Expanding the pracademic spaces

Career development requires the synergy of theory and practice. Pracademics can potentially lead this effort. A ‘practitioner-academic’ or pracademic is someone who is both a practitioner and an academic. They navigate the line between practicing a profession and teaching it.

The idea of the scholar-practitioner is not new. Domains like medicine, accounting, management and architecture have been practising it in some preliminary forms. But the idea has received traction of late in the professional and academic spaces due to different reasons.

Relevance and reasons

We need urgent collaborations across professions to address the large-scale problems, ranging from Covid-19 to climate change. Pracademia is one such boundary-spanning role that every career will take up in the future.

Pracademics can help promote collaboration with non-career experts. Think of Wikipedia, one of the largest collaborative projects in recent history. Many of its contributors are not experts. The model challenges established career expertise and traditional academic sources. Similarly, many informal knowledge networks link scholars, journalists and general practitioners to solve social problems.

Many pracademics become solutionists traversing different domains. Remember
the now-cliched statement: Never ask what you want to become when you grow up, instead seek which problem you want to solve.

The rise of independent scholars and distributed expertise are other reasons for the increased relevance of pracademics. Easier and better ways to access emerging sources of information contest the universities and colleges’ habit of controlled distribution of knowledge. Education technology also powers pracademic spaces through online learning.

There are many benefits in engaging pracademics.

First, pracademics drive the academic-practitioner interactions that are essential for career development and skilling in professions. Second, they engage, bridge, network, and add value to different stakeholders. They create intersections of theory and practice in career domains. Third, they are potential drivers in building a library of skills needed for professional development.

Being a pracademic

Different roles and levels of pracademic areas are open in the context of the industry interface of careers. It takes different pathways such as career mentors, adjunct faculty, co-researchers, co-guides, online course creators, and online teachers, to start with.

The benefits of being a pracademic depend on where you are in the pracademic spectrum, ranging from mostly academic to mostly practitioner. It is hard to find pracademic spaces in traditional academia due to their fortified, compliance-based nature.

Today, there are many professors-of-practice who are proud to be pracademics and bring unique perspectives to the field of professional learning.

Professional development and career plans in pracademic spaces are more agile. Instead of using peer pressure, think of alternatives like helping groups outside your career space as a pracademic. Look for urgency and fit. How important and valuable is your offering outside of your regular career? Does it fit with the opportunity available in academia or practice area?

Collaborative cultures

Research shows that collaborative career cultures can create more career capital. Neither the traditional career culture nor the educational status-quo is deliberately designed to accommodate this fluidity. Pracademics, as a new breed of thought leaders, can plug this gap.

As career spaces and learning spaces have shifted, some view pracademics as academia’s descent from the ivory tower. Some others worry about the career identity of pracademics. In any case, this is a wake-up call to be more practice-oriented.

Pracademics give a research lens to practitioners and bring practitioners’ voices to educators. By connecting the dots in career and professional development, they remain updated and contemporary.

Everyone with reasonable expertise in a specific domain can be a pracademic. The deep expertise places you in an advantageous position. With institutional support from corporate and academia alike, integrating pracademics in career preparation is a reflective process. If you have a meaningful experience in at least one area of life, plan for a pracademic adventure.

(The author is an Education Officer, University Grants Commission. Views are personal.)