Sarah Silverman is an educational developer from the USA that I have kept more of an eye on in recent years since some of her original critiques of CTLs came across my feed. This post explores the role and challenges faced by educational developers in the context of their teaching responsibilities. Sarah reflects on an initial critique from a graduate mentor who questioned the authority of educational developers to give teaching advice due to their limited teaching experience. Over time, working as an educational developer, she acknowledges this critique as fair, recognizing that many in the field are not able to teach frequently due to structural constraints within their roles.

This post caught my attention because I have worked in higher ed in similar roles for over a decade and heard similar critiques of myself and my colleagues. Laura Gibbs had raised this same point regarding instructional designers in higher education back before Twitter was a total hellscape (was there a time when it wasn’t?), I guess I mean when ed tech folks were still largely there.

As Sarah is based in the USA, and I’m here in Canada, I’d like to reflect on some similarities and differences in her observations about these types of roles.

“There are a wide variety of job descriptions and balances of duties among educational developers. Some positions include teaching one or two courses. Others do not include any teaching at all.”

The variety of job descriptions, qualifications, and duties has changed for both educational developers and instructional designers over decades in Canada. ed developers originated out of McGill, which, if I recall correctly, were seconded faculty who’d been identified as exemplary instructors. So, obviously, teaching was very close to those roles. At one time, even instructional designers were faculty, although instead of being in CTLs, instructional designers tended to be embedded in Extension or distance learning units. In both cases, there was a shift away from these positions being within faculty agreements and a shift to staff roles under a variety of collective agreements. Now, you’ll see them anywhere from academic professional officer job families to professional specialists to IT analysts to support staff. Credentials have also moved all over the place. Often times, education developers have PhD requirements or are considered an asset (although not necessarily in education). Instructional designers tend to sit anywhere from bachelor’s degree levels to master’s degrees, often asking for some education-related area but not always. In the job descriptions themselves, if teaching is included, most of what I’ve observed is the teaching of workshops to staff and/or faculty and courses that serve those audiences as well. Not for credit courses at the UG level or Grad levels.

“Academic staff, on the other hand, are sometimes not even allowed to teach.”

This tracks with what I’ve seen in Canada as well. There are a few catches here. Universities that largely operate as classroom-based learning environments offer most classes during the working hours of the ed developers/IDs. Therefore, without express permission of management to teach courses (even if they could get past the gatekeeping I’ll mention later), it is difficult. That leaves asynchronous online teaching, but often times it has to be for another institution, which means these staff have to get approval due to conflict of interest policies. A related item is research. CTLs seem to be changing their tune, but it wasn’t so long ago that I inquired about research projects based on the work I was doing and my manager shot down the idea immediately. Research was for faculty, not staff. So, between scheduling, job descriptions, management’s approval, etc. there are loads of barriers in place between educational development/ID staff and teaching.

There’s also a constraint of availability of sections to teach for these staff and what they’d be qualified to teach specific subjects at an UG level. For example, someone who was a nurse and moved into teaching in nursing programs and then found themselves in a CTL could potentially still teach in a nursing program if their current institution even has a program. If you have a CTL comprised with staff who have diverse subject areas then it’s not too difficult perhaps. But, if all your educational developers have a common educational background, say education degrees, then you run into a bit of a supply and demand problem regarding teaching opportunities. Combine that with seniority clauses that are often in collective agreements, or contracts for teaching specific courses and the opportunity is limited even more. There’s also departmental composition, where some departments are primarily faculty (so less opportunity for a staff member to be a lecturer in a section every now and then) vs. departments that have few faculty but generally operate with large numbers of sessionals (more sections available, but here you run into the first right of refusal thing again).

“What I used to say to some skeptical instructors is that ‘No, we do not (currently) share the experience of teaching three or four sections per semester. But perhaps having acknowledged that, we can recognize what each of us brings to the table in terms of experiences and knowledge to help you meet your goals.’”

I think Sarah hits the nail on the head here. I’m not sure that one can be completely dismissed as having something to offer even if they’re not currently teaching. That’s actually the beauty of these types of roles is their exposure to what many faculty across a university. An ed developer/ID might encounter an instructional strategy from one faculty/college that works great and can be applied elsewhere, acting as a catalyst for change across the organization. They can listen to the experiences, looking for opportunities to make things better for students AND faculty. That’s a huge part of design generally, the expertise is in design and working in collaboration with others is where magic and transformative practice happens. It’s not in one-off consults or workshops, or building single activities or ILOs, or syllabus reviews, but in enduring relationships enabled by project work.

So perhaps the critique should not be “What current teaching experience do ed developers/IDs have?” but “What kind of programming and services do CTLs offer, and how has the unit and its programming been designed?”