Spheres of Influence: Ventures and Visions in Educational Development*

3-6 July, 2002
The University of Western Australia
Perth, Western Australia

Abstract

A Swedish commitment to teaching and learning

Anna Lundh, Swedish Council for the Renewal of Higher Education, Sweden

The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate the commitment to teaching and learning made by the Swedish governments in the form of a Council for the Renewal of Higher Education, now in its 12th year of activity. Since the Council was founded in 1990, both conservative and social-democratic governments alike have given it their support. In its early days, the Council had a "sister" in Australia, the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching, CAUT. The Council members are teachers, Vice-Chancellors, students and PhD students committed to teaching excellence, all in all nine members.

The Swedish Government has changed the name of the Council several times over the years and added areas to its assignment but the strong base and overruling idea for all activities has stayed the same: support for pedagogical development, teaching and learning, in higher education. Much of this support is in the form of project grants to individual teachers and groups of teachers. In addition, the Council also identifies fields with particular needs and sets up working-groups. These working-groups are made up of faculty and students and have the specific task of initiating processes supporting the development of teaching and learning. I shall give some examples of activities and projects in my presentation.

In 2000 Professor Richard Johnstone, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of University of Technology, Sydney, was asked to make an evaluative review of the Council's activities in the past three to five years. In my presentation I shall discuss some of his findings, as well as some results from a statistical analysis of the Council's project database.

Finally, I shall discuss the considerably broader assignment, which the Council received in the Budget Bill for 2002, and relate it to the current challenges facing Swedish Higher Education.

Key words:
National initiative; Teacher-driven; Student-focused

Objectives, outcomes and activities:
For audience - inspiration, discussion, future networking Swedish-Australian teachers committed to renewal of higher education. For presenter/the Council - discussion of certain issues where input from the audience would be valuable, receiving an "Australian perspective", networking.

Anna Lundh has worked as a project co-ordinator with the Council for the Renewal of Higher Education for five years. Her other experiences from Higher Education is as a bachelor student, as a student representative of different boards and as an administrator. She has also worked with a special government assignment concerning Sustainable development in Higher Education.

Contact: Anna Lundh, email: anna.lundh@hsv.se