Distributed leadership to embed scholarship in STEM teaching teams

The Higher Education Standards Framework (HESF) requires continuous evaluation of teaching practice to inform ongoing curriculum transformation. TEQSA’s Guidance Note: Scholarship (TEQSA, 2018) states that scholarship claimed to inform teaching must have demonstrable relevance to the curriculum being taught. The HESF focus on degree-level curriculum implies the team of staff who design and teach degree curriculum need to be engaged; not just specialist teachers. The value proposition for scholarship must, however, resonate with academics’ professional goals and aspirations; not communicate administrative compliance.

In our joint national Australian Council of Deans of Science Fellowship, we conceptualise leadership for active engagement in scholarship within teaching teams (Fields, Kenny & Mueller, 2019) as one response to the TEQSA guidance note. We are adapting the Curriculum Evaluation Research (CER) framework (Kelder & Carr, 2017) for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), to ensure that data from teaching team-based quality assurance (QA) and improvement (QI) activities are analysed within a scholarly environment and available for dissemination.

Teaching teams from four courses in the College of Sciences and Engineering have agreed to collaborate to establish a planned, ethics approved, approach to scholarship of their curriculum. Further workshops, which will be adapted to suit the local context, are planned at over 10 Australian universities in 2019-20 to promote CER STEM. A CER STEM website has been developed to facilitate dissemination; including sharing case studies and resources developed by course teams during the Fellowship. Expected longer-term outputs are a greater percentage of STEM academics engaged positively in scholarship and improved curriculum.