Beyond academic development as institutional practice: advancing community-led approaches

We introduce the special issue entitled ‘Beyond academic development as institutional practice: advancing community-led approaches’ and offer critical commentary that advances the concept and practice of academic community development. Through repeated readings of the 10 articles from diverse contexts included in this issue, we draw out four main themes highlighting why and how academic communities beyond single institutions support academic development. First, we revise the initial conceptual framework of ‘academic community development (ACD)’, which focused the call for papers, presenting six dimensions rather than the previous three continua. Then, we consider the degree of ‘institutionalisation’ of this range of initiatives. From that analysis, we derive a typology of ACD initiatives. We then consider a) what common interests have been served by these communities, and whose they are; b) the focus of these communities in relation to the revised conceptual framework; and c) the essential ingredients for success. We emphasise that communities leverage assets in ways that traditional needs-based academic development often does not. We conclude with implications for typical academic development work.