The University of Copenhagen 2012 Strategy aimed at improving education at the university. This was a reaction to the massive dominance from research, which made it counterproductive for your career to engage in teaching – despite individual interest and an obvious organisational need. The presentation will review two actions - an individual and an organisational oriented - to counterbalance the low status of teaching.
The Faculty of Science established six positions as professor with special emphasis on education. The professors (now nine) work with innovative educational projects within their subject, based in their research group but with a perspective for the department and the whole faculty. Each professor is teamed up with a researcher from the pedagogical unit at the faculty, and the unit is responsible for distributing the results to the faculty. The presentation will describe the project, its impact and its potential as a career path for researchers focusing on teaching.
A top-down result of the new university strategy is the establishment of a pedagogical competence profile, a de facto standard for being a good teacher. This quite controversial project has as an official goal to equalize research and teaching and is in a process of being implemented. The profile has been approved by all boards and committees and will be linked to a mandatory teaching portfolio, used at all occasions where teaching is assessed. The presentation will discuss the pro and cons of putting teaching into a fixed framework