Noticing, curation, cultivation: Academic development leadership in the arts university

Abstract

The curation of four ‘teaching exhibitions’ of pedagogic research outputs in a specialist arts university is presented as a case study of distributed leadership practice, with the leadership in question being positioned as a feminized mode of leading educational or academic development from a middle-out position. Scholarship of teaching and learning focused upon the development of academic micro-cultures within universities is collided with thinking around arts-informed approaches to leadership. Through reflexively evaluating her nascent curatorial practice, the author reconsiders what academic development leadership in the specific organizational culture of the arts university can look like when arts modalities are brought into play.