Supporting transformational learning among academics in times of crisis: animating the animators to support a thousand flowers to bloom

This article builds on Boud’s concept of ‘animator’ to propose a new way of understanding the role of academic developers and a changed emphasis on academic development during periods of resource-constrained educational crisis. With retrospective ethical clearance, we, two Business School academics, engaged in collaborative autoethnography over a twenty-three-month period. Our data comprises emails, images, and reflections upon conversations that took place between the authors, also emails and reflections upon conversations exchanged with colleagues including academic developers. While, in examining the data, we acknowledge the implications of our positionality as academics, our findings suggest that replacing the prevailing perspectives that characterise existing developer roles with an emancipatory perspective allows for participatory and transformative action. From this position, the developer’s role is as ‘animator’, giving academics a voice to define change for themselves from within, supporting them to discern their own approaches to addressing it through reflexive learning from their experiences. We conclude by considering the implications of these findings for academic development.