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In this chapter, we explore potentials and challenges for academic developers (ADs) in their roles as deliberative leaders. Deliberative leadership in this context involves contributing to academics’ understanding of, reflection on and enactment of teaching and learning as, and for, public good. Furthermore, it implies performing educational leadership by means of deliberative communication. We study two ADs as they prepare, conduct and reflect on a course session with the aim of nurturing academics’ professional responsibility, through a discussion about learning outcomes and constructive alignment in relation to professional responsibility. We start by situating the case within current research on academic development as well as the recent implementation of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in Norwegian higher education. As brokers between external polices, institutional leaders and fellow academics, ADs are continuously faced with the considerable political and pedagogical challenge of creating spaces for imaginative and creative engagement between policy and practice. Deliberative leadership is identified as a means of seeking out legitimate compromises – consistent with professional responsibility – within these complex webs of commitments. The case, however, repeatedly demonstrates just how challenging deliberative leadership is in practice.

How can higher education educate graduates who know more than ‘just knowledge’? Such an education includes developing in students an awareness of the limits of their knowledge, an ability to discern what kinds of knowledge are appropriate in a given situation and a sensitivity to different forms of knowing. When is scientific rigour appropriate and when is another type of knowing appropriate? When should one set aside own preferences in favour of the needs of others? This paper rethinks ‘bildung’ as a source of ideas on aims for teaching students. Making the arguably ephemeral ideal of bildung work in practice can be an obstacle. This paper, however, takes it as a positive challenge, exploring ways in which bildung might be appropriate in professional education. If bildung can be helpful even within this most applied part of higher education, implications in terms of the development of more readily applicable and fully inclusive notions of bildung would benefit not only professional education but also higher education more generally. Drawing on work by Wolfgang Klafki, the authors argue the value of updated notions of bildung. Klafki’s three-part conception of bildung as self-determination, co-determination and solidarity helps reconnect the importance of personal development with that of peer communities (e.g., professional bodies) and action for others. Klafki’s framework facilitates working with ethical-epistemological questions such as these.