Keynote speaker is Kristin Ewins, Örebro University.
Abstract
Deliberative leadership – strengthening collegiality and professional responsibility in higher education
How can we as teachers, academic developers and educational leaders enact professional responsibility in higher education? How can we work together to contribute to public good? Drawing on the results of the international research project Formation and Competence Building of University Academic Developers, deliberative leadership is suggested as a mode, approach and attitude to direct reflection on, understanding of and enactment of teaching and learning as, and for, public good.
Educational leadership, in this context, is understood as distributed and enacted on every level from teaching assistant to Vice Chancellor. And deliberative leadership as a path at the intersection of critical autonomy and formal requirements, lending direction while respecting the myriad voices of the higher education collective.
About Kristin Ewins
I am Associate Professor of English and since 2013 Director of The Centre for Academic Development at Örebro University. As a researcher, teacher and leader, I am interested in how collegiality and deliberative processes can contribute to a higher education that is characterised by democratic values and contributes to the common good. I also work with these issues nationally on the board of Swedish Network for Educational Development in Higher Education (Swednet) since 2021 and as a steering group member of the Higher Education Pedagogical Leadership Network, which I helped to start in 2019.
Since 2021, I am, together with Molly Sutphen, project manager for the international research project Academic Hospitality in Interdisciplinary Education, funded by the Norwegian Research Council 2021-2025. The project is partly based on results from a previous project, Formation and Competence Building of University Academic Developers, where I was involved as a researcher and practitioner from the start in 2015 to the end of the project in 2020. The project was led by Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke, who is now a visiting professor at The Centre for Academic Development, and resulted in the book Leading Higher Education As and For Public Good: Rekindling Education as Praxis (ed. Solbrekke and Sugrue, Routledge, 2020). The higher education research we are now building up in Örebro is often close to our practice, and I am extremely proud to lead a group of colleagues who embody development, collegiality and professional responsibility.