Jon Van Til, one of the pioneers in nonprofit organization research and education, reports hearing this word first spoken by Hank Rubin, then director of Public Administration at Roosevelt University, in 1989: In "an auditorium filled with academics and nonproifit practitioners ... (w)e were listening to a session being conducted by the Independent Sector organization.
[6] George L Hanbury builds on the term in his 2004 paper on the ethics of honor by describing himself as a pracademic and observing his subject from this standpoint.
For example, in 2000, the term was used to describe Ross James, who conceptualised the Transitional Learning Model [9] following extensive research for his doctoral dissertation.
The term was first used in relation to the UK resilience community at the inaugural conference of the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management (April 2009).
[11] Peter Simpson from the London Fire Brigade, who undertook a Master’s programme at Leicester University as a mature student, described people like himself and others in the resilience community as ‘pracademics’ and showed delegates the ‘Pracademic Curve’, which clearly illustrated the inter-relationship between the practitioner and academic communities, particularly as it affects those who go into academia having already embarked on a career as a practitioner.
Jain used the term "pracademic" to (re)imagine her professional identity as that comprising a coherent, albeit hybridized, unity—that of a practitioner as well as an academic.