Education is a teamsport

A nice place with a good coffee machine. "That's what we dreamt of in 2016 during the first exploratory meeting for the newly established Centre for Academic Teaching and Learning," says Manon Kluijtmans, laughing. Almost eight years later, the Academic Director can conclude that apart from the coffee machine, the substantive dreams have also been more than fulfilled. A good time for a new chapter, on 1 December Bald de Vries will take over.   

Departing and incoming Academic Director both agree: for years, the Centre for Academic Teaching and Learning (CAT) has played a pioneering (inter)national role. "It runs like clockwork, so in a way I come in a bed of plenty," says Bald. "When I tell colleagues from outside Utrecht University (UU), for example, that with us every faculty has a substantial structural budget for educational innovation, they find it impressive. But there is plenty more room for expansion and improvement at our university as well. We certainly cannot sit back."

First, back to the beginning. Why was the CAT established?
Manon: "That had everything to do with the culture and support within UU. The importance of education has fortunately been seen here for a long time and there has been considerable investment in it. As a result, there were more and more offers for lecturers to develop themselves and their teaching. The CAT was established to make the many initiatives more visible and manageable and to bundle them UU-wide. It is great to see how offerings and community have only continued to grow since its opening in 2017.

You can see all the separate initiatives as expressions of a culture in which we want to improve the balance between research and education. Of course, this balance is not just something of the CAT, but of the entire university. In faculties, the academic culture is established and the CAT is a facilitating and connecting factor in this."

Bald: "The great thing about the CAT is that it brings together people from so many different contexts and disciplines that everyone reinforces each other and learns from each other."

Manon: "Education is also really a team sport. To keep improving, you need a mix of all kinds of staff, including teachers, but also experts in IT, didactics or education policy, for example. So the CAT is there for all university staff involved in education."

What are you most proud of from your years as Academic Director of the CAT?
Manon: "That is a difficult question, but then I would choose Educational Scholarship in combination with the contribution that I - and several others from the CAT community - have been able to make to the TRIPLE vision. At the university, we think research is very important. So it would be strange if we didn't also take a critical look at our teaching in a scientific way. This is not to say that all teachers should also become educational researchers, but in order to innovate thoroughly and credibly, research on education should be at least a piece of the portfolio of discipline groups. I sincerely believe that the culture change arising from open science is currently the most decisive factor in further strengthening teaching quality: as the gap between valuing research and teaching narrows, teachers are given more space to develop themselves and their teaching.

What constitutes good teaching is context-dependent. There is no single golden rule or trick. For example, what works for a course for a thousand first-year law students is really a different educational question than what works for thirty master's students in clinical health sciences. You have to constantly keep looking critically at your own context and keep asking the question of what you are educating for and how you are educating."

Who makes what contribution to the bigger goal?

Bald: "It is not yet obvious that every teacher scrutinises their own practice. Many teachers say, 'I don't have time for that and it doesn't count for my publication list'. But teachers do not have to start doing SoTL, i.e. researching their own teaching, en masse. It is important to see it as a team effort.

TRIPLE is based on the principle that an individual's contribution can only be assessed within the context of the team. Who makes what contribution to the broader goal? For example, one person's focus may be on disciplinary research, impact or leadership and another's on teaching or research on teaching. Slowly the realisation is dawning that all these different activities from TRIPLE count precisely in your package. And that there is room for diverse profiles and dynamic careers; Manon and I are also examples of that."

Manon: "Fortunately, there is indeed movement towards diverse profiles and equal appreciation of research and teaching. But I also realise that Bald and I are currently still among the happy few who have already been recognised and valued in their careers to the extent that they have been promoted to full professor on a total portfolio with expertise on teaching. Surely the somewhat younger academics experience that disciplinary research is still dominant in many places. So we are definitely not there yet. It takes time."

We have to be careful not to become too relaxed or blasé

Manon: "We get many requests from people at home and abroad who want to come and have a look at us. I think our university is leading in various aspects and we are quite unique in our total portfolio. But we have to be careful not to become too relaxed or blasé. There is some hard catching up going on. In the Netherlands, a large programme has been launched as an incentive to higher education institutions to set up or develop Centres for Teaching and Learning. For instance, there are already centres from which several PhD students are funded every year to do scientific research on teaching. That is something we can only dream of here. But fortunately, we are not standing still."

Bald, what will you be focusing on after 1 December?
Bald: "I think the pillars of teacher development and educational innovation are solid, so together with the wonderful team I will be joining, we are going to make sure that this keeps going well. Educational Scholarship - and thus the intertwining of research and teaching - can grow even more and become more structurally embedded. Not only in the CAT, but also in the wider university community. You simply cannot separate the core tasks of education and research. Because in a sense, we teach what we research. Yet education is often organised in very different places than research. Educational Scholarship, for instance, could be integrated much more into existing research programmes where the infrastructure is already in place. 

And so there are many more topics we could work on. Super interesting, for instance, is the question of how to look properly at performance in teaching. Where one teacher teaches incredibly well, the great programme that teacher teaches might have been designed by another. Teaching, innovating, evaluating. How do you make all that visible? How do you recognise and appreciate what someone does? There is still a world to be won there. Or think about artificial intelligence. That is going to have an insane impact on everything. With tools that can take over tasks, we actually have to go all the way back to the drawing board. What does it mean for your teaching, for innovation and for your development as a teacher or student? What are the opportunities and risks and how do we figure them out?"

A great team with a lot of expertise and enthusiasm together

Manon, to what extent do you hand over the baton with confidence?
Manon: "I have every confidence in Bald. He is very versatile and a figurehead from the teachers' point of view. Furthermore, fortunately he does not have to do it alone, because there is a great team - including the Senior Fellows and the CAT Advisory Board - with a lot of expertise and enthusiasm together. As Vice-Chancellor of Teaching and Learning, I will often continue to tap into the CAT as a think tank and expertise group to feed me in my role at the European political level, among other things. And, of course, I myself will simply remain part of the community. But I won't get in Bald's way for the first few months, mind you." 

Bald: "Feel free to keep visiting! And that goes for everyone. In September, the CAT moved to Bolognalaan 101, where we now have a real home base. This allows us to be even more open to people, so please be welcome!"