With Dr Jill Dickinson @jill_dickinson1
Both the concepts of ‘pracademia’ and ‘pracademic’ have been attracting growing interest around the world in the context of contemporary policy developments across the Higher Education (HE) sector (Hollweck et al., 2021). Yet, there is considerable debate about the value of these terms and their operation in practice. For example, the Hechinger Report recently published an article that referred to pracademics and asked ‘What’s in a word? A way to help impatient college students better connect to jobs’ (Marcus, 2023). In response, commentary in WonkHE questioned whether ‘staff with professional and industry expertise proper academics?’ (Hodgson and Garner, 2023).
Working with my former colleague, Teri-Lisa Griffiths from Sheffield Hallam University, we have recently published a multidisciplinary, edited collection with Springer. Entitled Professional Development for Practitioners in Academia: Pracademia, the book draws on insights from 29 contributors from both the UK and internationally. It is organised into three parts: Pracademic Identities, Professional Development, and Teaching practice, and draws on a variety of reflective, empirical and theoretical approaches to explore contemporary issues and develop deeper understandings of the contributions that pracademics can make within HE alongside those who have taken more traditional academic career paths.
Whilst we use the expression ‘pracademic’ (Volpe and Chandler, 1999; Posner, 2009) for the book to refer to former or current practitioners who are academics within Higher Education, Kitchener notes how there are a multitude of terms that are used to describe academics from professional backgrounds. These include ‘in-betweeners’, ‘practitioner-academics’, ‘practitioner-teacher’, ‘practice-based professional practitioner’ and ‘practice-based academic’ (2021, para. 2). Whatever the particular designation, our research (Dickinson and Griffiths, 2023; Dickinson et al., 2022), has explored the valuable contributions that pracademia can make to establishing a diverse academic community.
Both of us would describe ourselves as pracademics; I was a practising solicitor and Teri-Lisa is a former Careers Advisor. Through working together on careers and employability projects, we noticed how we were continuing to draw on the skills, knowledge, and experience that we had developed whilst in professional practice albeit within the context of academia; for example, through our approach to our academic advisor roles, scenario-based teaching, supporting students with developing their employability, and our approach to research. This led to this multidisciplinary research stream.
References
Dickinson, J, Fowler, A., and Griffiths, T. (2020). Pracademics? Exploring transitions and professional identities in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 47(2), 290-304. DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2020.1744123
Dickinson, J. and Griffiths, T. (2023). Professional Development for Practitioners in Academia: Pracademia. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-33746-8
Hodgson, R. and Garner, I. (2023, 4 August). Are staff with professional industry expertise proper academics? Wonkhe, https://wonkhe.com/blogs/are-staff-with-professional-and-industry-expertise-proper-academics/
Hollweck, T., Netolicky, D.M., and Campbell, P. (2021). Defining and exploring pracademia: identity, community, and engagement. Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 7(1), 6-24. DOI: doi.org/10.1108/JPCC-05-2021-0026
Kitchener, M. (2021). What’s in a name? The rise of the practitioner academic and time to reconsider standardised induction support. British Educational Research Association, https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/whats-in-a-name-the-rise-of-the-practitioner-academic-and-time-to-reconsider-standardised-induction-support
Marcus, J. (2023, 31 July). What’s in a word? A way to help impatient college students better connect to jobs. The Hechinger Report, https://hechingerreport.org/whats-in-a-word-a-way-to-help-impatient-college-students-better-connect-to-jobs/
Meet the team:
Dr Jill Dickinson @jill_dickinson1
Dr Jill Dickinson is a Reader of Law at Leeds Beckett University. A former solicitor, Jill is an SFHEA, she has been shortlisted for NTF, and was selected to review the Advance HE Global Teaching Excellence Awards. Her multidisciplinary research explores place-making and professional development, and her work has received an Emerald Literati Award for Excellence. She enjoys working with students, colleagues, and external organisations to co-create collaborative projects. These include communities of practice around pracademia and learning landscapes.
Teri-Lisa Griffiths
Teri-Lisa Griffiths is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Sheffield Hallam University. Her teaching is focused on the development of student employability and academic skills, working with external partners to provide relevant and high-quality experiences for students. Her research interests are student engagement and professional development, in particular how atypical spaces support emergent learning and development. . She is also a co-founder of the pracademia community of practice.
#LTHEchat 
I confess I find the term a bit un-serious, which, speaking as a practitioner, might not serve pracademics. Me and my colleagues are in the arts and we are very often not taken seriously by our peers in the STEM fields (for example). I see nothing wrong with the old-fashioned Professor of Practice. We also use the designation of Clinical Professor for those who have practices (usually medical).
Certainly, more and more, students seek faculty who both DO and teach. This is almost always true in the arts. But academia still labors under 19th century conceptions of just what a professor is and does. As long as those folks are in charge of the tenure and promotion process, it will be difficult to change minds, let alone names that describe what practitioners do.
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