Valuing teaching: exploring how a university’s strategic documents reflect institutional teaching culture

ABSTRACT

Strategic documents are artifacts that can reveal evidence of an institution’s teaching culture and, ideally, can influence how teaching is valued, rewarded, and resourced. This paper describes how an Institutional Teaching Culture framework based on six well-researched levers was applied to analyze strategic documents for indicators of teaching culture. Analyses conducted at five Canadian universities identified strengths and gaps within and across documents which, in turn, helped guide conversations about enhancing representations of institutional teaching culture. The authors share insights about our use of this analysis framework and offer recommendations to institutions invested in understanding and fostering robust teaching cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• strategic planning
• teaching culture

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our ITCPS collaborators Debra Dawson, Jill Grose, Joseph Beer, Ken N. Meadows, Paola Borin, and Peter Wolf for their ongoing contributions to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Lindsay Shaw

Lindsay Shaw is the Research Coordinator for the Institutional Teaching Culture Project, an Academic Advisor, and a PhD student in the Faculty of Education at Brock University. Her research interests include student learning and development, educational policy, and institutional teaching culture. [email protected].

H. MacDougall

Hannah MacDougall is a Research Assistant at the Paul R. McPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation, and Excellence in Teaching at McMaster University. Her research interests include education policy and institutional teaching culture. [email protected].

L. Goff

Lori Goff is the Director of the Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching at McMaster University. She holds a PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and is interested in ways that institutional cultures can be shifted through partnerships between faculty, educational development staff, and students. [email protected].

D. Ellis

Donna Ellis is the Director of the Centre for Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo and a past President of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network. Her research interests include change management in educational development, organizational development and culture, educational innovations, and assessment of teaching and learning centres. [email protected].

E. Kustra

Erika Kustra is the Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Windsor and past Chair of the Canadian Educational Developers Caucus (EDC). She has research interests in and has published on scholarly teaching, assessment of centres, learning outcomes, educational leadership, educational development portfolios, conference design, and teaching culture. [email protected].

M. P. Law

Madelyn P. Law is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Brock University. Her research interests are focused on organizational culture, change management, quality improvement, and innovative pedagogy. [email protected].

L. Taylor

LynnTaylor Now retired from active educational development practice, Lynn’s research interests include educational development practice and leadership and building teaching and learning capacity and cultures through social networks. [email protected].