Stewardship as practice : ‘learning on-the-job’ for the academic development newcomer

While a good deal of this volume revisits the teaching and learning endeavour as the object or phenomenon in focus, in this chapter we use practice-theory as a route into theorising stewardship for the field of academic development. In our experience of the Australian academic development scene, there is a tendency to conflate the practices involved in learning to teach in university settings with those related to the practices of academic development. Indeed, this distinction - between the scholarship of teaching and the scholarship of academic development – is not a new one. If Boyer’s (1990) text marked a watershed moment on the international scholarship of teaching landscape, it was only some six years later that a good deal of the research about academic development published in the International Journal for Academic Development started to become disseminated more widely, and the texts used to stimulate debate and curiosity about the field