The ambition to provide engaging teaching is the focal point of the university's aim to provide a further boost of teaching competencies at AU to benefit both student learning and the university's strategic goal of world-class research-based degree programmes. The increased focus on pedagogical competency development of teaching staff is being implemented in such a way that it also contributes to employees' general career paths and collegial collaboration on planning, conducting, developing and evaluating teaching and degree programmes. In addition, competency development is linked to employees’ current teaching assignments, provides formalised competencies and contributes to employee motivation and job satisfaction.
When the Faculty of Arts recruits researchers for principal positions (assistant professorship, associate professorship, professorship), the applicants' teaching qualifications are always assessed to ensure that these also meet the expectations regarding the type of position/the academic level of the position.
At Arts, we continuously strive to support the development of lecturers' pedagogical competences. We do this in collaboration with the Centre for Educational Development (CED), which supports high-quality teaching at Aarhus University. CED offers a fixed university didactic course portfolio for all levels of the lecturer career, i.e. for teaching staff and PhD students, part-time lecturers and student teachers (student instructors). CED also collaborates with the academic environments in relation to their ongoing development of both degree programmes and individual courses.
There are clearly formulated expectations with regard to lecturers' ongoing competency development at the Faculty of Arts. For example, we expect assistant professors to take the university teacher training course. The university teacher training course is a prerequisite for being employed in an associate professorship.
Overall, the head of school is responsible for ensuring competency development of teaching staff. The ambition is realised by all members of academic staff in principal positions discussing and agreeing with their immediate supervisor (at their SDD as a minimum) how their research and pedagogical/didactic competences can best be maintained and developed in the period leading up to the next dialogue. In addition, the students’ comments and general feedback on the teaching are included in the development of teaching activities and the lecturers’ pedagogical development.
