It was clear from the first part of our project that faculties at Lund University all have strong intention to consider pedagogic expertise in their recruitment and promotion processes: they are committed to excellent teaching. There is some variation between faculties, but in general, they all expect teaching expertise to be demonstrated for most recruitment or promotion activity. Sometimes a certain number of teaching hours is requested, or a sample lecture is to be given, for instance. However, most of the people we talked to expressed a wish to see clearer guidance about judging pedagogic competence, leadership, and scholarship.
As part of the application process for academic posts, external experts are usually asked to comment on the research and pedagogical aspects of someone’s application. Mårtensson et al (2018) studied how teaching, supervision and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) were evaluated in external reviews of professorial applications in the joint faculty of Humanities and Theology. They found that discussion of these aspects usually formed a small proportion of the total review. Figure 1 shows this for 18 sample reviews, organised by the length of each review.
Mårtensson et al found that these external reviews mainly focused on what is easily quantifiable, with recurring themes of the scope, breadth and depth of teaching and supervision experience, rather than any qualitative assessment of teaching competence or leadership. They found little consideration of SoTL in the reviews. From our conversations with those involved in these processes, we know that they want to know more about these topics. This clear evidence of a disconnect between intention and practice gives us a good idea of the aspects to focus on when developing enhanced guidance for judging a candidate in relation to their educational experiences. We will be focusing on making these intentions concrete, so that we are all looking in the same direction when it comes to making decisions about pedagogical competence, scholarship, and leadership.
Reference: Mårtensson, K., Larsson, M., Ahlberg, A., & Holst, O. (2018). How is teaching, supervision and SoTL evaluated in reviews of professors’ educational qualifications? ISSOTL18
If you would like to know more or have ideas or examples to contribute to the project, please get in touch with us.