Doing Educational Development Ambivalently: Applying post-colonial metaphors to educational development?

Post-colonial theories about liminality, hybridity, unhomeliness, and identity form a novel lens through which to re-theorise educational development work. Applying these conceptual frameworks allows practitioners and the academics they work with the opportunity to problematise some of educational development's colonial underpinnings and assumptions. They also enable an exploration of the states of betweenness that form educational developers' identities and impact implicitly and explicitly upon the nature of their changing practices. This paper seeks to read educational development and research supervisor development in particular "against the grain". It also seeks to illustrate these concepts through some vignettes of my academic development practice. Les theories postcoloniales portant sur les notions de "liminality", "hybridity", "unhomeliness", ainsi que sur la notion d'identite constituent un nouvel angle sous lequel nous pouvons reenvisager les travaux dans le domaine du developpement pedagogique. L'application de tels cadres conceptuels offre aux praticiens, ainsi qu'aux universitaires aupres de qui ils/elles oeuvrent, l'occasion d'envisager les problemes associes aux bases et pre-supposes colonialistes du developpement pedagogique. Ces cadres facilitent aussi l'exploration des etats relies a la notion de "between-ness", lesquels contribuent a la formation de l'identite des conseillers pedagogiques et ont un impact a la fois implicite et explicite sur la nature des pratiques en mutation. Cet article cherche a effectuer une lecture du developpement pedagogique et du developpement de la supervision de recherche en adoptant plus particulierement une approche "against the grain". If article cherche aussi a illustrer ces cadres par des vignettes de ma pratique.