SU short course on the Scholarship of Educational Leadership (SoEL)

This 12 credit short course focuses on leadership in and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The course draws on two bodies of knowledge, namely Academic Leadership (AL) and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and aims to bring conceptual frameworks from these two bodies of knowledge into dialogue with each other.

The course content is divided into four broad themes: Contextualising Leadership (Term 1), Researching Leadership (Term 2), Curriculum Leadership (Term 3) and Pedagogical Leadership (Term 4). The outcomes of the short course are:

• To engage academic leaders (e.g. Vice-Deans Teaching and Learning (T&L), programme leaders, departmental Chairs, and T&L-related unit heads) in scholarly approaches to educational leadership practices;

• To introduce academic leaders to the Scholarship of Educational Leadership (SoEL) literature and its implications for their own educational leadership context;

• To apply SoEL research skills to own educational leadership context (such as reviewing literature, defining SoEL research problems, designing research methods, disseminating results through a scholarly output);

• To demonstrate critically reflective practice in the form of a teaching portfolio.

It is envisaged that the short course will build a critical mass of T&L mentors at Stellenbosch University. Each year a selected cohort of staff members, who are playing a leadership role in the area of T&L, will be invited to register for the short course. Each of these cohorts, on completion of the short course, will in turn become part of a growing community of T&L mentors at the university.

For 2018, eleven participants are enrolled for the short course. The first two contact sessions took place on 2 February and 6 April.