Currently reading Mårtensson et al. (2011) on “Developing a quality culture through the scholarship of teaching and learning”

Hard to believe I never summarized this paper by my own colleagues, on SoTL, in our own context at Lund University before, but here we go!

They describe the strategy to use SoTL as an instrument to change individual and collective teaching quality, which they implement at LU, and where the goals are “to support the emergence of a quality culture in relation to teaching and learning, where teaching develops slowly but constantly by the active involvement of academic teachers.” It is built on four principles: teachers have to own the change, more and better conversations and documentation of those, peer-review as driving force, and “clarity in vision and careful timing while taking structural measures is a crucial part of leadership“.

Mårtensson et al. (2011) describe that teachers are embedded in a culture in which there are, for example, common ways to explain student mistakes, or specific teaching methods are preferred, and where teacher share assumptions about teaching and learning. Teachers can, of course, decide to go with the prevailing culture or against it, but in any case, they will be influenced by the culture by the range of reactions that they get based on how well they comply. Since most of the conversations about teaching happen backstage in significant networks, it is difficult to know what exactly is happening, and even more difficult to influence what is happening, unless those conversations are brought out in the open.

Sidenote that Mårtensson et al. (2019) bring in here: should teachers’ teaching even be influenced; what about academic freedom? They conclude that in Sweden, a concept similar to academic freedom seems to be important, but they cannot really pinpoint it down exactly. But in any case, any strategy to change teaching must be in alignment with teachers’ identity (or develop teachers’ identity so that it is aligned), and must work with their conception of academic freedom.

At LU, a SoTL model of developing teaching contains several elements

• Pedagogical courses. I have written about several of those on here, for example the 3-week Introduction to Teaching and Learning, and the 2-week Teaching for Sustainability course
• Project reports. In pretty much all our courses, participants do group SoTL projects and report on them in writing. Reports go into searchable a database, so people can look up what their colleagues are up to
• Critical friends. In most courses, we require that reports are discussed with Handal-type critical friends that participants choose themselves, both in order to improve the work as well as to spread good ideas from the projects back into the departments. We also require discussions of ETP portfolios with two critical friends, and those discussions are always really interesting, from both sides
• Departmental seminars. Those aren’t happening really regularly for all of LTH at the moment, but there are smaller work groups that meet regularly to discuss their teaching (for example, Terese and I have been invited to a group three times this spring to talk about teaching for (and especially through) sustainability.
• Campus conferences on teaching and learning. Happening every other year, and in the other years we have a faculty T&L conference at LTH. Great low-threshold way to get people to present their SoTL work to a wider public than just the other participants in the course they did the project in.
• Reward schemes. The “excellent teaching practitioner” reward has been given out at LTH since 2000, and recently LU adopted a new system for teaching recognition that yet has to be implemented
• Tenure and promotion. These are supposed to recognise teaching merits, and they do to some extent, at least in theory. In practice there is still some room for improvement here…

So in summary, in this strategy the focus is on building networks that are out in the open (by making course participants work in groups, and by requiring discussions with critical friends), creating documentations of discussions (with critical friends, and to some extent as manifested in project reports) and innovation projects, and “going public” in conferences. Here, discussing demands on teachers’ identity, Mårtensson et al. (2011) conclude that going public in a local context, and thus also anchoring SoTL projects in the local context rather than the cutting-edge educational research, is sufficient.

What I really appreciate in this paper (although almost 15 years old at this point) is the acknowledgement that strategies need to change. Pedagogical courses, for example, started as offers that teachers could take voluntarily, before they became mandatory after enough teachers had taken them and found them useful so that there was enough general approval of the courses, and perception of their usefulness, in the organisation. As contexts change, strategies need to adapt…

But here we have it — an example of how SoTL can be implemented as tool to improve teaching and learning!

Mårtensson, K., Roxå, T., & Olsson, T. (2011). Developing a quality culture through the scholarship of teaching and learning. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(1), 51-62.

Wave watching right after a trip to Campus Helsingborg before the summer vacations started! So old paper, old pictures, how fitting! But also — awesome classics, all of them… I love split photography!

And especially in cases like these ones where we see a sloped surface, plunging wave crests, a glimpse of the horizon, and the sandy seafloor!

Oh but also just the surface is beautiful!

Especially when you can still get a little peek inside the water. And see the groups of capillary waves on the surface!

Dreamy!

I love dipping, did I ever mention that? :-D