Paper 38 Oral presentations Main theme: Educational research Secondary theme: Professional development Professional development of mathematics academics Ken Houston, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, UK, sk.houston@ulster.ac.uk Leigh Wood, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, leigh.wood@uts.edu.au Johann Engelbrecht and Ansie Harding, University of Pretoria, South Africa Owe Kågesten, University of Linköping, Sweden Derek Holton, University of Otago, New Zealand Bill Barton, University of Auckland, New Zealand Abstract It is almost 30 years since Morris Kline published his wide-ranging critique of undergraduate education in his book, "Why The Professor can't Teach" [1]. In 1999, Steve Krantz, in his book, "How to Teach Mathematics" [2] reported that academics were paying much more attention to their teaching duties than before. Both of these books were largely about the situation in the USA. This paper explores ideas around the early in-service and continuing professional development of academics and uses examples from several countries. 1 Introduction Professional development is the increase of knowledge or skill through study, travel, research, workshops or courses, sabbaticals, internships, apprenticeships, residencies or work with a mentor or master. It is often seen as individual and focussed on a particular facet of a person, such as their career, or even a part of their career, such as teaching. It is often focussed at the start of one’s career or as you move to a new position. In this paper we look at the professional development of university mathematics academics and we take a wide view of developing teaching, research and the person as a whole. We also move beyond the development of the individual to the development of teams of researchers and teachers. We believe strongly that professional development has to be seen in a wide frame: if we just try to develop teaching in isolation those who do not see themselves as teachers will not go far. But if professional development overall becomes regarded as usual practice for professionals, and this includes development of research, teaching, and a wider general development (eg learning a new language) then we think there is a chance of a favourable reception from academics. One consideration when talking about “professional development” or “learning in the workplace” suggests that having an identity as a learner may not be compatible with being regarded as competent (Boud & Solomon [3]). Boud and Solomon further discuss the notion of learning as being put forward using different terms, for example, they point out that in the conceptual work of Lave and Wenger [4] the term “learning” is almost absent and other terms such as mutual engagement and participation are used. Further, various working practices, such as organisational processes, can also be understood as learning practices (Boud & Middleton [5]; Boud & Solomon [3]). We believe that this is also true of academics; as they have done their learning (very successfully with many degrees to show it) and do not want to be placed in the context of being a student again. Perhaps this explains some of the negative reaction to formal teacher training that we report in section 4. In terms of professional development for teaching, several countries (UK, Sweden and France [6]) have well-developed one-year courses in higher education teaching which are on offer to those new to lecturing. For example, in the UK, titles such as a Postgraduate Certificate in 1