Building Teaching Capacities in Higher Education (PDF)

This book is the culmination of three years' work by teams from eight institutions in five different European and North American countries. The teams included faculty developers, professors, and graduate students interested in developing and disseminating a more profound understanding of university-level pedagogy. The purpose of the project was, first, to conceptualize what an internationally-appropriate, formal academic program for faculty development in higher education might look like, taking into account differing national contexts, from national standards for faculty development (U.K. and Scandinavia), almost universal institutional support (North America) to virtually no activities (France). The intention was to create and nurture a community of practice, enriched and informed by a range of expertise and different higher education traditions, cultures, and languages. To do so, the book begins with a section of five case studies that describe current practice in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France and Switzerland.The second purpose was to define a common curriculum, or core course with common foundations, for faculty and graduate students, based on a distributed learning model. The final section of the book presents a concrete concept map used to define the curriculum, and to educational developers with useful tool for furthering their work, and explains the rationale for redefining faculty development as educational development.This book offers practitioners around the world a framework and model of educational development that can serve a number of purposes including professional development, monitoring and assessment of effectiveness, and research, as they seek to meet increasing demands for public accountability. For North American readers it offers insight into the vision and aims of the Bologna Process with which they may need to engage to maintain international competitiveness.