This thesis examines how Learning Development’s (LD) professional identity is constructed in a selection of texts from two UK higher education institutions (HEIs). Using Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach, the thesis compares these textual representations of LD with practitioners’ lived experiences in their respective settings. The findings reveal contrasting trajectories. In one HEI, tensions between institutional expectations and practitioners’ professional assumptions can be observed, while the other offers a more coherent narrative across all datasets. Greater alignment between institutional narratives and practitioners’ professional expectations supports confidence, agency and practice coherence, whereas misalignments can lead to constraint and narratives of despair. By drawing attention to the performative power of language and its relationship to structural dimensions, the study highlights both the constraints imposed by neoliberal HE practices and possible spaces for transformation and resistance. The thesis concludes that shifts in discourse, structures and practices can contribute to fairer, more sustainable configurations of LD professional work, enabling learning developers – and the students they serve – to flourish, as evidenced in one of the cases analysed.
Association for Learning Development in Higher Education