Closing

After the chapters you’ve read and the reflections you’ve encountered, one theme should now feel unmistakable: leadership in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning rarely arrives with a title, a mandate, or a neat beginning. It appears first as attentiveness, then as initiative, and only later—as language catches up—as leadership. Much of what you may already be doing fits this pattern:

• You respond to a colleague’s idea and help it travel a little further.
• You are asked what “counts” as SoTL and your answer shapes someone’s next step.
• You convene people or hold a space where inquiry can be shared.
• You notice connections across projects that others haven’t yet seen.
• You join a committee “because of how you think about teaching,” and that perspective changes the conversation.

None of this comes with a job title. All of it changes what becomes possible.

In this book, we traced how such work accumulates and becomes consequential—how engagement becomes leadership, how leadership is recognised (or not), and how it creates real, durable change in teaching and learning. Across diverse contexts, chapters, and perspectives, we have examined how this form of leadership takes shape at different levels—within individuals, across communities, and through institutional and international structures.  We now return to the guiding questions that opened this book: When does engagement become leadership? Who decides what counts as leadership in SoTL—and on what grounds? And how can SoTL leadership create meaningful change across teaching, learning, and institutions?

Looking Back on Our Route

Academic and SoTL leadership identities

Across the section, SoTL leadership emerges as a relational, developmental, and boundary‑crossing practice. In their case study, Rahul Pandit and Bo van Leeuwen offer reflective accounts from Utrecht University, describing their entry into SoTL through grants, mentorship, and communities of practice. Their narratives underscore the motivational power of recognition, role models, and collaborative inquiry, as well as the persistence required to balance SoTL with teaching demands and career precarity. Janice Miller‑Young conceptualizes SoTL leadership within a complex “landscape of practice,” emphasizing that leadership is enacted through processes rather than positions. She highlights the importance of convening across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, fostering shared purpose, and using boundary objects to support collective learning and change. Key dispositions—such as openness, humility, and knowledgeability—support sustained collaboration, reflexivity, and attention to power, helping scholars formulate innovative questions and methodologies while developing hybrid identities as teacher‑researcher‑leaders. Tanya Lawlis presents a complementary narrative from the perspective of an Education‑Focused (EF)academic navigating structural barriers such as heavy teaching loads, unclear expectations, and institutional undervaluation of SoTL. She outlines a set of targeted supports: a professional development calendar, grant programs, awards, and an EF Community of Practice. Together, these initiatives guide colleagues’ development as scholars by strengthening their theoretical understanding, building methodological capacity, and supporting the growth of scholarly identity. These initiatives have strengthened engagement, improved proposal quality, and expanded leadership capacity within the EF cohort. A complementary perspective is offered by van Houwelingen and colleagues, who shift attention from individual development towards collective and institutionally supported forms of SoTL engagement. Drawing on an interfaculty programme, the authors illustrate how educators take on advocate roles that support others in engaging with SoTL, acting as catalysts and community builders within their faculties. The chapter highlights key conditions for developing SoTL engagement—such as shared language, structured support, and the interplay between bottom-up and top-down approaches. In doing so, it positions SoTL leadership as a relational practice that connects people, ideas, and institutional levels, and shows how distributed roles can create pathways for participation and contribute to the gradual embedding of SoTL in institutional contexts.

Across the section, SoTL leadership emerges through practices that connect people, ideas, and practices across boundaries in order to improve teaching and learning. Miller-Young frames SoTL as a complex and adaptive landscape. Here, leadership does not depend on position, but on connecting practices, bringing people together, and creating boundary objects that support shared work. Learning is both the means and the result of this process. Lawlis operationalizes this vision institutionally: she tackles EF role challenges by designing structures (PD calendar, grants, awards, EF CoP) that cultivate methodological rigor and a scaffolded continuum from scholarly teaching to SoTL leadership. Her strategy shows how enabling conditions and sustained communities translate integration into changed culture, practice, and confidence. Van Leeuwen and Pandit, together with van Houwelingen and colleagues, ground the theme in lived experience: entry points (small grants, SIGs, advocate roles), community formation, and iterative projects demonstrate how recognition, mentorship, and re‑designed CoPs can overcome skepticism and workload pressures. Their narratives illustrate how integrative practices and identities take shape “from the middle,” reinforcing leadership as distributed and developmental. Together, these works argue for boundary‑crossing, inclusive, and rigorous SoTL—anchored in communities, scaffolded pathways, and integrative leadership that elevates both individual growth and systemic change.

Throughout these chapters, leadership becomes visible not through formal designation, but through participation in relationships and communities that enable inquiry, collaboration, and change.

Networks and communities in SoTL

The section frames SoTL leadership as a relational and collective practice that emerges through engagement in networks and communities. The chapters by Tierney, Thomson and colleagues, Lord, and McSweeney each illustrate how networks and communities create the conditions in which SoTL can develop, be sustained, and extend beyond individual practice. Tierney’s reflective narrative further demonstrates how transformative professional networks can be. Through personal stories of faculty learning communities, AdvanceHE (Higher Education Academy) networks, and educational development programmes, she shows how engaging with scholarly communities shaped her identity, expanded her understanding of teaching, and fostered long-term collegial relationships. Thomson and colleagues provide a complementary perspective by focusing on networks as spaces for informal learning, trust, and collaborative problem-solving within complex educational settings. Drawing on experiences in health professions education, they show how collegial relationships and cross-disciplinary collaboration help SoTL leaders navigate institutional complexity, sustain innovation, and support one another in everyday academic practice. McSweeney extends this discussion by positioning SoTL leadership itself as community work. Lord’s chapter offers a practical, research-informed guide to building and sustaining SoTL networks, distinguishing among formal networks, informal networks, and Communities of Practice (CoPs). Her focus is primarily on understanding how different kinds of networks function and what conditions support their effectiveness. She emphasises collaboration, shared goals, and institutional support as essential conditions for effective and lasting SoTL communities. Using the Community of Scholars (CoS) model, McSweeney argues more explicitly for the intentional cultivation of scholarly communities, highlighting how that SoTL leaders must intentionally build, grow, and sustain communities that nurture belonging, mentorship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and scholarly identity development. All three authors emphasize that SoTL thrives through relationships: supportive networks expand individual capacity, enrich practice, and contribute to institutional and disciplinary change. Together, the chapters highlight how community-building—far from peripheral—is central to engaging meaningfully in SoTL.

A clear, unifying theme across the three chapters is that SoTL is inherently relational work. Whether framed as networks (Lord), communities (Tierney), or leadership structures (McSweeney), each author argues that meaningful engagement in SoTL depends on cultivating human connections that support inquiry, reflection, and growth. These communities provide emotional support, intellectual stimulation, and professional identity development—especially important in contexts where SoTL remains undervalued or poorly supported institutionally. The authors also stress that communities are not accidental: they require intentional design, collaborative goal-setting, inclusive communication practices, and shared ownership. Lord emphasises structural considerations for forming networks, while McSweeney articulates how leaders sustain communities through relational ethics, psychological safety, and responsiveness to members’ evolving needs. Tierney’s narrative demonstrates the lived impact of such communities, showing how they foster belonging and creativity even when formal institutional structures fall short. Together, the chapters suggest that SoTL communities are sites of possibility—places where educators imagine new pedagogical futures, bridge disciplinary borders, and collectively advance teaching and learning. Ultimately, the theme that emerges is one of boundary-crossing connection: SoTL flourishes when educators come together across roles, contexts, and identities to build collaborative, caring, and sustainable networks of practice. In this way, SoTL leadership emerges not primarily through formal roles, but through the intentional work of convening people, cultivating trust, and sustaining the relationships that allow scholarly communities to flourish.

Institutional cultures and SoTL leadership

This section explores how institutional cultures shape, constrain, and enable SoTL. Kluijtmans’ case study from Utrecht University traces a longer institutional journey toward valuing educational scholarship. Her narrative highlights the importance of infrastructure—centres for teaching and learning, professional development programs, grants, and recognition systems—in building a sustainable culture of evidence‑informed teaching. She emphasizes how leadership grounded in scholarship can transform both formal structures and informal norms. Mårtensson & Roxå provide the theoretical backbone for this discussion. They argue that universities contain multiple micro-cultures and “local teaching and learning regimes,” which means that effective SoTL leadership works through frontstage and backstage conversations, network effects, and persistent, locally anchored efforts to “go public” and gradually shift norms. Their chapter positions SoTL as cultural, developmental, and leadership‑oriented, and offers meso‑level tactics for aligning structures, incentives, and dialogue so that scholarly teaching becomes an institutional expectation rather than an individual exception. Briseño‑Garzón and colleagues describe UBC’s SoTL Seed Program as a strategic response to two persistent barriers: faculty’s limited methodological preparation and the pressures of workload. Their program pairs faculty with trained graduate “SoTL Specialists,” creating a scaffolded, relational model of SoTL support that builds capacity, nurtures agency, and strengthens institutional culture. Dorner and colleagues focus on European contexts where SoTL often lacks formal recognition. They highlight grassroots leadership, mentoring programs, teaching certificates, and developmental observation models as strategies for creating opportunities in environments where teaching is undervalued. Their stories show that SoTL leadership frequently emerges from local, relational, and practice‑based initiatives that gradually reshape institutional priorities.

Taken together, these chapters illustrate a shared theme: institutional culture —not funding alone— is the decisive factor in whether SoTL thrives, survives, or struggles at the margins. Despite varying national systems and institutional histories, all chapters show that SoTL gains traction when structures, people, and values are intentionally aligned. Formal support—centres for teaching and learning, competency frameworks, grants, recognition systems, and professional development programs—provides necessary infrastructure, but they are not sufficient alone. Equally essential is relational leadership, enacted through mentoring, partnerships, communities of practice, and cross‑disciplinary alliances. These interpersonal forms of support cultivate trust, agency, and shared responsibility. The chapters collectively show that SoTL often begins in small, localized actions—pairing faculty with graduate researchers, designing a teaching certificate, creating a peer‑feedback forum—but these acts accumulate into cultural change when consistently nurtured. The University of British Columbia operationalizes this by coupling money with relational capacity (student–faculty partnerships, iterative evaluation, dissemination venues), translating support into habit‑forming scholarly conversations and project momentum. Utrecht University demonstrates how senior, evidence‑informed leadership can embed SoTL through integrated centres, career pathways, and recognition and rewards, signalling its value in both formal and informal arenas. Where  recognition is limited, distributed forms of leadership — through mentoring, teaching certificates, developmental peer observation, and cross‑institutional networks—can still grow pockets of excellence that gradually re‑norm local practice . Mårtensson and Roxå’s chapter on organizational cultures helps explain why these strategies work. Universities are systems of semi‑autonomous micro‑cultures; change is negotiated through trusted networks, frontstage/backstage talk, and repeated opportunities to “go public” locally so that new artifacts (portfolios, seminars, repositories) and routines take root. A second unifying insight is that SoTL bridges research and teaching by inviting practitioners to study their own educational environments. When institutions value this work—through recognition, workload structures, and leadership modelling—faculty are empowered to approach teaching with scholarly curiosity rather than compliance. Ultimately, the theme across all the chapters is that transforming teaching culture requires both institutional commitment and distributed, evidence‑informed leadership that makes teaching visible, valued, and intellectually vibrant.

The through‑line is a both/and: building infrastructure and recognition while cultivating relationships and routines. Effective SoTL leadership, therefore, aligns structures, time, and status with everyday scholarly dialogue, making teaching visible, discussable, and intellectually consequential—until the cultural default is that teaching itself is a site of scholarship. At the same time, these institutional efforts do not develop in isolation, but are increasingly shaped through international networks, collaborations, and conversations about teaching and learning.

SoTL leadership in an international context

These international perspectives further illustrate that SoTL leadership is shaped by place, context, relationships, and shared interests, while also revealing the broader conversations and collaborations through which the field and region continues to evolve. This section extends the discussion of SoTL leadership beyond institutional contexts to the international dimensions of SoTL practice. The chapters collectively highlight how SoTL leadership is shaped by cultural, linguistic, geopolitical, and institutional differences, and how engaging across these differences requires reflexivity, collaboration, and contextual awareness. Together, the contributions show that international SoTL leadership is not simply about expanding networks globally, but also about navigating different understandings of teaching, learning, scholarship, and academic identity. Young’s case study foregrounds the importance of national and institutional context through reflections on cross-institutional SoTL collaboration in South Africa. Drawing attention to inequalities in resources, institutional histories, and differing understandings of student success and professional development, he illustrates how SoTL leadership must remain attentive to local realities and contextual differences. The chapter highlights the importance of dialogue and shared understanding when collaborating across institutions and educational systems. Geertsema offers a more theoretical exploration of the tensions between the local and the global in SoTL. His chapter examines how SoTL is shaped by disciplinary traditions, institutional cultures, and geopolitical dynamics, particularly for scholars working outside the historical centres of SoTL in the Global North. By distinguishing between leadership of SoTL and leadership through SoTL, he argues for broader and more inclusive understandings of educational leadership that recognise relational, distributed, and practice-based forms of influence. The chapter also emphasises the importance of context-sensitive support, collegiality, and international dialogue in sustaining SoTL work. Schrum and colleagues focus on practical pathways into international SoTL engagement, particularly for emerging scholars and contexts where regional and institutional support and recognition for SoTL may still be developing. Using the metaphor of “dipping a toe in the water,” the chapter presents SoTL leadership as a process of building confidence, scholarly identity, and community through accessible forms of participation such as reading, networking, mentoring, conference participation, and publication. Their contribution highlights how relational support and intentional inclusion can help broaden participation in international SoTL communities. Chng and colleagues further challenge us to consider the challenges and possibilities of genuinely international SoTL communities. Focusing on issues of language, participation, and inclusion, the chapter highlights how international SoTL spaces are often shaped by implicit norms and assumptions that may privilege particular academic traditions and forms of communication. They argue for more inclusive and dialogic approaches to international collaboration that create space for diverse voices, perspectives, and ways of engaging in SoTL.

Taken together, these chapters position SoTL leadership as both contextual and connective. They show that leadership in SoTL requires sensitivity to local realities while also engaging in broader conversations that cross institutional, disciplinary, linguistic, and national boundaries. In doing so, the section reinforces one of the central themes of this book: that SoTL leadership emerges through relationships, shared inquiry, and the collective work of creating more inclusive and contextually responsive cultures of teaching and learning. Together, these chapters further show that SoTL leadership is shaped by context, relationships, and shared inquiry, while also highlighting the importance of international conversations and collaborations in the ongoing development of the field. These international perspectives therefore not only extend the discussion of SoTL leadership, but also bring into sharper focus many of the themes that have emerged throughout this book.

So, what have we learned about SoTL Leadership?

Leadership in SoTL emerges from repeated, situated acts: asking better questions about learning, inquiring into one’s teaching, inviting others into that inquiry, and sharing what is learned. Across the chapters, we saw that this is not a switch that flips but a practice that deepens. Credibility grows from curiosity; influence follows from contribution; leadership takes shape through relationships that hold and move ideas. The chapters also show that there is no single route into SoTL leadership: leadership can emerge through teaching practice, mentoring, advocacy, curriculum work, research, community-building, or simply by creating spaces where others can learn and connect.

Rather than a positional authority, SoTL leadership is relational work—work that translates, brokers, and mobilises across contexts, communities, and continents. SoTL Leaders connect people and projects; they make knowledge travel; they help disparate efforts cohere into shared purpose. When leaders encounter constraints, the most effective responses we saw were coalitional: small groups making coordinated moves—creating micro-infrastructures (e.g., cross-course inquiry cycles, shared rubrics, brown-bag series), documenting outcomes, and using evidence to invite allies and decision-makers into the conversation. Whether convening communities of practice and scholarship, aligning curriculum renewal with SoTL findings, or linking local inquiries to institutional priorities, SoTL Leaders create routes through which scholarship —and scholars—can move. And few leaders stay in one place. Most move fluidly across various networks, translating insights from one to another and helping people see how their local work connects to wider change.

Across the chapters, leadership appears more often as distributed than concentrated—more influential than formally acknowledged. Many contributors describe relational work that emerges in response to institutional priorities or directives. This creates both tensions and opportunities. Distributed leadership can be resilient, creative, and inclusive. At the same time, it requires coordination, advocacy, and forms of stewardship that support people, relationships, and communities over time.

Patterns, Principles, and Practices of SoTL Leaders

The cases, theories, and practices described throughout the book converge on a set of commitments that make SoTL Leadership both effective and humane. We name them here as principles for practice—not a prescriptive model, but a set of anchors to return to as contexts and roles shift.

1. Lead with authenticity. Bring your values to the surface. Be transparent about what you know, what you’re learning, and where you’re unsure. Authenticity builds trust, and trust changes what groups can attempt together. SoTL Leadership is not only about direction—it is also about stewardship. Protect the people you work with, the time you commit, and build structures that support the next generation of SoTL Leaders.
2. Cultivate networks, not just projects. Projects end; networks persist. Invest in relationships and shared infrastructures that enable ongoing collaboration and learning.
3. Broker across boundaries. Work the edges—between disciplines, units, roles, and geographies. Mobilise insights from one space to another; make invisible alignments visible; translate language across communities. Ask, “How does this micro insight matter at meso, macro, and mega levels?” and “What mega-level conversations should inform our micro decisions?”
4. Make the work legible. Name the leadership you (and others) are doing. Document impacts on learners, programmes, and policy. Make pathways for recognition.

These principles are not sequential; they are mutually reinforcing. They describe SoTL leadership as an ecology of practice in which inquiry, connection, and care produce enduring change.

An Invitation to your next adventure

This book has argued that SoTL leadership is not exclusive terrain. It is a set of evolving practices available to all who care deeply about learning and are willing to work with others to improve it. If you recognise yourself in the cases and chapters — good. You are already on the path.

To carry this work forward, consider these closing prompts:

• Where is your most compelling “why” right now? What SoTL need or opportunity draws your attention?
• Who are your natural co-travellers? Which people could you invite into a next inquiry?
• What boundary could you broker? Between which groups or contexts would a small bridge make a big difference? What one step would convert your ideas into movement?
• How will you make your work visible? What’s your plan to share insights and invite others to adapt them?

The questions  that opened this book do not lead to singular answers. Across the chapters, the responses have been plural, situated, and deeply relational. Engagement becomes leadership when it connects people and ideas into shared purpose and movement. What comes to count as leadership is shaped, in part, by how we name, document, recognise, and sustain this work. Meaningful change emerges when inquiry, connection, and care are sustained across the micro, meso, macro, and mega levels.

SoTL leadership creates connections across borders: between disciplines and roles, between projects and policy, between institutions and the wider scholarly community. It is undertaken by people like you—curious, committed, and collaborative—who make routes where none existed, and widen them so others can travel. For many readers, SoTL leadership may already be present in the work they do every day, even if they have not yet named it as such. May the practices and possibilities in these pages help you locate yourself on the map, take your next step, and, in doing so, help the rest of us move, too.