Defining moments in HERDSA's history
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HERDSA emerged during a period of immense social and cultural change. Australia had begun to see a huge expansion in the university sector after World War II. The six universities located in each State experienced a sudden influx of non-traditional students after the war that brought with it fears of falling academic standards.
An early priority of the newly founded Society was to produce a newsletter which would be distributed to all HERDSA members soon after the election of the first HERDSA Executive in 1973.
The first general meeting of HERDSA members laid out a clear program of activities for the new Society that included an annual conference. The idea of forming a scholarly society had emerged from regular meetings at the ANZAAS Congress during the late 1960s and it was agreed that HERDSA should continue to align itself with the prestige of future Congresses. Since the inaugural HERDSA conference in 1975 the conference format has evolved several time.
From its very beginning HERDSA attracted members from a variety of fields including student counsellors, librarians, technical teachers, study skills advisors, or discipline-based academics. With such a wide range of interests among its members, one of the early suggestions to emerge from the first HERDSA conference was to have a call for the formation of special interest groups (SIGs) that could be used as a reason for members to meet between annual conferences. Initially, SIGs were conceived as member-only meetings advertised in the
At the Canberra HERDSA conference in 1980 the decision was taken to establish a HERDSA journal. A feasibility study showed that a journal would only be viable if it was integrated into the HERDSA membership, with each member receiving a copy as part of their membership fee. The cost of producing the journal would be a significant draw on HERDSA funds however recruitment of new members remained an issue for the Executive, and it was hoped that the journal would be an incentive to join HERDSA.
It was clear that a scholarly society needed to provide more opportunities for scholarly publishing than was offered by the HERDSA Newsletter. The first occasional publication by HERDSA was a survey of laboratory teaching produced by Dave Boud, who was working on a postgraduate program for science teachers in the Department of Applied Physics at Western Australia Institute of Technology (WAIT).
A new generation of women academics had been joining HERDSA since the mid-1980s. They wanted HERDSA to be at the forefront of seeing gains were made by women academics and they felt that this was not a view being represented in the HERDSA Executive. They acknowledged that women had been active in HERDSA since its beginnings. Barbara Falk led one of the most respected units in Australasia and was enthusiastically involved in the establishment of HERDSA, becoming HERDSA's second President.
Rumours were circulating throughout the late 1990s that the Australian Government was planning to make a teaching qualification a requirement for university teaching. In preparation from that likelihood the HERDSA Executive agreed to pilot a teaching recognition scheme led by Angela Brew. In 2002 Angela organised the initial group of HERDSA Fellows. The pilot recognition scheme was based on a similar scheme by the Staff and Educational Development Association in the UK.
Coralie McCormack started the discussion group Talking About Teaching and Learning (TATAL) with Robert Kennelly when they decided to re-establish the HERDSA ACT Branch in 2008. Their aim was to encourage greater collaborative scholarship in teaching and learning amongst the universities of the region.
After forty years of supporting HERDSA members the question started to be asked, what was HERDSA doing for academics new to higher education research? The "R" in HERDSA was largely represented by the Society's journal Higher Education Research and Development (HERD). Getting published in HERD had become out of reach for most young scholars. A more realistic goal was to publish small scale inquiries into their own teaching practices as Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at conferences or online.
