Academic staff with a range of teaching, research and service responsibilities often find traditional professional development opportunities inaccessible (Datt, 2024). For some the logistics of attending workshops or short courses are not compatible with their role—particularly those with part-time appointments. For others, the scope of these pre-designed activities is not sufficiently calibrated to their context and its requirements, making such activities an inefficient use of often proscribed professional development time. Others still struggle to find academic developer colleagues whose knowledges and experiences are sufficient to provide support to those whose academic teaching involves clinical or vocational praxis. While some might argue this is a deficiency of academic development, in reality, the contexts in which many of us work in academic development limit our capacity to provide such support: there are too few of us and too many of them.

Though not a cure-all, heutagogy offers a framework that embraces such academic staff’s unique positionalities and can afford academic developers flexibility in the provision of support. Heutagogy’s focus on “learner-centered learning that sees the learner as the major agent in their own learning, which occurs as a result of personal experiences” (Hase and Kenyon , 2007, p. 112) shifts the role of academic developers from (solely) subject matter expert to more a facilitative mentor. Such mentorship relationships can be oriented to building and extending competence, with the academic developer acting as hub within a network of colleagues, whom can provision collegial peer support. As well, liberating academic developers from timetabled learning events can also increase their individual capacity. In particular, heutagogy—as self-determined learning—requires learners to drive the purpose, goal, content and process of professional development in the digital learning space.

In this presentation, I examine how infusing an heutagogic ethos into my academic development praxis has reinvigorated it—and changed how I led a bespoke team of academic developers. Heutagogy has enabled some to extend their competences who are unable to attend more traditional professional development opportunities, and has led to other subsequent changes in the academic development space at my university. Whether competences are acquired via institutional professional development opportunities (my way), wholly autonomously (your way), or some other (any) way is secondary to acquiring the competences—and the provisioning of support to do so. In the end, academic staff who engage substantively with professional development develop their own socially situated heutagogic practice. This should subsequently serve them well professionally, including those who wish to pursue postgraduate studies around digital learning.

Datt, A. K. (2024). Building capacity for teaching with technologies in higher education: The value of networking. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. https://hdl.handle.net/2292/70729

Hase, S., & Kenyon, C. (2007). Heutagogy: A child of complexity theory. Complicity: An international journal of complexity and education, 4(1): 111-118