I just signed on board the campus Professional Development Committee for the next academic year. I was attracted to this committee as an offshoot of the sort of "scholarship of teaching" I've been doing on this weblog, and I'm interested in learning how other teachers seek development in addition to discovering more about the system behind providing funding and support to faculty research.

It sounds innocent enough. Quite helpful, even, to others. But what are the ideological assumptions operating behind the very idea of "professional development"? And how does it participate in the commercialization of academic life?

In her fascinating article, "Against Professional Development" (note: .pdf format), Erica McWilliam draws parallels between the discourses that surround "professional development" and the language governments and corporations use when talking about developing the Third World. It's a subversively brilliant discussion of the new power/knowledge relationships that are artificially constructed by standardized forms of professional development. She critiques the "charming absurdities" that emerge from such practices, and discusses how the drive to be "enterprising" is rewarded, if not institutionally mandated, by colleges that are more and more using a commercialized model for managing faculty. She essentially argues that professional development often reifies new technologies (for their own sake -- like, for example, rewarding those who learn to use PowerPoint for lectures, even if it reduces their teaching effectiveness). The problem she raises is that such rewards tend to commodify pedagogy into predictable pre-packaged systems, while at the same time subordinating individualized forms of self-education and other forms of growth that might otherwise emerge from one's own discipline. Borrowing from Foucault, she challenges how structured forms of professional development are complicit "in the production of the 'malleable-but-disciplined' individual that is so necessary to enterprising culture."

A remarkable read!

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