Scholarly Socialization

The welcoming of new “guests” in academic hospitality is closely related to research on socialization into disciplinary fields, the locus for which is (most often) the graduate degree program. This body of literature tends to focus on how such programs can most effectively disseminate their shared scholarly norms, with an eye toward improving both equity and long-term career success (Adler & Adler, 2005; Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Gardner & Barnes, 2007; Hoffmann-Longtin et al., 2021; Twale et al., 2016). Because few, if any, advanced degrees in educational development exist (Green & Little, 2017), the commensurate socialization process must, by necessity, take place outside of these conventional degree pathways. By extension, then, it could be argued that the INED has served as the primary vehicle of socialization for those new to educational development as a scholarly field.

That said, the field of educational development has long resisted the temptation to refer to itself as a discipline due, at least in part, to its emphasis on adaptability (Wright et al., 2018). Previous POD Network President Deandra Little (2014), for example, has argued that a defining feature of educational development work is the need for intellectual dexterity, or the ability to move between and among existing disciplinary silos (Cruz et al., 2022; Kearns et al., 2018). Others have emphasized both the disconcerting and liberating aspects of holding multiple identities within clearly delineated academic spaces (Plank, 2019; Rowland, 2007). This begs the question of how to envision a field, especially to newcomers, that not only lacks a singular academic identity but further defines itself by embracing a plurality of perspectives.

Professional Socialization

If educational development were to be considered an academic role, as opposed to a discipline, then new faculty (and/or staff) orientation events or programs might be considered a more commensurate activity than graduate school. There has not been a great deal of research done on such programs, but what work does exist tends to emphasize how they can be designed as points of entry into the operations of the university and how these events ensure that participants are able to succeed in the local environment (Cullen & Harris, 2008; Miller, 2021; Scott et al., 2016). This focus on the campus may be less directly applicable to educational developers, who may be new to their profession but not necessarily to their respective institutions.

This juxtaposition between the conditions of the local institution and the broader field has been identified as an essential tension within educational development work (Geertsema, 2016). Although there has been a growing tendency for some aspects of the work of faculty development to become more generalized and professionalized (Brennan et al., 2022), at the same time other aspects have become increasingly divergent, a reflection of multiple, sustained adaptations to specific campus cultures (Kelley et al., 2017; Wright, 2023). As these adaptations have continued to expand over time and space, the list of skills and knowledge that new developers need has grown along with it. Because a stable definition of our practice is not fully established (and may never be), the general competencies that a new educational developer might wish to learn may become secondary to their ability to respond to the shifting local context in which they are embedded. This state of affairs fundamentally challenges our ability to (re-)enact the local conditions under which our work takes place and transfer that to a cross-institutional context such as the INED.

Organizational Socialization

If we consider educational development not as a discipline or a practice but as an integral part of how a university functions, then we can perhaps look toward research on workplace models of onboarding for reference. This body of research tends to emphasize the evolving nature of employee development, especially as new generations or historical cohorts of employees are brought into the existing culture of organizations or even broader economic sectors, such as high tech (e.g., Bauer & Erdogan, 2011; Cesário & Chambel, 2019; Gajda, 2019; Jayathilake et al., 2021; Schroth, 2019). This body of research and practice seems to resonate with recent shifts within the field of educational development, as many CTLs seek to “come in from the margins” (Beach et al., 2016; Schroeder & Associates, 2011), shedding their historical identity primarily as service providers and embracing their role as change agents, seeking to re-create and reinforce their campuses as vibrant teaching and learning communities (Felten et al., 2007). In other words, to paraphrase the title of an article by Bjorn Stensaker (2018), educational development is fundamentally cultural work.

In many cases, however, the literature on organizational development is often based on a clear sense of organizational hierarchy, with each person playing carefully delineated roles. As many scholars have pointed out, however, universities do not function as rational organizations and often belie many theories of management and organizational behavior that are derived from the corporate world (Lueg & Graf, 2022). The CTLs (or related units) where educational developers work may appear on institutional organizational charts in a specific place, but they are often loosely coupled with a wide range of people and units across all levels of the institutional hierarchy (Elken & Vukasovic, 2019; Taylor, 2005). Studies in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) (a practice that is frequently supported through CTLs), for example, have suggested that the culture of teaching and learning is enacted at multiple levels of an institution, ranging from the individual (the micro) to the institution (the macro) or even the super-institutional (the mega) (Frake-Mistak et al., 2023; Simmons, 2020). Changing this culture, therefore, necessitates the coordination of multiple levers of that change, most likely by educational developers who embody the desired cultural beliefs and practices.

Framed in this way, educational developers constitute a professional community of practice that collectively serves to shape other communities in which we are embedded, whether that is the professional organization to which we belong, the local campuses where we work, the broader sector of higher education in which we participate, and last, but not least, the current zeitgeist that envelops all aspects of our lives. The challenge lies in how we, as a broad, trans-disciplinary, and dis-aggregated community of professionals, continuously envision, enact, and embody these multiple layers of identity, practice, and positionality in a way that provides a meaningful onboarding experience for new community members from a wide range of lived experiences, academic backgrounds, and institutional contexts. As the complexity of the previous sentence perhaps attests, ours is not an easy task.

Case 1: At the Table (2015)

Up to 2015, a prevalent perception was that the POD Network (representing the community of educational developers) was dominated by large, public research universities, whose affordances included larger CTLs with funding to support staff participation in professional societies. If this premise is accepted, then much of how the field of practice had been defined was also done primarily by faculty and staff at these institutions. This placed the conveners of the 2015 INED, which did not include a single research university, in a curious “envisioning” predicament of bringing new practitioners into a field that they may have viewed as not having been created by or for them. This openness, not just to new members but also to new membership types, generated both challenges and opportunities in the process of (re-)imagining the educational development community.

In previous iterations, a single institution, most often a large research university, had served as the primary host site, and the work of designing and implementing fell primarily to the faculty and staff at that institution. For the first time in 2015, the institute was hosted by a consortium of independent schools (i.e., not part of a connected system), all located within an approximately 50-mile (ca. 80-km) radius of Asheville, North Carolina. There were two lead institutions—a rural regional comprehensive university and an urban (2-year) community college—and six participating institutions (two private liberal arts institutions; one public liberal arts university; one rural 2-year college; and one for-profit, faith-based college). Because of this broader inclusion in leadership, the conveners intentionally designed the institute to be inclusive of educational development practices across a broad, arguably broader, range of institutional types. This was evinced by the (then) record registration, which included significant numbers of participants from previously underrepresented institutions and institutional types.

The multiple hosts were challenged, not only in how to envision the field to participants but also in how to enact it together, as practice varied considerably by institutional context. The institute’s theme, “At the Table,” refers to educational developers taking on stronger advocacy within their respective institutions, a reflection of broader trends within the field. As the literature review above suggests, however, scholars have previously identified inherent tensions between the local campus orientation of a CTL and some of its organizational development aspirations. There were institutions within the leadership group who envisioned their CTLs primarily as service providers, not levers of change. Members of the group also raised questions about the extent to which a person new to their role at a given institution would need to be able to engage in cultural work, and some suggested that organizational development could potentially be considered an advanced skill set, one that would come at a later point on a given career path, or at a later stage of development for a given CTL.

The multi-institutional hosting role also presented challenges in how the hosts embodied the field, both internally and externally. Most educational developers are, of course, employees of an institution and bound to serve its best interests. It is possible that activity focused outside of that local context can potentially be viewed as taking focus away from the core mission. For this reason, it may be difficult for a given CTL to internally justify the considerable amount of time and resources needed to host an externally facing event such as the INED. In this iteration, the hosts tried to head this potential objection off at the pass, arguing that the labor would be distributed across multiple institutions.

The trade-off of the distributed model was that the prestige of hosting would also be distributed, potentially diluted, across all participating institutions. It was interesting to note that the participating institutions gravitated toward the hosting opportunity for different reasons, with some looking for inclusion (2-year colleges), voice (the liberal arts colleges), or credibility (the faith-based institution) in addition to prestige (the regional comprehensive). In some ways, the INED experience could be seen as a proxy for how education development work was embodied differently within each of our respective institutions.

Speaking of responsibilities, the institute may be hosted by an institution(s), but it is POD Network sponsored, and there is an implicit expectation that the event will enact and embody the values and practices associated with the organization. This presented the conveners with a dilemma, as the POD Network was a relatively unknown entity for at least a few of the institutions included in the hosting consortium. The prevalent perception was that the organization served did not reflect the realities of educational development work in their contexts. The open question was to what extent the tail (INED hosts) could, or arguably should, wag the dog (the organization). The hosts chose to situate our position as responsive, not just to the organization but also to the broader field. The term responsive is intentionally chosen. In 2018, Mary Wright and colleagues suggested that one of the defining attributes of educational development is its responsiveness, which they differentiated from reactivity, in that responsiveness implies a more nuanced relationship to the needs of those whom we serve. Being responsive is not about simply sitting back passively waiting to respond to stated needs, but rather about taking a proactive stance, anticipating, even leading, others into the future.

By envisioning a broader, more inclusive, community as the foundation of this iteration of the INED, the event gained both in numbers and representation, but this did not come without a cost, which largely manifested at the level of individual relationships. The organizers intentionally chose to pair INED faculty into teams that included representatives from different institutional types, such as a person from a research-intensive university with one from a 2-year college. This led to largely minor, but yet persistent, interpersonal conflicts, as participants worked to find common ground. Participants also noted that the broader inclusion could at times (and somewhat ironically) make it more difficult for an individual to see themselves in a given practice or feel as if they belonged in a particular space. It is perhaps not a coincidence that a number of informal interest groups, most distinguished by institutional type (e.g., small colleges, 2-year colleges), emerged organically at shared mealtimes. Relation-building is widely recognized as a core competency for educational developers (Wright et al., 2018), so while we held workshops and coaching circles focused on making such connections, there were limits to how that competency was enacted and embodied across the event as a whole.

Case 2: Building Communities (2017)

Hosted by the State University of New York (SUNY) in Saratoga Springs, the 2017 INED was envisioned as a collaboration between the SUNY educational development community of practice and the POD Network community of educational developers. Given its size (64 campuses) and complexity (community colleges, regional comprehensives, technology colleges, and research universities), SUNY was well positioned to consider how educational development is enacted in diverse campus contexts as well as how to develop a curriculum that takes into account such institutional diversity. In planning the 2017 INED, SUNY sought to embody the “spirit of POD” by involving diverse developers (both from SUNY and outside SUNY) at all stages of the process when writing the proposal (with SUNY educational developers) and in shaping the curriculum (with the SUNY and non-SUNY facilitators) to create a supportive and responsive program for the participants.

The SUNY Center for Professional Development (CPD) took the lead in planning and coordinating the INED. The CPD does not operate as a traditional center for teaching and learning tasked with directly providing programs for all SUNY faculty and staff. Instead, it serves the SUNY system campuses through identifying resources and co-creating programs to meet professional development needs (more on this below). The CPD was able to leverage relationships with other SUNY educational developers to put together the INED proposal and identify SUNY faculty and staff who could serve as INED facilitators. The SUNY CPD was motivated to host the INED in order to create connections between educational developers in the SUNY system similar to the way the INED (and other POD Network programs) envisions and enacts the field to its members.

To enact the INED, the CPD relied on its history of working with SUNY communities of practice (CoPs) to collaboratively create professional development programs. CoPs are “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). The CPD engages with representatives from CoPs to help them envision their community, identify needed competencies for those in their CoP, and then identify or design programs to help members of that CoP learn those competencies. When considering an application to host the 2017 INED, the CPD worked with the SUNY educational development CoP advisory group to brainstorm the competencies and learning objectives that formed the foundation of the proposal and draft of the curriculum. After being selected as hosts, the CPD used the competencies and learning objectives to help identify the faculty facilitators (via survey), asking them to indicate the session topics they felt qualified to lead. Once the facilitators were selected, they were matched with one other faculty facilitator for each of their sessions. To put this in the academic hospitality framework, through envisioning the broader field through a CoP lens, the foundation was laid for enacting and embodying educational development practice at SUNY’s INED.

Because the place of educational development in higher education is always in flux, what those in this role need to know and be able to do also requires regular discussion and debate. Those who host the INED need to figure out how to engage developers from other contexts in enacting our work through the collaborative construction of the curriculum. To that end, there were scheduled monthly meetings of the faculty facilitators in the weeks leading to the 2017 INED to refine all aspects of the curriculum: session objectives, descriptions, activities, etc. These meetings culminated in a half-day in-person meeting of the facilitators followed by dinner together the day before the INED. The event feedback indicated that participants and facilitators had a positive experience during the INED, but whether these hospitality practices extended beyond their direct experience at the institute is unknown. The SUNY system is still searching for a POD-like network of educational developers but is unfortunately lacking the organizational and institutional commitments of the POD Network and a program like the INED to envision, enact, and embody its own sense of shared community.

Case 3: Collaboration for Change (2021)

The Claremont Consortium and the University of La Verne collaborated on the next INED. These institutions were scheduled to host in-person INEDs in both 2020 and 2021 as part of a POD Network initiative to move to a yearly hosted format with institutions hosting two years in a row. Unfortunately, the 2020 INED was canceled due to the pandemic. Following the cancellation, with the great amount of turmoil surrounding what was possible due to the closing and reopening of different states, particularly California, there was a great amount of discussion about the format and even feasibility of hosting the 2021 INED among the local committees, the POD Network PDC, and the POD Network Core Committee. Eventually, the group chose to offer a fully virtual version of the event for the first time. In the course of these changes, the 2021 INED was asked to re-envision, re-enact, and re-embody academic hospitality many times.

It all started in March 2020 as the in-person event was being finalized. At first, invited faculty were asked to hold off on planning their travel for a bit with the belief (common at the time) that this was going to be a 2-week delay and that the preparation process, and the country, would be “back to normal” by the original planned date for the event (in June). Two weeks stretched to a month and then to months. It became clear that the event could not be held, which led to a choice for participants to either receive reimbursement or roll over their registration to an in-person event in 2021. It also led to a thank you to facilitators and a plea that they still be a part of the 2021 event. Months passed as the country continued to wrestle with the pandemic along with the shock to the economy, the death of George Floyd and the unrest that followed, and the January 6 insurrection.

With each event, the local organizing committee(s) discussed what could and should be done. These discussions were also held with various POD Network committees as they, too, struggled to decide how to proceed while dealing with the challenges of remote learning and remote work situations on their home campuses, in their home communities, and in their individual homes. The pandemic forced a severe reckoning of what was appropriate and what could be handled within the compounding levels of stress being felt by seemingly everyone. It also forced the original theme of collaboration to take on even more significance as both the host and guest roles were re-imagined.

The hosts attempted to embody practices in our INED that would offer models for new educational developers struggling under the emotional weight of the pandemic. In particular, the focus on inter-institutional collaboration was positioned to take pressure off individual CTLs in their myriad of forms and institutional placements. This seemed critical to model in part because the institutions of virtually everyone had been thrown into what felt like an endless cycle of upheaval. Institutions were grappling with changes of delivery, loss of students, changes to faculty identities, and economic impacts of running institutions during a pandemic. The hosts sought ways to model changes at the institutional level, ours and others, by discussing collaboration, survival, and revival. In this way the INED was intended to embody the theme of collaboration for (and in a time of) change.

The situation had also changed for the guests: INED participants. The pandemic forced a reimagining of how higher education impacted the embodied identities of people everywhere and how that impact might be inequitably distributed, along with a social reckoning that was a part of the greater narrative. The hosts felt they had no choice but to address what this meant on a personal level for the participants while also addressing what it meant on the most personal and individual levels for the invited faculty and organizers. The impacts on individuals were at the forefront, which included dealing with change, fear, survival, guilt from joy, and just trying to do the things each and every individual was being asked to do to just get through. This is why one of the most attended and impactful sessions was on dealing with burnout, fear, and being fully human in a time of change.

Indeed, these were a tumultuous couple of years on so many levels for everyone. For the localized organizing committees and the POD Network in general, there were times when the INED was a complete afterthought, and rightfully so with the level of distress and change forced upon the entire world. There were times when the pandemic weighed so heavily that it seemed silly to even try and proceed. There were times when the envisioned needs of those in the field were so real that the hosts felt like the INED was needed more than ever. The pandemic changed virtually everything about what was envisioned and enacted even as it reinforced the need of what was envisioned and enacted. Collaboration and adaptability became more than just a vision or something hoped to be modeled—it became the way things had to be done. It became the reality of what was to be enacted by those already in and those entering the field.

The POD Network was also thrown into a time of change, further illustrating the needs we sought to address and how those needs were enacted and embodied by the field writ large. While the INED did have to balance the ways people could participate previously due to political events, the POD Network was scrambling to figure out what to do and how the organization needed to quickly adjust amid changes to higher education, educational development, and the social and economic issues that were a part of all the changes. The INED became a microcosm that reflected the changes that were being discussed and embodied by the organization as a whole. It became an immediate and concrete space of reckoning between what was envisioned and what was possible. The INED became a testing ground, of sorts, where questions that were asked elsewhere demanded immediate decisions, particularly in the initial canceling of the 2020 in-person event, the discussion of whether a 2021 event was even possible, the eventual shift to a fully virtual format, and accommodating the new needs of the developers who were entering the field during massive disruption.

Under the conditions of the global pandemic, higher education was in the middle of something that few had experienced in recent memory. Everything had changed in a matter of weeks, and then everything changed again, and then everything changed again. The INED in 2020/21 needed to (re-)envision, (re-)enact, and (re-)embody what that meant and how new and experienced developers were going to find their way through an environment that had no foreseeable stability. The implications still reverberate, as is evident in ongoing discussions of “before times,” pre/post pandemic trends, and the future of higher education itself.

Case 4: Inclusive Critical Practice (2023)

Nevada State University hosted the 2023 INED, and the 4-day event was held on their campus in Henderson, Nevada. Typically, the INED event has been offered face-to-face bi-annually, every other year. However, because of the global pandemic, the last face-to-face INED had been held in 2019 in Greensboro, North Carolina. In planning for and hosting the 2023 INED, the host envisioned this as an opportunity to invite individuals back to a face-to-face event. After an extended, excruciating period of isolation that so many of us experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a major goal was to facilitate networking and create an inclusive and welcoming environment that encouraged relationship-building. These are typically perceived as strengths of the POD Network, but more than ever it was necessary to make these prioritized objectives in order for this iteration of the INED to be successful. Enabling each individual participant to feel a sense of belonging and valuing their contributions are part of the unique INED experience, and doing so also models what effective educational development programs typically can do for their faculty participants.

Many of us (as educational developers) who participated in a previous/pre-pandemic iteration of the INED may remember the magic of that experience, which surpassed engagement—it was an embodiment of community. Both the INED host and the faculty not only shared best practices in an organized curriculum but also intentionally created opportunities to invite their guests to be part of the POD Network community. Beyond any conference where information sharing is the primary objective, that sense of community was enacted through opportunities for co-creation of its outcomes, curriculum, and activities. This mingling of both conventional and academic hospitality is crucial to the success of INED iterations.

In order to embody community at the 2023 INED, each attendee was assigned and invited to participate in one of the INED learning communities. These groups included 15–18 registrants and were led and facilitated by two or three INED faculty. Dedicated time for meetings was scheduled daily, usually over a meal, so that individuals could get connected and build relationships within a smaller group of colleagues. In addition, at the end of the INED program, the hosts held a special reflective session on Friday afternoon just before the conclusion. Registrants were invited to review key takeaways, share next steps and goals, and prioritize which action items they should pursue upon returning to their respective campuses. Each learning community was invited to stay in contact, and INED faculty offered their services to continue serving as mentors.

As the curriculum was enacted for the individual guests, the hosts realized that there might be varying levels of experience with the broader educational development community. Some would be brand new to the field, whereas others may have had several years of experience under the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic. The curriculum had to be responsive to the wider range of past experience; it also had to encompass an increasingly unknown future. By 2023, not only were higher education institutions operating differently than they operated before the pandemic, but many long-standing signature practices, such as face-to-face workshops, were no longer serving the needs of faculty and institutions. For this reason, the hosts chose to provide time and space for participants to reflect on the challenges faced by faculty and students at their institutions and to consider how they might be active participants in enacting the next generation of educational development scholarship and practice.