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In this article, we share themes and tensions experienced by humanities faculty undertaking a scholarship of teaching & learning (SoTL) project as part of a multi-campus, grant-funded initiative. Faculty participants in the project iteratively transformed a course to improve one or more aspects of their students' learning over a three-year period and documented the process and results in a course portfolio. To support their individual and collaborative work, each of the four campuses had a local leader, and participants met regularly with campus teams, convening with the full group annually for cross-campus knowledge exchange and peer review. At the project conclusion campus leaders gathered participant reflections and discovered a pattern of tensions that included: disciplinary ways of knowing, ways to represent knowing, and ways of writing and sharing. These tensions are similar to those identified elsewhere and can be potential impediments to this work for some in the humanities. Explicitly addressing those potential tensions while helping faculty see how their own disciplinary approaches can help them investigate their course practices is a useful first step toward more contributions from humanities scholars.

Building on ecosystem models that examine individuals' development within professional environments (Roxa, 2014; Hannah & Lester, 2009), we explore how campus centers for educational development and research can provide a range of experiences for faculty to learn about scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), conduct individual or collaborative -- and sometimes multi-institutional -- SoTL, and go public with their work. Using extended case studies of colleagues who have become increasingly more active in SoTL, we created a typology of the experiences that supported their development. The case studies illustrate that offering a variety of educational development options at different institutional levels and with different time commitments enables developers to meet faculty where they are -- and to provide growth opportunities for deepening SoTL commitments. Our typology can help educational developers prioritize among potential programs by considering the cost-benefit analysis not only for individual faculty but also for micro-, meso-, and macro-level institutional cultures.

Nearly 25 years after Barr and Tagg's (1995) article on the move away from the Instruction Paradigm, the authors argue that we are experiencing another shift, from a learning-centered to de-centered educational environment. Just as Barr and Tagg signalled a paradigm shift from teaching to learning, the authors suggest--nearly a quarter century later--that another transition, from a learning-centered to de-centered educational environment is being experienced. The de-centered paradigm includes an expanded vision of ways to develop, design, and deliver learning to allow for a more democratic or reciprocal relationship between instructor, learner, and material. A table is provided that illustrates a comparison of the three paradigms. Best ways to support instructors as they navigate the new terrain of this de-centered paradigm include Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) or units supporting faculty professional development. In many cases, CTLs are increasingly hearing calls to address the de-centered educational landscape by offering equally distributed support, using emerging technology (e.g., analytics or personalized advising) or disciplinary-based expertise (such as discipline-based educational research, also known as DBER). The key benefit of a CTL is its ability to re-center--or connect--resources as campuses navigate a de-centered educational landscape. Some have described this emerging role as a "hub" function or "concierge": One approach would be to see teaching and learning centers as the hub of a wheel that includes a range of other offices as related spokes. In this approach, the faculty development center may take on the role of concierge, helping faculty members determine their needs and interests and then connecting them with the appropriate resources on campus. Centers for Teaching and Learning play an important "hub" role in this landscape to connect the diverse constituencies and resources within institutions of higher education, and to support broader institutional goals such as inclusive excellence and student success.

Educational developers around the world are employed in a range of settings and under different working conditions, including academic (faculty) positions and administrative (professional staff) roles. Curiously, in a survey of 1,000 developers from 38 countries, the authors find that a full 51% of developers in the United States are on administrative contracts, while only 16% are on employed as faculty--figures that are markedly out of kilter with the overall international data. In this paper, the authors argue that the positioning of educational developers matters because of the "wall in the head"--the perceived division between faculty and staff in U.S. institutions; narratives of distrust along that dividing line pervade not only the higher education press but also the research, indicating the extent to which this metaphorical barrier could thwart educational developers' attempts to enhance teaching and learning at their institutions. Ironically, this is happening at a point when universities are increasingly choosing to appoint educational developers: the miscategorization of developers' work may be inadvertently undermining institutions' own investment. The authors seek to explain the U.S. anomaly in positioning developers as staff by mining their international dataset, focusing on developers' qualifications, academic experience, institutional contexts, and personal identities.

Previously, the authors developed a theoretical framework drawing on an early sociological study of migration to explore how marginality--being between cultures--might account for academic developers' "hybrid" academic identities and help them navigate institutional power dynamics. Based on data from semi-structured interviews, this empirical study reports on the extent to which the model captures the structural tensions experienced by developers from multiple countries in their working lives. (Contains 1 figure.)

The past century's technological revolution has returned images to a central place in people's individual and collective lives. Photography became widely popular in the first half of the past century, creating new visual forms of high art, mass advertising, and amateur entertainment. During the latter half of the twentieth century, innovations in digital imaging and network technologies have made visuals a primary mode of global communication in print, on screens, and online--becoming at times both the means and the message. The authors contend that visual literacy is a critical skill for twenty-first-century students and ought to be a central component of a liberal education. They present two examples illustrating that visual resources are one tool for helping students achieve the essential learning outcomes of liberal education. Liberal education in the twenty-first century needs to take seriously the visual as a fundamental way of knowing. As meaning is increasingly made through the combination of text and image, visual literacy is essential for understanding disciplines as well as local and global cultures.

Can research on disciplinary socialization and imprinting help us understand the extent to which educational developers bring aspects of their disciplinary training to their educational development research? In this paper, we explore the relationship between the research approaches developers associate with their original disciplinary training and those they actively use in their own educational development research, comparing and contrasting the strength of imprinting by discipline cluster. We discuss implications for how educational development as a field supports new developers moving into the field from another discipline and for how developers work with academic colleagues in other disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational development (also called academic or faculty development) has been described as fragmented, disconnected, and a ‘family of strangers,’ due mostly to the different academic backgrounds of its members. In this paper, the authors report on a survey of over 1000 educational developers from 38 countries on six continents. To help the field gain a clearer picture of itself at the international level, the authors provide a profile of developers’ demography, institutional locations, academic backgrounds, and current roles, and discuss the implications for educational development as a field and developers as a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]