About the talk

Sweeping reforms are underway to academic promotion systems in universities across the world to better evaluate and reward faculty impact in teaching and learning.  Over the past five years, the momentum for change has grown rapidly as universities have joined together with national and global peers to drive collective reform to career pathways and promotion criteria. 

The presentation will chart the progress by the Advancing Teaching, a global network of over 50 universities devoted to informing, supporting and connecting universities with this shared mission for systemic change.  In particular, it will highlight:

• the Career Framework for University Teaching: a tool developed to support career progression on the basis of academic impact in teaching and learning that has been adopted and adapted by universities across the network;
• the Teaching Cultures Survey: outcomes of a cross-sectional survey designed to track the perceived culture and status of teaching at universities worldwide that are implementing systemic reform to their academic reward systems;
• global best practices: examples of changes already made to academic career pathways and university recognition systems, both at an institutional-level and national-level.

The talk will conclude by discussing how the momentum for improving the reward of university teaching can be advanced and sustained.

After the talk, there will be an interactive parallell session following up the topic of the talk.

About the speaker

A Mechanical Engineer by training, Dr Ruth Graham specialised in aeronautical fatigue, working with BAE SYSTEMS for a number of years. In 2002 she moved to Imperial College London and later became Director of the EnVision project, which sought to transform the undergraduate education across the universtity’s Faculty of Engineering.

Ruth has worked as an independent consultant since 2008.  Her work is focused on fostering change in higher education across the world, helping to improve teaching and learning worldwide. Ruth’s recent projects have included

• a global initiative to improve the reward and recognition of teaching in higher education that is now supporting reform to academic career pathways at over 50 universities worldwide (www.advancingteaching.com);
• a global study on the lessons learnt from the current period of ‘emergency teaching’ resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and how this might impact the trajectory of engineering education in the future (www.ceeda.org);
• a cross-institutional and multi-year survey to capture and track the culture and status of teaching amongst faculty, in which 21 universities from 10 countries are participating (www.teachingcultures.com).

Further details can be found on Ruth’s website – www.rhgraham.org – which provides an outline of recent projects as well as copies of her published reports.