Access and success: rethinking and widening the impact of academic development

The vexed issue of the ‘impact’ of academic work, and of academic development (AD) itself, remains a perennial challenge for our field (Bamber & Stefani, 2016; Chalmers & Gardiner, 2015; Moya, Turra, & Chalmers, 2019; Sutherland, 2015). A recent IJAD editorial (Sutherland & Hall, 2018) recognizes the importance of impact, while at the same time seeking to problematize or at least to question it. As Sutherland and Hall point out, ‘we declare in our “Aims and Scope” that our journal’s goal is to improve the quality of higher education internationally and it is important that we continually ask ourselves as scholars and practitioners of academic development if we are achieving this goal’ (p. 69). Measuring this impact by providing evidence of the difference that we make has been a concern since the early days of IJAD (for example, Kreber & Brook, 2001). While inference measures are weak, such as participant perception (or satisfaction) and participation numbers, in neoliberal times they in truth are still – and perhaps increasingly – valued institutionally to determine what the so-called ‘ROI’ (return on investment) of our services is, since these are indicators that are easily measured. But do such metrics enable us to measure what we value, or do they instead just allow us to measure what is easily measured? And do we then end up valuing what we (can) measure instead of measuring what we value (see Biesta, 2016)? To adapt a distinction from the student success literature (see, for example, Lipka, 2019), while access (and widening access) to AD is important, and while participant satisfaction and participation numbers certainly matter, to what extent do they indicate actual success? Given these issues, a prior question when it comes to measuring impact must involve considering the ‘normative validity’ of our measurements: a separate concern from their ‘technical validity’, or whether we are measuring what we intend to measure. Normative validity is a question of values and educational purposes (Biesta, 2016), of reflecting on ‘what constitutes “impact”’ and how we ‘sustain’ what we value (Sutherland & Hall, 2018, p. 69) before designing interventions to measure it, and so it requires paying more attention to the question of what ‘impact’ looks like. What are we trying to achieve, and why? What do we value as academic developers, and where can we make a difference? How do we value the rich knowledge and deep expertise of academics in higher education, whether in research universities or other post-secondary settings? And how (if at all) do we as academic developers connect our work, which more often than not will be focused on academics’ teaching, with priorities and values oriented toward research and the discovery of new knowledge? In this time of great disruption for the world in general, and for higher education and AD in particular, how are we dealing with the manifold challenges resulting from the pandemic, technological changes, and the straitened finances of many universities? These questions all ultimately concern not just how effective we are (technical validity) but whether what we do matters and why (normative validity), and they need to be posed INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT 2021, VOL. 26, NO. 1, 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2021.1876337