Against Professional Development

This paper raises questions about the sort of knowledge which has come to count as professional development knowledge.The author interrogates the curriculum and pedagogy of academic professional development programs in Australian universities, drawing parallels with Third World development programs.She argues that professional development knowledge is privileged over disciplinary knowledge in setting lifelong learning agendas for academics, and notes some problematic consequences of this for academics engaged in professional development programs. Against Professional DevelopmentAll professional workers need to be developed.Moreover, there should be no end to this process -the true professional knows that learning is for life.I want to explore how these two propositions have come to be true for academics and other professional workers at the beginning of the new millennium, and with what effects.In doing so, I seek to provoke debate about 'professional development' as a discursively organised domain whose practices are neither innocent nor neutral.In declaring this to be a paper against professional development, I am signalling my ambivalence about the truth claims made within this discursive domain as much as my interest in how such claims have gained the status of Truth.My rationale does not arise out of any belief in the sufficiency of my own knowledge or that of my professional colleagues.Rather it arises out of my concerns about the sort of knowledge that is coming to count as worthwhile for all professionals, including academics, and the current proliferation of mechanisms for disseminating this knowledge, for better and worse.It is too easy to forget the latter point.Just as the work done to develop Third World communities can often contribute to the deterioration of those same communities, so too the knowledge presumed to be relevant to the development of professional workers can undermine worthwhile local and contextsensitive knowledge.In the discussion that follows, I use Australian higher education as a case study to draw parallels between Third World development and the development of professional academic workers, using anthropological critiques of Western knowledge applications as conceptual tools relevant for this purpose.