Talking ourselves up: reframing learning development to reflect our expertise

The way universities frame Learning Development (LD) has profound implications for the field’s pedagogy, status, autonomy and evolution. These variables affect the value that LD releases to staff and students. Framing involves ‘foregrounding certain perspectives and ruling out others’ to characterise a phenomenon (Jones, 2010, p.242). Learning developers’ ‘palpable reluctance’ to advocate for their expertise (Webster, 2022, p.181) contributes to the field often being framed externally. This session guided attendees on how to constructively challenge and redefine the framings at university level, using my doctoral data (Johnson, 2023). It included analysis of framing discourse about LD on UK universities’ websites, of the value of LD to students and staff in one university, and of how the two related. LD can be framed as a combination of skills development, human development and subject-embedded instruction (Hallett, 2010). The university website discourse lacked quantity and detail about the embedded framing, while strongly representing the skills framing. The skills framing correlated with stakeholders perceiving LD as delivering functional (financial) value, while the humanistic framing added social and emotional value. Only the embedded framing encouraged perceptions of LD as adding knowledge – a.k.a. epistemic value (terminology from Sheth et al., 1991, adapted for higher education [HE] by LeBlanc and Nguyen, 1999). I therefore argued LD teams should advocate for a reframing of their work which better calibrates and explains all three discourses. As the stakeholder data illustrated, this enhanced perception increases students’ and staff’s inclination to engage with LD (conditional value), leading to greater value release.