Åsa Lindberg-Sand

Compulsory higher education teacher training in Sweden: development of a national standards framework based in the scholarship of teaching and learning

Today visible proofs of excellence in teaching and learning are increasingly important aspects of institutional branding in higher education (HE). Teaching competence is brought forward as a central aspect of the quality of programmes. Still, the induction of new university teachers is managed in many different ways. Approaches may vary according to how teaching competence is perceived; as growing from practice only, requiring formal courses or, for instance, outlined in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) movement. In Sweden, the HE Ordinance from 2002 states that to get permanent positions, lecturers should have completed Compulsory HE Teacher Training (CHETT). The size and organisation of the courses were not regulated in the Ordinance and institutional practices varied. In a three-year project intended learning outcomes for CHETT was suggested. These outcomes are based on SoTL and linked to an estimated workload of 10 weeks. Based on a national survey in 2006, institutional responses to the proposals are analysed.

The Embedding of the European Higher Education Reform at the Institutional Level: Development of Outcome-Based and Flexible Curricula?

The Bologna Process stands for a profound break in European university traditions. In the future the outcomes may well be described as a contribution to the “social construction of world culture”. The central innovation at work is the flexible use of learning outcomes. The intention may be expressed in a simple way: That the learning outcomes described in European frameworks and institutional curricula also should be the ones the students have achieved. This is a challenge which runs deep into academic cultures: What does it take to make institutional curricula outcome-based and students’ learning outcomes valid and visible? Certainly, it will not be sufficient to add on only a new layer of policies. This chapter lifts forward a couple of pivotal aspects of the interconnectedness implied in the European curricular reform. Using Sweden as an example of a quite successful implementation, it still asks for another couple of decades to embed the outcome-based perspective in institutional curricula and to make accounts of students’ qualifications more reliable.

Teaching Academies as a Means of Developing Institutional Quality: Academic Identities, Levels of Engagement and Organizational Cultures

Many universities establish teaching academies to raise the status of teaching, mostly by engaging teachers deemed to be excellent in formal or informal communities. This chapter investigates how 13 institutions belonging to a network of research-intensive universities have approached the development of teaching academies. Using two case studies from Singapore and Sweden that exemplify distinctly different instantiations of such academies, we employ Wenger’s theory of communities of practice to deepen the perspective on how these two universities have set out to foster teaching excellence through their academies. We do so by focusing on the complex issue of academic identities.