Wright, 2023). Building on earlier work that mapped the organizational foundations for educational development across partner institutions (EUGLOH, 2024), this joint initiative conducts a comparative analysis of frameworks, course designs, and material resources used in introductory pedagogical programs for new academic staff. The session brings together complementary presentations from educational developers who exchanged and analysed organisational contexts, course structures, assignments, and teaching materials. This collaborative process revealed shared challenges as well as innovative practices that can enhance support for new teachers. The individual presentations resonate well with the four themes presented by O’Mahony et al (2025); the institutionalisation of staff development, the shift from compliance-driven participation toward a culture of teaching and learning, the role of relationships and connection in development initiatives, and the need to examine barriers to engagement. By presenting converging themes and distinct institutional approaches, the symposium demonstrates the value of cross-border dialogue in improving program design and fostering professional growth. It highlights how systematic comparison and knowledge sharing across institutions can promote academic development, offering actionable insights for rethinking and enriching teaching and learning courses and programs in diverse higher education contexts.

ABSTRACT. Higher education internationally has begun to embrace peer observation of teaching for its potential to enhance instructional quality and foster instructor professional development. Increasingly, institutions look to peer observation as a means to assess teaching effectiveness. Though peer observation has become more widespread, practices vary significantly across institutions and national contexts. This roundtable invites participants to explore international approaches to peer observation, drawing on preliminary findings from a multi-phase study of peer observation practices in higher education internationally but with a focus on U.S. institutions.

The study uses an explanatory sequential design, beginning with an international survey of educational developers, instructors, and academic leaders, followed by individual interviews to explore institutional models, tools, and cultural factors shaping peer observation. Key themes include formative vs. evaluative uses, faculty attitudes, and the role of institutional culture in shaping acceptance and sustainability.

Roundtable participants will engage in structured dialogue around emerging findings, share experiences from their own institutional and national contexts, and collaboratively identify promising practices and persistent challenges. The session aims to foster cross-cultural exchange and generate insights that inform the development of inclusive, effective, and scalable peer observation programs.

This session is especially relevant for educational developers, academic leaders, and faculty involved in teaching enhancement initiatives. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the global landscape of peer observation and practical ideas for improving or initiating programs at their own institutions.

ABSTRACT. Student attendance—or absence—at non-mandatory course activities has become a challenge for many courses, particularly those based on active or collaborative learning. These sessions aim to provide more than repetition of lecture material; they are intended as spaces for deepening, reflection, and joint knowledge development. However, students often prioritize mandatory components, driven by grade-related motivation, making it difficult to maintain constructive alignment and pedagogical coherence.

This collaborative space will explore strategies to address low attendance without simply increasing compulsory elements. Building on a newly granted pedagogical project and drawing on experiences from CEMUS studentled courses at Uppsala University as well as previous faculty-wide discussions within TUR (the Council for Educational Development), the session will be a space for sharing perspectives and ideas on how to respond to the pedagogical challenge of failing attendance.

Participants will be invited to share perspectives, compare approaches, and co-create ideas for interventions. The session seeks to identify common challenges, exchange best practices, and explore opportunities for joint research or future collaborations.

ABSTRACT. From their origins in the 1960s, Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) have evolved dramatically, moving from support services to strategic organizations that must navigate complex institutional and global landscapes. Apace with the growth of CTLs, there has been an emergence of international scholarship about educational development organizations. Although this literature is becoming more theoretical, it is often not conceptually anchored and most scholarship of academic development still takes place from an individual lens. The ambition for this Collaborative Space session is to start generating a research agenda around “Educational Development Through an Organizational Lens.” This session will help to shape an upcoming special issue of the International Journal for Academic Development (IJAD).

ABSTRACT. This session introduces a transformative, open-source model for professional development designed to bridge the widening "support gap" in higher education. We present a virtual global professional development community—a nationally recognized educational platform that serves as a blueprint for both institutional efficiency and instructor autonomy. For institutions, this global framework addresses declining local budgets by reducing the need for redundant content creation. Centers for Teaching and Learning can "wrap" evidence-based pedagogical content with their own campus-specific resources, allowing staff to shift from content development to high-impact coaching. For instructors, the platform provides a low-stakes, private environment for self-reflection and “bite size” resources for faculty development. Because the framework is hosted globally, it offers a permanent professional "home" for instructors to document their growth throughout their careers. Participants will exercise academic agency by deconstructing the tool’s evidence-based pillars, distinguishing between transferable pedagogical logic and institution-specific content. We will move beyond passive observation to brainstorm adaptation strategies and low-cost implementation models. By joining this global community network of collaborators, you will help build a sustainable community asset that empowers both organizational development needs and the individual teaching practices of a diverse faculty population.

ABSTRACT. By now, you likely know the basics of universal design (UD): lower access barriers in the physical environment, as well as in the design of learning experiences. How consistently does your center or institution model these principles in your educational programming?

Come to our workshop and take away concrete techniques for modeling UD in your educational-development work and scaling up to lower barriers across your institution and in your region. You’ll learn how to

assess your educational-development work to uncover “start-here” gaps; build core UD skills for instructor and staff participants; concretely model UD in your programming; expand UD across campus through center support; define how UD considerations change at the institutional and system-level scales; create action plans for UD along three strategic pillars of access, inclusion, and predictability; and attract funding, resources, and time for systemic UD application, community, and assessment.

Using the “see one, do one, teach one” approach, you’ll learn from a) an advocacy organisation that co-leads a nationwide UD credentialing programme, b) a university that adopted UD across its teaching and service touchpoints, and c) a researcher whose UD-at-scale process is a model for how you can adopt and advocate for UD in your own context.

Come prepared to be part of the conversation—equal parts demonstration, proof-of-concept, and collaborative meaning-making. This workshop is for instructors, teaching-centre staff, and campus leaders at all levels.

ABSTRACT. Generative Artificial Intelligence represents a significant opportunity to strengthen research processes in higher education, particularly within the field of academic development and evidence-based educational research. As a complementary resource, it can enhance efficiency, creativity, and innovation in the design and implementation of research related to teaching and learning. This workshop aims to support academic developers in the conscious and strategic use of generative AI tools to enhance key stages of educational research, including the formulation of research questions, methodological design, and the development of conceptual frameworks, particularly within the context of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Beyond technological capabilities, the workshop emphasizes the importance of maintaining ethical judgment, critical reflection, and pedagogical awareness as guiding principles. Participants will explore not only how to use AI tools, but also how to apply and translate these practices into academic development contexts, including faculty development, curriculum innovation, and research capacity building. Understanding the scope and limitations of these tools ensures a responsible and reflective application of AI in higher education, positioning academic developers as researchers, facilitators, and agents of institutional change, while maintaining the researcher as the central agent in knowledge generation.

ABSTRACT. In many higher education institutions, the teaching portfolio serves as a central tool for documenting pedagogical competences in promotion and recruitment processes. Traditionally, portfolios combine personal reflection, theoretical grounding, and practical examples of teaching. Beyond documenting teachers’ skills, teaching portfolios are intended to foster ongoing professional growth and the development of teaching practice. However, the emergence of large language models has made it remarkably easy to use AI-technology to generate teaching philosophies and create portfolios that appear theoretically robust, critically reflective, and richly illustrated with examples. As a result, generative AI is starting to challenge established approaches to documenting and assessing teaching competences. These changes raise critical questions about authenticity, credibility, and fairness in using pedagogical portfolios as documentation of pedagogical competence. If AI convincingly creates such documentation, how should institutions recalibrate promotion and reward systems to protect integrity and support ongoing professional development?

This interactive workshop invites participants to explore these challenges through demonstrations of AI-generated portfolio texts, guided group reflections, and collaborative scenario-building exercises. Together, we will examine the balance between the “performative self” and the “authentic self” in documentation practices. Participants will also consider alternative frameworks for validating and supporting pedagogical development in an AI-rich environment. By engaging critically with AI’s disruptive potential, we will co-create strategies to safeguard academic integrity and agency while reimagining recognition systems in higher education.

ABSTRACT. Three years after Generative AI has made its way into our classrooms, post-secondary faculty continue to be confronted by the task of setting their own classroom guidelines around the use of the tools amidst a changing educational landscape. As a result, educational developers face the growing challenge of supporting faculty across the spectrum, from strong adopters of Generative AI to active resisters, while creating a safe space for learning together. This workshop-in-a-box responds to that challenge by introducing critical generative AI literacy, an approach that promotes faculty to ask deeper questions: when, where, and why should we use gen AI, and when should we not, if at all. Drawing on Maha Bali’s framework (2023) and through interactive activities, participants will experience how Gen AI predicts rather than understands, examine bias and sycophancy, and apply an appraisal tool to evaluate ethical implications of Gen AI usage. The workshop equips educators to adapt, and remix provided materials shared through a Creative Commons license and teach micro-lessons, engage with curated resources, and connect with one another for ongoing support. Participants will leave with practical strategies and a framework for guiding students toward responsible, reflective engagement with Gen AI, while keeping the human connection at the heart of learning experiences.

ABSTRACT. Research on learning has shown that emotion and cognition are deeply interconnected and equally vital aspects of learning. Teachers’ understanding of how emotions impact learning is essential for making pedagogically sound decisions regarding a range of aspects that impact student learning directly, such as activity, assessment design and classroom management.

Despite its importance, the emotional dimension of learning has traditionally received limited attention in teacher education and professional development. As change agents working closely with faculty, educational developers are well positioned to address this gap by promoting research-informed practices that recognise both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of learning.

This workshop aims to:

- Explore research-based evidence on the key role emotions play in learning and its implications for teaching design and facilitation.

- Provide a space for participants to share experiences and discuss how emotions could be more explicitly embedded in faculty’s professional development and learning design initiatives within their institutions.

ABSTRACT. This interactive workshop introduces the simple 3-step “Time and Effort on Task” Toolkit – a practical resource for enhancing both staff and students’ assessment literacy. The toolkit can be used in a variety of ways to support and enhance the communication between staff and students around assessment demands while offering clarity on assessment expectations. The toolkit offers plenty of opportunities to highlight available support mechanisms whilst bringing at the forefront the students’ time and effort investment on assessment. The session encourages active engagement, through reflection, discussion and hands-on activities. By the end of the session, you will be able to: 1. Explore the significance of student time and effort in assessment and its impact on both staff and students’ assessment literacy. 2. Analyse the key components of the TET Framework and the 3 steps of the TET Toolkit by reviewing its practical applications through real classroom case studies. 3. Reflect on your own teaching and assessment practices, including how you communicate assessment demands to students, by applying the TET toolkit to your own context. 4. Adapt the TET toolkit to your own teaching and assessment context through guided activities and peer discussion. Colleagues with academic/educational development roles will be offered with a facilitator’s guide so that they can deliver the workshop to their institution.

ABSTRACT. High-impact, strategic relationships between and among campus stakeholders are often key to institutional change. When coupled with strategic alignment to institutional priorities, these relationships super-charge change efforts. At this interactive workshop, facilitators will present a case study of their institution’s teaching-oriented strategic change efforts, which have launched transformative classroom learning experiences and advanced education for sustainable development. These parallel initiatives provided multiple rounds of faculty development aligned with institutional priorities and resulted in collaboration across units, continuous improvement in organizational learning, and resiliency in navigating systemic disruptions. This work included multiple rounds of faculty mini-grants for course design/redesign, the development of a curriculum to help faculty design and evaluate teaching projects, and a series of campus-wide teaching events that showcased the projects. Altogether, the courses redesigned through this initiative have reached virtually every undergraduate student via integration with general education. Now four years into the initiatives, the work has captured the interest of institutional leaders and has produced results that point to successful change actions and opportunities for improvement. At this workshop, participants will align their work with one or more of their institution’s strategic priorities and will identify new and existing high-impact relationships that could be cultivated to contribute to the success of their goals.

ABSTRACT. Academic developers are trained to think about teaching, learning, and institutional change, but rarely invited to feel it in their bodies. This 90-minute experiential workshop introduces Embodied Learning as a practice-oriented approach to developing the human capacities that underlie professional agency in educational development. Grounded in polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011), somatic psychology, and embodied cognition research (Clughen, 2024; Liu et al., 2025), the workshop guides participants through a structured sequence of somatic awareness exercises, a guided reflective protocol, and collaborative meaning-making activities designed to cultivate interoceptive sensitivity, emotional regulation, and values-aligned decision-making. The session is organized around a four-step reflective method: Recognize (attending to bodily signals), Examine (noticing cognitive and emotional patterns), Align (connecting to professional values and purpose), and Decide (choosing action from a regulated, intentional state). Participants will leave with practical tools they can immediately integrate into their own faculty development workshops, retreats, and one-on-one consultations. The workshop directly addresses the growing evidence that higher education professional development remains disproportionately cognitive and intellectually focused, neglecting the embodied dimensions of learning that research increasingly identifies as essential for sustainable professional practice, resilience, and authentic agency (University of Iowa Teaching Center, 2024). This work is grounded in a forthcoming book on embodied learning in educational contexts (Moore, forthcoming 2027).

ABSTRACT. Join us for this talk to meet Maya, a persona representing early career academics participating in a university pedagogical course, where we piloted implementing Collective Academic Supervision (CAS) as the primary supervision format for pedagogical development projects. Traditionally, such projects have been supported through individual supervision, but recurring challenges – including difficulties in using pedagogical terminology, feelings of isolation, and a desire for collegial dialogue – motivated us as instructors and supervisors in the course to experiment with CAS.

We chose to implement CAS because, as a structured, feedback-rich, and collaborative process, it holds potential to strengthen academic dialogue, accelerate writing, reduce isolation, and support discipline-specific argumentation. Further, drawing on research in higher education development, we situate CAS within broader discussions of professional identity formation, engagement, and the importance of communities of practice for early career academics.

In the talk, we share participant perspectives alongside our own experiences as supervisors to illuminate the affordances and limitations of CAS in faculty development contexts. The intended takeaway is to inspire instructors and educational developers to consider collective supervision formats as a way to foster collaboration, strengthen teaching-focused communities of practice, and enhance the development of teacher identity.

ABSTRACT. Postgraduate teaching assistants (TAs) exhibit an interesting duality in agency: not only must they function as instructors for others, they are also themselves learners of effective pedagogical practices. In STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education, a key rate-limiting step in the effective delivery of applied learning activities—such as labs, tutorials, research training, and critical thinking tasks—is found in the large volume of instructor hours that must be devoted to supervising and mentoring learners, a need that is most often met by postgraduate TAs rather than faculty. Despite this systematic reliance on TAs, most STEM programs lack an organized approach to TA training, resulting in wide variations in outcomes. Over a ten-year period, an apprenticeship-style active learning TA training program was devised and deployed across two universities in China and South Korea, revealing hands-on apprenticeship components to be especially influential on new TA confidence and pedagogical outcomes. A mixed methods approach was used to demonstrate that a more traditional style of TA training focusing only on the conceptual examination of curriculum design, pedagogical methods, and best practices was often insufficient to optimize TA confidence and instructional performance, especially in settings where TAs needed to teach applied skills such as research and critical thinking.

ABSTRACT. Summary This ICED Talk examines how a cross-university partnership is establishing the foundations for a scalable, future-focused ecosystem of Team-Based Learning in Irish higher education. The aim of the talk is to demonstrate how structured, relational academic development can shift institutions from isolated active-learning projects to a coordinated national strategy. In response to sector-wide challenges such as declining student engagement, issues of belonging, concerns around critical thinking, and the accelerating influence of artificial intelligence, the initiative positions TBL as a structured, human-centred pedagogy that can strengthen both academic integrity and student retention. Key activities include developing a 15-credit professional qualification in TBL, creating open-access learning and teaching resources, and conducting a coordinated scoping exercise to better understand staff readiness for large-scale pedagogical change. Introductory workshops, along with the integration of digital learning tools such as Learning Activity Management System (LAMS), have enabled staff across participating institutions to experience how TBL can be delivered consistently and seamlessly. The narrative presented in the talk traces how early capacity building efforts created momentum for institutional alignment. A particularly significant milestone involved bringing academic leaders to an established international TBL hub where they observed a mature, institution-wide TBL ecosystem. The core message is that sustainable pedagogical transformation requires ecosystem-level structures rather than isolated

ABSTRACT. Academic developers increasingly occupy dual roles as facilitators of faculty learning and active partners in collaborative Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). These hybrid roles raise ethical and practical questions when developers move from supporting inquiry to co-authoring scholarly work with faculty—particularly in large, distributed, cross-institutional teams. This ICED Talk examines how issues of authorship, ownership, and recognition surface during the transition from inquiry to dissemination, and why these moments matter for equity and agency in academic development. Drawing on our experience leading a multi-institutional research (MegaSoTL) project on generative AI involving seven interdisciplinary research teams, we share concrete examples of how unclear expectations around data ownership, uneven labor distribution, and varying levels of research experience complicate decisions about co-authorship. We describe strategies we developed to navigate these tensions, including transparent authorship criteria, intentional mentoring structures for scholarly writing, and practices for recognizing contributions across positional hierarchies. Throughout the talk, we reflect on how our dual identities as academic developers and scholars required us to balance faculty autonomy with the intellectual leadership developers often provide in collaborative SoTL work. We argue that authorship should be understood as an extension of academic developers’ pedagogical and relational practice. By approaching co-authorship as a site for cultivating faculty agency, supporting scholarly identity formation, and modeling ethical collaboration, academic developers can strengthen institutional cultures of inquiry and belonging. Attendees will leave with concrete considerations and reflective questions to guide equitable co-authorship practices in their own contexts.

ABSTRACT. Academic publishing is entering a post-authorship paradigm that is reshaping not only how knowledge is disseminated, but how it is created, governed, and sustained. In fields such as Scholarship of Educational Development (SOED) and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), these shifts are intensified by the rapid emergence of AI technologies, changing incentive structures, and increasingly complex funding and ownership models. This collaborative session responds to these challenges by bringing together editors from four international open-access journals. Through structured dialogue and collaborative design activities, attendees will critically evaluate post-authorship challenges, identify opportunities for their own scholarly growth as authors or editors, and co-generate visions for the future of open-access publishing in SOED and SOTL. No prior publishing or editorial experience is required; all who wish to contribute to shaping inclusive, sustainable academic publishing futures are welcome.

ABSTRACT. To collaboratively develop a curriculum on planetary health, we conducted a module workshop at the University of Regensburg using an agile backward-design approach. The workshop consisted of two 120-minute design sprints held two weeks apart and involved academic physicians, practicing pediatricians, students, and instructional designers. Through iterative design cycles in cross-functional teams and ongoing feedback, this approach fostered collective engagement and rapid pedagogical refinement. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method. During the development process, however, differing understandings of methodological and didactic principles proved challenging: the lack of a shared knowledge base delayed substantive progress and increased coordination efforts. To address these challenges, we plan to develop a toolkit consisting of visualization templates and accompanying guidelines for future module workshops. Within this collaborative space, we aim to exchange experiences on co-creative, agile approaches to curriculum design. Participants will be invited to provide feedback on draft visualization templates, drawing on their diverse disciplinary and professional perspectives to enhance the clarity and usability of these materials. Furthermore, the session will explore opportunities to establish partnerships for the joint development of a toolkit intended to support agile backward design practices in curriculum development. This initiative directly contributes to academic development by offering a scalable, evidence-informed model for collaborative curriculum design.

ABSTRACT. Since three years our university has been piloting Curriculum Redesign Mandates(CRM), partially freeing academic staff from educational, research, managerial and/or administrative tasks to lead a long-stretched and team-based curriculum development process. Support staff members guide and document the innovation processes, encouraging educational teams to critically revisit their curricula, in alignment with institutional priorities, societal and disciplinary evolutions. While such processes are increasingly common in higher education, they still lack evidence-informed grounding touching upon questions of academic agency, distributed leadership, and change management. In a rapidly evolving world, guiding long-term-focused curriculum innovations is not a straightforward task. It requires careful navigation and consideration of tensions and dilemmas that are both practical and relational, technical and cultural, highlighting the need for support practices that are reflective, dialogical, and capable of strengthening the reflective dispositions of those involved. The session aims to create a dialogical space where participants can critically reflect on their own institutional practices, share challenges, and co-develop principles for enabling sustainable curriculum redesign. We seek to connect theory and practice, linking participants’ lived experiences with current research on academic leadership and change.

ABSTRACT. Rapid technological, social, and economic changes demand higher education to be agile and innovative. This requires educators to collaborate beyond classroom and program boundaries, engaging at faculty and institutional levels to drive sustainable educational change. However, many innovations fail to endure, highlighting the need to strengthen educators’ professional agency—their capacity to act intentionally and reflectively within innovation contexts. Building on research into student and teacher agency, we developed the Professional Agency in Educational Innovation (PAEI) model, which links agency to personal, organizational, and learning resources and manifests in agentic behaviors such as leading or supporting roles in change processes. At ICED 2026, we aim to explore this model through a collaborative session with educators, researchers, and trainers in the field of teaching & learning. The session will identify key resources for sustainable change, gather feedback on the PAEI model, and foster knowledge exchange to potentially establish a network focused on stimulating professional agency in educational innovation.

ABSTRACT. This talk examines how an 8-week core competencies course fosters student agency in higher education. Through students’ feedback and paired assessments, the study explores pedagogical strategies for developing Collaboration & Teamwork, Communication & Presentation, Information & Data Literacy, and Intercultural & Global Literacy. Findings reveal a striking metacognitive gap: students demonstrated the strongest learning gains in Information & Data Literacy yet reported the lowest confidence in this competency. Conversely, Communication & Presentation, rated most useful by students, showed minimal measurable gains. This disconnect highlights the necessity of using multiple assessment methods to capture authentic learning. When curriculum positions students as co-creators through experiential learning and reflective practices, significant gains emerge across competencies. Students strongly preferred active, real-world engagement over traditional approaches, reinforcing the importance of student-centered pedagogies. These findings offer practical implications for designing transformative curriculum that empowers students while developing essential competencies for diverse academic and professional environments.

ABSTRACT. “I trust that meaningful learning can take place only when we honor the voices of those who have been silenced.” —bell hooks When the project first began, the students weren’t sure that their voice, voices shaped by the ALANAM experience at a predominantly white institution, were meant to belong in the realm of formal research. But research? That belonged to someone else. Or at least, that’s what they had been taught to believe. But everything changed when my mentoring model changed. Rooted in equity-informed, culturally sustaining practices, the mentoring approach refused the familiar hierarchy in which faculty lead and students follow. Instead, it invited students into a shared space of inquiry, a space where their lived realities were not only relevant, but essential. As we co-designed something profound happened: the students began to see themselves as knowledge-producers, capable of shaping conversations far beyond the classroom. This student-led led project illuminated patterns that faculty rarely glimpse and that institutions often overlook. They brought these insights together, the students realized that they had built something more than a research project, they had built a mirror their institution needed. This talk tells the story of that transformation about how academic developers and faculty discovering new ways of seeing their students, their pedagogy, and their institution. Participants will leave with an invitation: to reimagine mentoring as a collaborative and opening fresh perspectives on what higher education can become when students are empowered to lead.

ABSTRACT. This ICED-Talk shares an academic development case from a UK higher education institution exploring a new curriculum model in which students-as-partners is embedded as a core design principle rather than an optional enhancement. Drawing on the “engagement through partnership” conceptual model (Healey, Flint & Harrington, 2014), the approach positions partnership-building as foundational to curriculum renewal: students and staff co-create not only learning experiences, but also the partnership principles that will govern how decisions are made, whose expertise counts, and how power is shared.

Framed through agency as the capacity to influence action and change (Bandura, 2001) and student agency as goal-setting, reflection, and responsible action (OECD, 2019/2030 Learning Compass), the talk argues that co-creation can be a practical mechanism for developing learner agency at scale. Building on Bovill’s work on whole-class co-creation and relational pedagogy (Bovill, 2020) and Matthews’ scholarship on genuine partnership and power (Matthews, 2016; Matthews, 2017), we outline a replicable process for academic developers: convening co-design spaces, negotiating shared principles, and translating these into curriculum governance and staff development. The intended takeaway is a principles-to-practice blueprint that academic developers can use to spark dialogue, shift cultures toward power-sharing, and make agency-building an explicit curriculum outcome.

ABSTRACT. As co-creation practices become ever more embedded in institutional strategies to enhance teaching and learning, how can we shift perceptions of partnership working from something that is done as a one-off activity to something that is a constant and continuous way of doing and being within universities? This fundamental question will be interrogated through the lens of a recent change programme designed to redefine curricula across an entire institution and the subsequent support that was put in place to guide and influence teaching staff in the use of co-creation methods and tools. As part of this institutional drive, a team of Student Partnerships Advisors was created to work with academic leaders to audit, critique and rethink their approaches to co-creation and partnership within their courses and / or departments. This talk highlights the successes and challenges presented with this approach, and it outlines a unique perspective on the role of academic developers in creating cultures in which students are empowered to influence their own learning journeys and in which staff develop new practices and mindsets outside of traditional development programmes. The audience will be encouraged to engage with this approach to student-staff partnerships as a foundational and lasting way to iteratively reimagine teaching and learning across a large institution, and they will be asked to consider the possible advantages and challenges to adopting such an approach within their own areas of work.

ABSTRACT. Higher education institutions often set ambitious strategic goals, such as “inclusive education,” but how do these translate into concrete, actionable steps? At KU Leuven, we operationalized our ambition for inclusive education via three small-scale pilot projects. These were evaluated, refined, and are currently being consolidated into a comprehensive, faculty-tailored support offer. Along the way, several strategic design choices were made and valuable lessons have been learned.

This workshop targets educational developers, institutional leaders and teaching staff aiming to embed strategic themes (such as inclusion) at their institutions. Step by step, participants will build their own blueprint for implementation, according to our framework. We will focus on what to offer (content), at which level (individual, faculty, institution), for which target group, and in what format (e.g., workshops, coaching, policy tools).

Drawing on lessons learned and educational research, each step is accompanied by guided reflection on key considerations, such as stakeholder engagement, resource alignment, and resistance management. The session is highly interactive, combining facilitated exercises with peer exchange. Participants will leave with a customized actionable blueprint to embed a strategic theme of their choosing, and clear strategies to apply within their own contexts.

ABSTRACT. This workshop focuses on critical reflections and collegial conversations regarding strategic approaches to academic development. The underpinning assumption, based on recent literature in the field, is that academic development centres (ADCs) have expanded and broadened their scope, to be more holistic (Sutherland, 2018) and to support the enhancement of teaching focusing both on individuals as well as on the higher education institutions in which the enhancement takes place (Gibbs, 2013; Wright, 2023). In order to be agentic, rather than reactive, this workshop spotlights the need for intentionality in terms of strategic approaches and explicit, thought-through, context-sensitive theories of change (Kezar, 2018) in academic development. Participants will discuss a set of questions related to strategic approaches in academic development, questions that have also formed the basis of a small-scale survey, sent to ADCs in the UK and Sweden in 2025. Results from this survey will be presented by the workshop facilitators as part of the workshop discussions, and then implications for academic development, and the need for future research will be collaboratively discussed. Participants will leave the workshop having reflected critically on their own strategic approach to academic development, having heard several other examples of approaches, and with a future plan of what they can do to be more agentic in their own academic development initiatives.

ABSTRACT. This session introduces a framework for designing and facilitating experiential learning activities that develop perspective taking as a core competency for collaboration across professional, disciplinary and organizational boundaries. While interpersonal perspective taking has long been recognized as a transferable skill, this session extends the concept to interprofessional contexts, where learners gain agency by gaining an understanding of the lived experience and constraints of other professional groups, exploring the downstream impacts of their choices on colleagues, systems, and communities, and identifying how perspective taking can lead to better organizational and societal outcomes. Through case studies from construction management, health sciences, engineering, software design, and the social sciences, participants will explore how authentic, inter-professional tasks that allow students to step outside their usual learning environments and collaborate with other professional groups. Examples such as hands-on activities in sustainable mass timber construction illustrate how experiential learning can transform curriculum by shifting students from passive observers of professional practice to empowered partners who co-create solutions with industry experts. Participants will identify opportunities for inter-professional experiential learning within their institutions, supported by a practical framework for scaffolding and sequencing these experiences. The session equips educational developers with strategies and examples to help faculty design competence-oriented, inclusive curricula that foster student agency and interprofessional perspective taking for societal and organizational impact.

ABSTRACT. Feedback is at the heart of learning. Not only is it main way students can progress in their skill development, but it affords an opportunity for the cultivation of their agency. But not all feedback is equally effective, and for feedback to support learning, students need to engage with it. Asset-based feedback is effectively designed and delivered feedback that attends to students’ strengths, existing knowledge, motivations, and feedback literacy. It also makes clear the agency they hold over their learning growth. This interactive workshop-in-a-box will provide evidence for the importance of improving pedagogical feedback alongside seven practical strategies for instructors to engage in asset-based feedback. All slides, worksheets, and a handout with variations will be provided to attendees for use on their own campuses, with suggestions for adaptations for unique contexts.

ABSTRACT. This workshop explores the transformative potential of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in post-secondary education using CAST's UDL Guidelines 3.0 (2024). The workshop is relevant to educators and leaders looking to promote accessibility to learning. UDL is an educational framework that removes barriers to support student success and increases accessibility to learning for all. By promoting autonomy and choice in how students access and express their knowledge, UDL fosters motivation, engagement, and the development of expert learners who can advocate for their own needs. We explore how to advance UDL practices to create inclusive learning environments in collaboration with Accessibility Services and other departments. This 90-minute session will introduce participants to UDL principles, explore barriers to adopting UDL, and highlight how we can overcome barriers and promote UDL across the institute. We will engage attendees in case study analysis to reflect on their own teaching and learning practices, and find ways to promote UDL at the classroom and institutional level. The workshop aligns with ICED26’s sub theme 3, focusing on agency, academic development, and empowering students as active participants in their education.

ABSTRACT. This workshop shares the story of developing the Graphic Design and Interactive Media (GDIM) diploma program at the XXXX. The initiative began amid institutional uncertainty, leadership transitions, and rapid technological disruption driven by artificial intelligence. Through these challenges, a cross-functional team—including a program champion, an instructional development consultant, and an operations specialist—developed a collaborative process that redefined how curriculum could be co-created. Central to this process was the use of Figma, and specifically FigJam, as a shared, visual workspace. This platform enabled course developers and consultants to transparently co-design, align learning outcomes, and identify overlaps and synergies across 16 interconnected courses.

Participants in this 90-minute workshop—designed for developers, senior leaders, and teaching staff—will experience a condensed version of the mapping activity that supported the GDIM program’s development, thereby learning how visual collaboration tools can enhance agency, cohesion, and innovation in academic program design. The workshop aligns with ICED26’s theme of Agency and Academic Development by demonstrating how academic developers can act as change agents through technology-enabled, inclusive, and collaborative curriculum processes.

ABSTRACT. Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) can be defined as institutional entities or catalysts for educational change and innovation. For 14 universities in the Netherlands, 14 different CTLs can be described regarding governance, responsibilities, position in the organization, networks within the organization and with colleague-institutes. A framework by Mihai, Beausaert and Daley (2025) provides a structured approach to examining CTL agency and strategic positioning within higher education institutions. In our opinion, it offers a valuable perspective to reflect on one owns’ CTL and to define next steps in clarifying and strengthening the position of a CTL. From a theoretical introduction into CTLs, we will introduce the framework by Mihai, followed by three case studies from three different universities in the Netherlands. In addition, we will elaborate on three different approaches to define and measure impact of the CTL on institutional, teaching, and education level. Through guided discussions and peer exchange, participants will be inspired to reflect on structures and positioning of teaching and learning units in their own organization and to define first actions to initiate further institutional dialogue and development.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on international, cross-institutional perspectives, this workshop invites delegates to explore how authentic learner agency, in an era shaped by Generative AI (GenAI), depends on greater visibility of learning processes and transparency around critical thinking. Building on findings from our Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) collaborative enhancement project (Osborne et al., 2025), we will introduce our empirically developed Critical Thinking Framework, which conceptualises critical thinking as developmental, iterative, and context-dependent. This interactive workshop will directly engage participants in the Framework, supporting dialogue and exchange of practice that makes critical thinking visible within diverse educational and cultural contexts. Together, we will explore a range of practical and inclusive interventions which can be embedded in the classroom to support student clarity and understanding around critical thinking. Participants will be able to consider a broad range of applications which the Framework supports, from designing learning outcomes and activities to implementing clear marking criteria and actionable feedback. As a collaborative and international project, this workshop presents a valuable opportunity to draw on the wide range of academic development practice experience held by delegates. Collectively, we aim to safeguard the “human” in learning by opening up critical thinking as a visible, inclusive, and globally relevant practice. Leaving with new ways of thinking and practical strategies to adopt in our own institutional and professional contexts, we will be better placed to shape an equitable and future-focused higher education system.

ABSTRACT. Interdisciplinary education (ITD) is essential for preparing students to address complex societal challenges, yet institutional ambitions often remain disconnected from day-to-day educational practice. This workshop showcases an interdisciplinary teacher development program as an example of how experiential and participatory approaches can bridge this gap.

Participants engage in a short “pressure-cooker” activity based on Integrative Teaching Methods (ITMs)—including systems thinking, IRP processes, and travelling concepts—to experience how structured integrative methods make epistemic integration tangible and accessible for teachers. This hands-on activity illustrates the central pedagogical principles underpinning the program: learning through interdisciplinarity, not merely about it.

The workshop further highlights how these experiential activities are embedded in a broader participatory design process in which teachers collaborate with students, educational developers, policy makers, and societal partners. This approach strengthens teacher agency, fosters interdisciplinary teaching communities, and creates alignment between micro-level curriculum design and macro-level institutional frameworks.

Through guided reflection and collaborative dialogue, participants explore how these methods and design principles can be translated to their own institutional contexts. The workshop offers research-informed, practical tools to support academic developers, teachers, and educational leaders in fostering sustainable interdisciplinary curriculum innovation.

ABSTRACT. Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) and new faculty are often responsible for substantial undergraduate teaching while still forming their pedagogical identities and navigating institutional expectations, often with little or no formal teaching training. This poster examines a coordinated learning community model at a research-intensive university in which GTAs and new faculty participate in cohort-based Learning Communities. Both programs are facilitated by the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning, draw on practical, research-informed resources such as The Successful TA: A Practical Approach to Effective Teaching, and focus on core topics including course design, active learning, assessment, feedback, digital landscapes, and managing the affective dimensions of teaching. Using the ICED26 lens of “agency and academic development,” the poster explores how these structured, small cohort communities support early-career instructors’ pedagogical confidence, sense of belonging, and capacity to influence curriculum and teaching culture over time. Drawing on program design documents, participation data, and formative stakeholder feedback, the poster identifies design principles, tensions, and future directions for integrating early career learning communities into institutional strategy, graduate education, and faculty development portfolios.

ABSTRACT. Abstract Vocational education programs present unique challenges for teachers of general subjects, who must engage students with a practical orientation, varying levels of school motivation, and a strong need for relevance. This presentation explores how teacher education can prepare future teachers for this task through a pedagogical approach that combines vocational relevance, practice-based learning, and research-informed reflection. We argue that teacher education should integrate authentic, work-related assignments, interdisciplinary collaboration, and workplace observation to strengthen students’ professional understanding. Furthermore, we demonstrate how digital tools and case analysis can be used to develop teaching strategies that promote mastery and motivation among vocational students. The goal is to contribute to teacher education that not only provides subject knowledge but also equips future teachers to create meaningful and inclusive learning experiences in general subjects within vocational programs.

ABSTRACT. This presentation emerges from a collaborative exploration between an academic developer and a graduate teaching assistant (GTA), examining the practical implications of agency in teaching identity development. Drawing on recent research examining how GTAs construct professional identities within institutional constraints, we analyze theoretical frameworks to decipher actionable strategies and gaps that exist in these frameworks in supporting agency in GTA’s teaching identity development.

Through a combination of literature scan and a dialogical approach, we aim to address critical questions facing graduate programs: How can GTAs exercise meaningful agency in prescribed teaching environments? What institutional structures enable or inhibit identity exploration? How can academic developers create spaces that give GTAs agency while meeting programmatic requirements? What do GTAs themselves experience in terms of agency in this uncertain era of teaching in higher education due to the influx of AI? The GTA perspective illuminates real tensions between autonomy and expectation, while the developer offers evidence-based approaches to fostering agentic practice within institutional parameters.

We will present concrete recommendations emerging from our dialogue, including structured reflection prompts to gauge extent of GTA agency within a course, instructor-GTA partnership models that support collective agency-building, and departmental policy reforms that enhance GTA agency. We welcome dialogue with academic developers, program administrators, faculty mentors, and GTAs about contextual challenges and successful interventions. By bridging scholarly insight with practitioners’ experiences, we demonstrate that meaningful GTA development requires considering graduate students as agentic professionals capable of shaping their own pedagogical journeys within supportive structures.

ABSTRACT. In Poland, university teachers are not required to hold certified teaching competences, and job advertisements typically refer only vaguely to 'experience in teaching students'. In this context, the Ars Docendi Centre for Teaching Excellence at Jagiellonian University chose to build a development strategy grounded not in obligation or supervision, but in autonomy, trust, and intrinsic motivation. This approach contrasts with earlier historical models in Central and Eastern Europe, where mandatory pedagogical training produced negative long-term effects. This case-study presentation outlines how a large research university can develop a culture of teaching and learning quality without formal regulatory requirements. The strategy draws on humanistic theories of adult learning (Rogers, Knowles), emphasising autonomy, agency, and reflective practice. Methodologically, it is based on qualitative analysis of institutional initiatives, participation data, and collaboration with university leadership. Six interconnected areas shape this model: (1) voluntary, high-quality training programmes supported by a widely attended webinar series that builds developmental interest; (2) individual support through consultations and mentoring; (3) systemic shift toward developmental and peer-review-based teaching observations; (4) co-creation of institutional policies, including a multi-level teaching-competence certification framework; (5) strong cooperation with university leadership to strengthen educational leadership; and (6) support for innovation through competitive funding, the Teaching Slam competition, and international collaborations. The Jagiellonian University experience demonstrates that meaningful transformation of teaching culture can be effectively driven through trust-based, voluntary engagement rather than formal obligations. It highlights how universities can design systemic support that staff willingly use, fostering agency, innovation, and long-term organisational learning.

ABSTRACT. Universities must prepare students for complex futures. This poster presents a framework for how both individual agency - planning, forethinking, self-regulation, and self- reflection - as well as collective agency - sharing best practice, community building, and peer exchange - can become intended outcomes of professional development in teaching. We discuss how agency can inspire teaching and learning across the institution where teaching is valued as a professional practice and a shared responsibility. Ultimately, this case study provides an impulse for institutions seeking to professionalize teaching for increasingly complex educational contexts.

ABSTRACT. Creating sustainable networks in which faculty from across the disciplines build agency and share knowledge can be challenging when faculty participation in academic development is stagnant. Writing Accountability Groups (WAGs) provide space to create such networks while addressing an inherent faculty need: protected time for writing. WAGs reduce feelings of doubt and shame, increase overall time dedicated to writing, and boost scholarly productivity. These benefits are especially helpful for fostering epistemic agency among women and BIPOC faculty, who often juggle disproportionately heavy service and teaching loads with family caretaking expectations and who are progressively less represented in higher faculty ranks; e.g., women are more heavily represented in adjunct positions than in associate professor positions. In this poster session, the presenters will summarize research about WAGs and share best practices for establishing these powerful, sustainable networks at your institution, based on both existing research and their experience establishing WAGs at their institution.

ABSTRACT. Academic Portfolios (AP,Seldin & Miller, 2009) are powerful tools for faculty reflection, yet their extensive format can be a barrier. To address this, the "Structured Academic Portfolio (SAP) Chart" (Yoshida & Kurita, 2016) was previously developed and achieved comprehensive reflection in a simplified format. However, practice revealed two issues: (1) Conceptual adaptation, where, particularly in the Japanese context, explicitly distinguishing "University Management" and "Social Contribution" rather than grouping them as "Service" makes it easier for users to engage with the tool; and (2) Structural fragmentation, where the fixed, box-style layout visually separated teaching, research, and service, failing to accommodate the diverse workload balances of individual faculty members.This paper reports on the development of the improved "AP Chart", designed for versatility across career stages—from Pre-Faculty Development (Pre-FD) to senior Faculty Development. The redesigned chart features a circular structure with the faculty member’s "Philosophy (Core)" placed at the center, visually connecting all activities. The "Service" domain is explicitly split into "University Management" and "Social Contribution." This paper discusses how this tool offers greater flexibility than the previous version in envisioning career paths, and facilitates easier reflection.

ABSTRACT. This study evaluates the quality and impact of a peer mentoring program aimed at faculty members at a University. The primary objective is to analyze changes in mentors' expectations and perceptions regarding career development, roles, satisfaction with mentoring training, the nature and impact of peer feedback, and the overall perception of the students involved. The program is designed as a strategic intervention operating at both individual and institutional levels to align teaching practices with organizational goals and to promote a reflective and collaborative culture. The procedure includes training sessions, reciprocal teaching observations, feedback sessions, and dialogues with students. A mixed-methods design is adopted, involving pre-post questionnaires completed by professors and surveys to students, complemented by debriefing recordings and qualitative reports. The sample includes 16 teachers organized into 4 mentoring units and their students. Preliminary results indicate high satisfaction with the training sessions. Significant changes in expectations and role perceptions are anticipated, evidence on the role of feedback for teaching innovation, and confirmation of the positive impact perceived by students. The implications highlight mentoring as a lever for professional agency and organizational transformation in the context of faculty development.

ABSTRACT. International students’ success is often addressed through discrete services (orientation, language workshops, advising). Yet many barriers to belonging and academic progress emerge in everyday learning spaces where faculty agency, course design, and assessment practices shape student experience. This interactive poster presents a scalable, community-based model that equips faculty and peer mentors to strengthen international students’ academic literacies, confidence, and sense of belonging over time. The model integrates (1) structured peer and near-peer mentoring, (2) bidirectional cultural learning that positions students as contributors (not deficits), and (3) faculty-facing practices that translate EAL-informed insights into course-level supports (e.g., transparent assessment expectations, feedback for learning, and psychologically safe learning environments). The approach is grounded in communities of practice and student agency perspectives, aligning with ICED26 Sub-theme 3 by focusing on how learning partnerships promote self-regulation, engagement, and inclusive curriculum transformation. The poster shares high-level implementation components, facilitator scripts, and outcomes from long-running practice in a teaching-focused institution, including indicators of increased help-seeking, confidence in academic communication, leadership development among mentors, and improved belonging. Participants will leave with a one-page starter resource and a context-tailored adaptation plan for applying the model in resource-constrained settings.

ABSTRACT. The collaborators, who work in different institutional and national contexts, come to the topic of agency in academic development (AD) with our lived experiences working in and across teacher education and SoTL as well as formal and informal AD roles. Drawing on frameworks that conceptualize professional identities and relations as well as Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances, we have begun to explore the connections and distinctions among these fields. Our preliminary explorations and curiosities have highlighted the value of expanding these conversations to include additional voices and experiences. Through sharing personal narratives and facilitated small-group discussions using a World Café format, participants will explore (1) similarities and tensions among these fields, (2) possible reasons for their artificial siloing, and (3) potential synergies and collaborative opportunities. This session invites participants from diverse roles and backgrounds—including those with experience in K-12 or teacher education, SoTL practitioners, and academic developers from other disciplinary pathways—to contribute multiple perspectives to the conversation.

ABSTRACT. As educational developers, how do we conceive of, inhabit, and contribute to scholarly conversations about teaching and learning? This session engages ecology theory - which embeds people, places, and ideas in the context of the larger systems that influence their development - to “map knowledge about higher education” (Renn & Smith 2023, p.15). As a team of facilitators with experience across diverse international contexts (Ireland, Kosovo, Mongolia, Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, UK, US), we invite participants to render an ecological map of the current landscape of pedagogical research - including scholarship of academic development (SoAD), scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), higher education studies, discipline-based educational research (DBER), design-based research (DBR), and more. This mapping exercise invites dialogue about the relationships between scholarly forms, their purpose(s), and the broader context(s) in which they are embedded - including recognizing the current imperative to re-position the mission of modern universities. Applying and extending Gaipa’s metaphor of scholarly conversations as tables within “ballrooms” (2004), we invite insights into how names relate to ontological and epistemological assumptions that shape mattering within scholarly community(ies) (who is at the table?), the challenges of delineating boundaries (how many and which tables?), and the potential affordances of leveraging the relationships between them (the ballroom itself). Who are we inviting in, and who are we potentially leaving out, when we choose what we call our work? And, ultimately, where (and how) do we situate ourselves within the grand ballroom of scholarly conversations about teaching and learning in higher education?

ABSTRACT. The Collaborative Space is designed to explore how research-based learning can be effectively transferred from theory into teaching practice. Research-based learning actively engages students in generating and reflecting on their own insights through guided or self-directed research processes. While its theoretical foundations are well established, implementing it in diverse teaching contexts remains challenging for teachers and lecturers. To support this transition, the [name of the program] developed an online workshop, regularly offered by the [name of the university], which helps lecturers design and reflect on research-based teaching formats. A systematic analysis of participants’ reflection papers revealed key success factors and challenges in applying research-based learning. The Collaborative Space provides a structured forum for higher education professionals and lecturers to discuss these findings. Interactive phases are used to collaboratively identify supportive conditions, didactic strategies, and institutional frameworks that foster successful implementation. The findings are directly incorporated into the further development of the online workshop and broader support services for teaching. Ultimately, the Collaborative Space contributes to improving teaching quality and promoting a research-oriented learning culture in higher education by enabling shared reflection, peer consultation, and practical strategy development.

ABSTRACT. How do academic developers construct, share, and apply knowledge in interdisciplinary and collaborative contexts? What are the features that characterise academic developers’ expertise? What are the connections between these features and the impacts of our activities? To explore these questions, we have been conducting a participatory research project with academic developers in the UK with two aims: 1) to surface the values, traits and aptitudes that underpin how academic developers carry out their roles; 2) to map the characteristics of our expertise to the impacts of our activities through a Theory of Change framework. Our ultimate objective is the creation of a framework that will support the academic development field in articulating what we do, what we impact upon and how we do that.

As a participatory research project, collaboration with the community has been at the heart of our study design and process. In this collaborative space session, we will share the data gathered from our research and the framework that we have begun to develop from this data. Participants will be invited to share insights on this data, particularly exploring any similarities, differences, gaps, etc., across the various international contexts of those attending. These insights will then inform discussions on the initial Theory of Change framework, which will be further developed and refined through collaborative activity within the session. As an ongoing project, we hope to explore potential partnerships to expand the study and connect with work others are pursuing in similar areas.

ABSTRACT. This session will introduce those in attendance to the potentially mutually beneficial outcomes of the creation and development of a Lead Teaching Assistant (TA) Program in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The presentation will outline the establishment and early evolution of the Lead TA Program within my home department, with a specific focus on its implementation in a first-year online course, which took place between January and April of 2025. Additionally, this collaborative space will provide myself and the Lead TA with an opportunity to receive constructive feedback, consider the scalability of the initiative, and establish connections across the post-secondary sector.

The Lead TA role positions the upper-year student as a focal point of the course, as they assist with course design; receive mentorship from the instructor, while mentoring their fellow TAs; and serve as an accessible point of contact for first-year students who may be hesitant to approach their instructor. This experiential learning role offers the Lead TA an opportunity to develop their pedagogical content knowledge and disciplinary instructional competence. Simultaneously, it provides both the instructor and first-year students with an additional level of support in a far too often disconnected online learning community.

ABSTRACT. In the current university context, characterized by increasing complexity in the organization of curricula, methodologies and teaching profiles, as well as the creation of more and more interdisciplinary degrees, coordination has become an essential approach to guarantee coherence and quality in teaching.

The coordination project of our institution aims to improve the organizational culture of centres and teaching collaboration in order to enhance the coherence of degrees and thus have an impact on improvements in teaching.

After a thorough review of all actors involved, the need for collaboration at different levels became apparent. To this end, a number of guidance documents and tools were prepared so that each centre could design and implement its own coordination protocols while respecting its own culture.

The first phases of the model for accompanying the centres developed by our institution are now being presented. So far, the process includes a diagnosis of the state of teaching; a review of existing coordination protocols at macro level (university) and intermediate level (centre) and the implementation of spaces for dialogue and reflection at micro level (group workshops and interviews).

This article presents a transferable project at an early stage of implementation. The aim is to offer a proposal that connects the institutional strategy with classroom teaching practice. The goal of this article is to start a dialogue with other universities, share the challenges of implementation and explore lessons learned from similar experiences in change management in higher education.

ABSTRACT. In this collaborative space, we will introduce a conceptual framework for equity-centered peer-mentoring practices in academic support programs. This framework builds on an existing body of scholarship (Rawlinson and Willimott, 2016) and was further developed through a 3-year comparative study of peer-led academic support programs at universities in Canada, Singapore, and the United States. In this session, participants will engage with key project findings and explore an assessment instrument for programs that utilize peer support to help students navigate their academic experience in higher education. This collaborative space will also create a space for session participants to explore and reflect on the tool’s potential value for campuses seeking to build new or improve existing peer mentoring programs.The results of this study and the assessment framework are situated within the broader realities of the current higher education landscape, where faculty and staff are often navigating heavy workloads, resource constraints, and increasing student needs. Despite these pressures, many of these educators and academic support staff continue to seek meaningful ways to create supportive, responsive, and equitable learning environments. Our framework is designed with this context in mind, offering practical, research-informed approaches that can help institutions strengthen peer-mentoring structures while acknowledging the complex conditions under which they operate.

ABSTRACT. This collaborative space shares how instructors at Montana State University Billings use an instructional strategy, called the “exam autopsy.” The exam autopsy is a post-exam reflective assessment tool that helps students identify exam errors, reflect on study strategies, and articulate adjustments in preparing for future exams. The project aims to empower students through metacognition to better understand how they are learning and methods that lead to increased academic success. Still in its early stages, we are eager to share this project and gain valuable feedback and iterations from an international academic development community. This session invites participants to review the tool and offer feedback/refinements as we look to offer the tool across disciplines and course modalities. There will also be opportunities for participants to explore adoption of the exam autopsy through interdisciplinary partnerships.

ABSTRACT. An exploration of the potential of compassionate instructional design as a transformative framework for addressing persistent learning barriers in South African higher education, grounded in trauma-informed pedagogies. While instructional design has traditionally focused on efficiency and alignment, this session invites participants to reconsider its role in supporting student well-being, engagement and persistence within complex learning environments. Drawing on an emerging action research project, the session will create a dialogic space for participants to reflect critically on their own design practices and explore how compassion can be intentionally embedded into curriculum, assessment, and learning environments. Rather than presenting a fixed model, this space invites collaboration to refine an evolving conceptual framework that centres care, relationality and justice in learning design. Participants will engage in structured reflection and small-group dialogue to share contextual challenges, design responses and questions for future research and practice. The session aims to generate collective insights, strengthen cross-institutional connections, and support the development of more humane, responsive instructional design practices in higher education.

ABSTRACT. Designing curricula for study programmes is a complex challenge, shaped by rising expectations regarding competence orientation, the shift from teaching to learning, student diversity, digitalisation, and organisational coherence. The Reference Framework for Higher Education Development by Brahm, Jenert, and Euler (2015) provides a valuable conceptual lens for understanding this complexity across three interconnected levels: learning environments, programme design, and organisational conditions. Drawing on accumulated practical experience and insights from research, we have compiled a wide range of characteristics and design principles—such as key competencies, digital learning formats, internationalisation, and the student life cycle—that fit to one or more of the three levels. The framework offers a promising structure for mapping and integrating these elements more coherently.

The proposed Collaborative Space invites participants to jointly explore how the framework can guide curriculum development practices. Through group work, visualisation, and iterative reflection, participants will review, challenge, and refine this mapping, contributing their own expertise and experiences. The session thus emphasises co-construction rather than the presentation of predefined results, acknowledging the distributed and multi-actor nature of curriculum development.

Intended outcomes include: (1) reflecting on the usefulness of the framework for structuring curriculum development, (2) refining and expanding the set of identified characteristics, and (3) initiating a practice-oriented overview of how elements of curriculum development connect across levels. Ultimately, the session aims to create shared insights that support more coherent and informed approaches to curriculum design.