ABSTRACT
Academic developers are tasked with supporting institutions in times of change. Essential for preparing academic developers for professional practice is enabling them to engage with and integrate existing knowledge with new knowledge, and apply their understandings to new contexts. Focusing on the summative assessment processes and products of a course specifically for academic developers, this chapter shows how cumulative knowledge-building can be achieved in both course design and pedagogy. Drawing on LCT concepts of ‘semantic gravity’ and ‘semantic density’, two high-achieving portfolios were analysed. The analysis indicates that movements between knowledge that is relatively abstract, decontextualized and complex to knowledge that is relatively concrete, context-dependent and simpler, represents a key characteristic of cumulative learning for professional practice courses. The chapter demonstrates how LCT can reveal the tacit ‘rules’ for success in the course, as well as how pedagogic strategies can be designed to achieve the desired outcome.
