SoTL, the Local, and the Global

Abstract

This theoretical chapter unpacks some of the complexities of SoTL in relation to leadership—both leadership of SoTL (leading SoTL initiatives) and leadership through SoTL (supporting and influencing others). These fundamentally involve a set of tensions between the local and the global, and thus issues pertaining to context. SoTL work, as a form of practitioner research, is firmly rooted in highly contextualized local inquiries by academics into their teaching and their students’ learning, which raises questions of knowledge, expertise, rigour, and generalizability. On an institutional level, these complexities require careful strategic positioning of SoTL by leaders. One important question concerns how SoTL should be positioned institutionally. Should its purpose be to produce groundbreaking knowledge with the potential to change higher education through global sharing in the form of publications in prestigious journals? Or might its influence be positioned more locally, in relation to the practice of the academics engaging in SoTL work, their students, and their colleagues? Are these two ways of positioning mutually exclusive? On an epistemic level, for those of us located outside the historical mainstream of SoTL there are additional geopolitical dimensions to consider, given the origins of SoTL in North America and the location of its centre of gravity in the Global North. At the same time, the different perspectives brought about by an orientation toward the Global South can be beneficial for rethinking SoTL practice more broadly, by focusing on issues of equity, epistemic access, and student success.

My point of departure in this chapter is that the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning—understood at the most basic level as inquiry by university teachers into their teaching that they share publicly (e.g. Chick, Felten, & Mårtensson, 2026)—has great potential for making a difference to students, universities, and society. If it is true that SoTL improves the quality of teaching, the professional development of teachers, and the recognition and appreciation of education (Meijerman et al., 2023), then this presents a strong rationale for university teachers to engage in it, but universities also need to provide guidance and support for teachers who wish to do so. [see endnote 1] This is because engaging in SoTL can be very challenging: while “[the] practice, use, and growth of SoTL is important because of its potential to effect change within and beyond higher education” (Scharff et al., 2023, p. 16), university teachers, particularly when working in a research-intensive environment, can find it hard to make the transition towards the educational practice of SoTL (Meijerman et al., 2023).  And equally, fostering a culture of collegiality in which SoTL thrives can be very challenging too: it is important to acknowledge that SoTL can be a “hard sell” (Boshier, 2009), given that in higher education teaching has for a long time been, and still is very often, considered a private matter (Shulman, 1993; Mårtensson, 2023; Mårtensson & Geertsema, forthcoming 2027).

Dealing with these challenges has certainly been hard in the specific context within which I work: that of a prestigious research-intensive university in Singapore, a city-state very much plugged into global flows (e.g. Yeoh & Chang, 2001), though located outside of the mainstream of SoTL (e.g. Chng & Looker, 2013). In this chapter I therefore consider how SoTL, as practice-based inquiry—that is, inquiry by university teachers into teaching and learning that they then make public—involves educational change; what aspects of context are important to consider when supporting university teachers in this work; and how important leadership is for such support. A key insight from existing scholarship is that “sustainable development of teaching and curricula depends not only on individual teachers or groups of teachers but also on leadership; a leadership that engages with, supports, and coordinates development in local collegial contexts” (Mårtensson & Roxå, 2016, p. 248; my emphasis). Such engagement is important at the local, departmental level of the university, positioned between university management and individual academics (Simmons, 2016; Simmons & Taylor, 2019; Simmons, 2020), as this ‘meso-level’ is where the leaders are located with whom individual university teachers interact concerning their teaching.

To make this argument, I will start by looking more closely at some of the key challenges of engaging in—and supporting—SoTL. I will then consider the complex interrelationship between context, higher education, and change, in particular the importance of the department as the locus of academic work. Finally, I will move to a closer consideration of educational leadership in higher education and how it has been defined in the literature in order to distinguish between leadership of and through SoTL. Where possible I will contextualize the points, I make with reference to my own location and what we can learn from perspectives from the Global South.

Challenges of engaging in and supporting SoTL

In part, SoTL can be a ‘hard sell’ because it requires that as university teachers we ask questions about our teaching, something we are not used to in academic culture. Having a problem or question is the starting point for any inquiry, and university teachers constantly pose research questions when it comes to their own respective disciplines. But when it comes to teaching those disciplines and interdisciplines, asking questions or identifying problems can seem like an accusation (Bass, 1999). This situation arises because of what Lee Shulman (1993) termed ‘pedagogical solitude’: the culture in higher education of treating teaching as private, while research is by definition something public that we share with a research community grounded in the discipline (Geertsema, forthcoming 2027). Even though both SoTL as inquiry into teaching and research as inquiry into the discipline involve asking questions, engaging in SoTL can therefore be experienced as being very different to engaging in (disciplinary) research. Another reason why SoTL can be a hard sell is that it involves a research approach to teaching, so there is ambiguity whether it counts as research or as teaching (Cruz et al., 2024). It can further be hard for academics to engage in SoTL as they are experts in their discipline, not the discipline of education (Geertsema, 2016) and there are long-standing controversies relating to how, and even whether, SoTL differs from educational research (Larsson et al., 2020).

Many authors have identified multiple challenges for the transition towards SoTL, ranging from university teachers’ location within discipline-based research paradigms to lack of institutional recognition for this work. Webb and Tierney (2020), reporting on two studies in different contexts, found several threshold concepts that constitute barriers in engaging in SoTL and noted such foundational issues as the language and discourse of SoTL, as well as the need for recognition of teaching as a “public, researchable act” (2020, p.618). They identify several threshold concepts that constitute barriers to engagement in SoTL:

• Scholarship as a threshold concept. Reading and producing scholarship in a field other than one’s own is hard—in this case, that new field would be that of inquiring into teaching and learning one’s discipline, rather than researching that discipline—particularly if the research methodology, methods, data collection, analysis, and what is accepted as evidence are different and new.
• Novice identity in SoTL. Even though one already has deep knowledge and extensive experience in one’s own discipline, it can be very hard to be an expert in one’s discipline, while being a novice in SoTL work.
• Developing a new scholarly identity. Forming a new identity is challenging and university teachers engaging in SoTL need support epistemologically, in relation to engaging with educational theory and pedagogic literature, as well as scholarship relating to curriculum and assessment.
• Reflection as scholarly practice. To many university teachers, it can be hard to recognize the importance of reflection on their own teaching and their students’ learning, and the practice of reflection can also be very difficult for people not used to such an orientation toward their teaching.

Given these kinds of complexities, it is important to recognize the reality that university teachers “are situated within a complex network of personal, professional, and financial tensions” (Webb & Tierney, 2020, p. 620) and need context-sensitive support by leaders if they are to engage in, not to mention transition, into SoTL as a means of effecting “change within and beyond higher education” (Scharff et al., 2023, p. 16).

But what do we mean by such change? What might such context-sensitive support look like, and who could offer it? And is it really the case that those of us who want to engage in SoTL work need to transition to a new identity, away from one grounded in our own discipline and into that of being a scholar of teaching and learning?

A key aspect of the complexities highlighted above is that there always seems to be a tension, in the case of engagement in SoTL, between the local and the global. On the one hand, SoTL work is local in character as it involves highly contextualised investigation into teaching and learning and is therefore necessarily practice-based, drawing on personal and local knowledge.

On the other hand, SoTL also has a global character since engaging in it involves sharing one’s work by making it public and can involve having it validated as research. SoTL work has a global dimension in the sense that it moves beyond the purely personal towards the collegial level and potentially beyond, when it is presented at conferences or published in peer-reviewed venues such as journals or books. Indeed, it is precisely if one makes one’s investigations of teaching practice public that those investigations can influence the practice of others, be it as an investigation to contribute to local knowledge building, or at a more expansive global level that contributes to public knowledge as research. But precisely because of the highly contextualised character of investigations into local practices, tensions arise when the local practices are presented more widely and in broader contexts—often with their own scientific standards of validation and verification.

Given these kinds of complexities, when it comes to the development of teaching there are strong arguments to be made that “investigation of practice (but not necessarily research) is an essential component of professional activity” (Ashwin & Trigwell, 2004, p. 118; my emphasis). For SoTL leaders, what this suggests is that when university teachers engage in investigating teaching, we might best focus on supporting them to develop local knowledge for local change or improvement. But the price to be paid for such a more local orientation is lack of recognition for this work. By its nature, as practice-based research, SoTL work tends to be locally produced and disseminated, making it hard to consider its wider impact, if any: “an inherent problem with the scholarship of teaching and learning is that … most research remains (true to the original intention) small-scale, short-term and local in orientation” (Tight, 2018, p. 72).

One important implication of this challenging situation—given the multiple complexities discussed above—is that leadership support is essential: for SoTL to meet its potential, university teachers should not only be provided with relevant and context-specific guidance that can address these challenges, but institutional leaders—among them, heads of department, programme directors, and deans—need to support and encourage this work. Before turning to leadership more directly, it is important to consider how contextual factors shape educational change in higher education.

Context, Higher Education, and Change

“Context matters”: the theme of the 2023 ISSOTL conference, held at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, brought together people from across the globe to share their local, practice-based inquiries more broadly. The organisers of that conference identified four different contexts that are critical for engagement in SoTL:

1. Teaching and learning context
2. Disciplinary context
3. Institutional context
4. Geographical, language and political context

These multiple contexts are hard to disentangle from one another, and it is important to problematize what we understand by ‘context’ (Roxå et al., 2025) as educational change is often difficult to achieve because of the complex interconnection of these elements. Much SoTL work focuses almost exclusively on what has been termed the ‘didactic’ domain—what works in teaching and learning (Booth & Woollacott, 2018, p. 541). In doing so, disciplinary, professional, cultural, and political contexts are sometimes overlooked. This is significant, given that effecting educational change is a key purpose of SoTL as a particular orientation to educational scholarship. Leading educational change as a purpose of SoTL is implicit in the widely accepted understanding that it “is at its core systematic inquiry into teaching and learning made public” (Ciccone, 2018, p.15), and that such inquiry is focused on “the process in which students experience changes in their ways of thinking and being through our courses” (Ciccone, 2018, p.21; see also p.23). Though the point may seem obvious, it is worth emphasising, as Ciccone’s statement does, that when students take our courses and engage in educational experiences, they “experience changes”—or they should: learning in principle involves changes in students. The notion that students (should) experience change is implicit in the very concept ‘education’, since the idea of change led by a teacher is built into the word: ‘educere’ in Latin literally means the teacher leads (‘ducere’) the student out or from (‘e’) something into something else. And SoTL, as practice-based inquiry into student learning and our educational role as teachers, is interested in developing a better understanding of that process of change that students experience and that teachers lead: what happens to enable this change, how it happens, what else might be possible to improve learning, and potentially what new conceptual frameworks for shaping thinking about practice we might develop from the process (Hutchings, 2000, p.5; see Chick et al., 2026, p.80).

As we saw earlier, the sharing of this inquiry into change disseminates practice from the individual context of the university teacher to others, be they local colleagues in the department or faculty, at the broader university or beyond, thereby potentially serving as inspiration for doing things differently by developing the intellectual work of teaching. Bolander Laksov (2023; see also Simmons, 2016) rightly argues that the department is an important locus of educational change when it comes to teaching; too often, educational developers and other university leaders focus on centralized, generic provision of support for faculty to develop their teaching. Instead, based on her research, Bolander Laksov suggests that local departmental contexts and cultures, informed by the individual academic’s discipline, are crucial for advancing this work. Accordingly, educational developers and those of us who care about educational change should work with heads of department to create partnerships with individual teachers to engage in educational projects that are strategically important to the department. Doing so has a good chance of leading to sustainable educational change initiatives: to “projects that contribute to development over time not only of the individual … but of a broader community of academics” (2023, p.399), as individual projects gain influence and can help to make change when they are strategically important to heads and matter to colleagues in the department. In that way, as educational scholarship gains influence in being strategically rooted in local departmental concerns, it thereby becomes educational leadership.

But at the same time, local departmental cultures can create conditions that make sustainable educational development hard. This is in part because while most academics are, as researchers—a crucial aspect of our identity—automatically “members of active communities” (Shulman, 1993, p.6), as teachers we “close the classroom door and experience pedagogical solitude”. While ‘going public’ is an essential part of what academics do as researchers, the same is not true of teaching, since teaching is by and large considered in the academy to be a private and local affair. How often do academics talk to one another about teaching with anything approaching the frequency and scholarly orientation that is habitual in talking about research (Bass, 1999)? How often do we as university teachers treat our teaching as a “scholarly inquiry into learning” (Bernstein, 2013, p.36)?

Intellectual communities devoted to “significant conversations” about university teaching are rare, whether in the department or beyond, and have to be intentionally created. Roxå and Mårtensson’s research found academics engage a “limited number of conversational partners [in] serious discussions about teaching” (2009, p.550), with the majority having no more than 10 such conversational partners. But as Roxå and Mårtensson also found, significant conversations about teaching with a few trusted colleagues can happen both within and beyond academic departments, including with international colleagues outside the institution, thereby revealing a ‘cosmopolitan’ dimension of SoTL (Bernstein, 2013). This happens when university teachers inquire into student learning and their own teaching and share the results of those inquiries within, but also potentially beyond, their departments, faculties, and universities. This global and cosmopolitan dimension has been especially pertinent for some of us from the Global South, in geographical contexts removed from the mainstream of SoTL work, where there is significant attention paid to the transformative potential of higher education. With its focus on students and inquiry into their learning, SoTL has the potential to enhance and perhaps transform higher education, which itself should be a transformative experience for our students that helps them to succeed. Indeed, one of the key purposes of engaging in SoTL is to act “in the important interests of students, and by contributing to the betterment of teaching and learning … by extension, to a fairer, more compassionate and sustainable world” (Kreber, 2013, p. 98). As university teachers, we need to ask whether the work we do in higher education is transformative—whether it truly makes a difference to students’ lives; engaging in SoTL and sharing our results to build communities of care is a key way of answering this question.

Of course, however, as discussed in the previous section, it can be challenging for university teachers to engage in—and to lead—through SoTL. This is why we now need to turn to a more detailed discussion of leadership of and through SoTL.

Leadership in Higher Education

In a study of local-level leaders—that is, leaders on the ‘meso-level’ of the university as organization: the level of departments and collegial teams of specialists in academic disciplines—Mårtensson and Roxå (2016, p. 258) identify four challenges for not just engaging in SoTL, but specifically for leading through supporting scholarly inquiry into teaching:

1. Handling the relation between themselves as leaders and the people they lead;
2. Getting a group of academics to work together;
3. Defining and clarifying leadership role/s; and
4. Balancing discrepancies between formal organisation and local teaching culture.

In their study, Mårtensson and Roxå (2016, p. 247) describe an educational leadership development programme in a research-intensive university. In this programme, leaders conducted scholarly projects focused on contextualised educational development and leadership, and they reported the projects in writing while peer-reviewing one another’s reports within the programme. What is important for us here is that though the leaders in this study were all formally appointed—and people in formally appointed leadership positions are critically important for guiding and supporting others in SoTL—in addition they also enact informal local-level leadership. The leaders in this study are leaders not only by virtue of being formally appointed to leadership positions, but also because they engaged in SoTL projects and shared the results of their inquiries locally, within the teaching team or department. This sharing itself constitutes (informal) leadership as a form of ‘going public’ because by sharing, they exert influence through the force and power of their scholarly work, thereby gaining trust and credibility within the local departmental context.

By identifying some of the key challenges for local-level leadership, it is possible to follow Mårtensson and Roxå in constructing a framework that can be helpful for thinking about SoTL leadership. What is especially striking about this framework is its emphasis on relationships (#1, #2), language and definitions (#3), and the tension between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ (#4). The research indicates that it is crucially important for leaders to build relationships between themselves and the people they lead, which is essential for getting groups of academics to work together. For SoTL leaders, an implication is that it is important to define leadership clearly, and to use language to spell out what is meant by it. This requires carefully designed support for leaders themselves, in their leadership roles, to help them to reflect upon leadership (and ‘followership’—what it means to be a leader, what it means to be a follower). In this way, SoTL leaders can develop a more complex, nuanced understanding of leadership and what it entails.

This nuanced understanding is especially important because, as Mårtensson and Roxå (2016) argue, local-level leaders always need to balance tensions (or “discrepancies”) between an ‘external mandate’ and an ‘internal mandate’. In brief, this means that leaders in education, in particular when it comes to SoTL at the local (meso-) level, need to balance expectations. There are external expectations from the university, given their assignment of a leadership position, for example mandates relating to curriculum or metrics of success. But there are also internal expectations from those local-level leaders, which require trust, collaboration, and goodwill, suggesting that leaders draw on strategies that have been shown to be helpful in developing teaching through fostering collaboration, motivation, and integration (Geertsema & Mårtensson, forthcoming 2027) In short, educational leaders, including SoTL leaders, need to be aware of the tension between local and global expectations as they engage in the work of local-level leadership.

Once again, it is important to emphasize that leadership goes beyond formal positions. There is a need for those of us who are academics in higher education, as well as for our institutions, to question our assumptions about leadership. Universities are highly complex organizations in which there are multiple conceptions of leadership—the meaning of leadership is contested. For example, a study of how academics in Aotearoa / New Zealand experience and make sense of leadership, and how these relate to institutional, sociocultural, and political contexts, found four overarching meanings (Juntrasook, 2014):

• Leadership as position
• Leadership as performance
• Leadership as practice
• Leadership as professional role model for others

Given these different meanings, there is a need for developing more inclusive and broader theories of leadership that can inform both leadership practices and policies, for example relating to promotion and tenure. As discussed above, leadership need not be limited to a formal position, but can be understood in terms of an academic’s performance at work and demonstrated competency as well as accomplishments in professional contexts (Juntrasook, 2014, p. 24). If an academic achieves highly, then this person is considered a leader in that field. Importantly, leadership can also be understood as professional practice in everyday contexts—as ‘distributed’ among practitioners rather than concentrated in a limited number of formal positions. And finally, leadership can be understood in terms of academics being role models for others, in the sense of leading exemplary lives that others can follow.

A recent substantial review of the literature on leadership of higher education found three main perspectives: the ‘traditionalist’, which focuses on the cultural context and argues neoliberal business practices have undermined academic self-governance; the ‘reformist’ perspective is grounded in values of social justice and argues for a more democratic and inclusive, distributed  approach to leadership; and the ‘pragmatist’ perspective is more functionally oriented on identifying the competences and skills needed for effective leadership in universities (Macfarlane et al., 2024). The authors argue that leadership development programmes should draw on insights from all three perspectives, as each provides important insights relating to how cultural context influences leadership (‘traditionalist’ perspective), how values and purpose shape leadership (‘reformist’ perspective), and what skills and competences leaders need (‘pragmatist’ perspective) (pp. 1392-1393).

While these reviews are potentially very helpful in unpacking the nature of leadership in higher education, and especially that it need not be formal or positional, it is striking that they do not appear to recognize that engaging in SoTL itself involves a form of leadership. Returning to Mårtensson and Roxå’s study (2016, p. 259), as they note the project reports they studied themselves “constitute scholarly artefacts that can be used for the benefit of other leaders in similar roles within and outside the organisation. These artefacts [thereby] demonstrate leadership in theory as well as leadership in practice from different local academic contexts”. What this means is that the project reports, in which local-level leaders investigated their scholarly practice as leaders including the challenges they faced as leaders within their local contexts, themselves constitute leadership. By documenting, peer reviewing, and disseminating their project reports, the authors of the reports enacted leadership in the act of sharing: they are leaders not only of, but through SoTL. For SoTL leaders, what this underscores is that it is important to take a wider, more holistic view of leadership.

Concluding Thoughts: Going Global?

In this chapter, we have discussed key challenges of engaging in SoTL and highlighted the importance of leadership in supporting this work. We then focused on untangling the complex interrelationship between context and change in higher education, noting that in principle, as university teachers who educate our students, we should see this work as involving leadership. For this reason, we devoted time to looking more closely at what recent scholarship can tell us about educational leadership, in order to derive greater conceptual clarity concerning leadership. The purpose of this final section is to return to the tension between the local and global when it comes to SoTL. What is the appropriate level of sharing of scholarly inquiry in the case of SoTL projects?

While the local context and the meso-level are crucial for the cultural work of educational development through SoTL (Stensaker, 2018), this ought not to be the sole focus of such work. As mentioned earlier, an important part of my own complex context is that of a research-intensive university in Singapore, a highly cosmopolitan, outward-looking city-state located in Southeast Asia. The student population is diverse; while my colleagues are from across the world, all of them have in common that they highly value research rooted in their disciplinary identity. In that context, a key realization—a “critical moment of practice” (Chick, 2018) in my engagement with SoTL as an university teacher and developer—was that (of course!) not all academics are trained as social scientists in the discipline of education. Different and equally valid, depending on context, conceptions of research exist, including of methodology and what counts as evidence (Poole, 2013), which are strongly connected to academics’ disciplines. A second realization was that though cosmopolitan, Singapore is located “on the margins of SoTL discourse” (Chng & Looker, 2013), given that we are remote from the metropolitan centre from where SoTL originated and where it still arguably is strongest: North / Euro-America (Chng, Mårtensson, & Leibowitz, 2020). And so I have found it important to honour both of these sides—to, as it were, deconstruct the binary between the local and the international.

On the one hand, the department provides the lifeblood of an academic’s existence and engaging in the practice-based work of SoTL in that context can lead to iterative improvement of personal practice and collective development of departmental culture, where—as academics—we seek to integrate specialised disciplinary research identities with day-to-day teaching, something like Shulman’s (1987) ‘pedagogical content knowledge’. Yet at the same time, international conversations and connections can provide a broader perspective, and as “critical moments of practice” they helped to change how I understand teaching “as intellectual work distinct from scholarship of discovery in education” (Bernstein & Poole, 2020): that academics’ identities by-and-large are not the identities of educational researchers (Mårtensson, Roxå, & Olsson, 2011, p.60).

Through international university networks and conferences like ISSOTL and ICED, and involvement in journals like Teaching and Learning Inquiry and the International Journal for Academic Development, I met leaders in SoTL and started reading the work they had published. A visit to Lund in 2015 completely changed my perspective on teaching and SoTL, helping me to see the importance for SoTL of ‘didactic’ inquiry into ‘what works’ (Hutchings, 2000, p.5), with the crucial purpose of developing it in the local teaching and learning context. However, other significant conversations that resonated with other aspects of my context (as someone from the Global South who witnessed and unwittingly benefited from racial oppression in apartheid South Africa) revealed that SoTL also has the potential to address the urgent and enduring challenges facing the world (Felten & Geertsema, 2023). In this regard, those of us who as university teachers engage in SoTL can learn from work emanating in the Global South relating to decolonizing the curriculum (e.g. Behari-Leak & Mokou, 2019) and the importance of questioning assumptions relating to the coloniality of knowledge, being, and power.

A main learning point, when we look at some of this important work from the Global South, relates to the need to broaden our understanding of the potential of SoTL to make a difference to the important interests of students mentioned earlier. Work from outside the ‘mainstream’ of SoTL has convincingly argued that to foster student success we need to deepen our understanding of students’ contexts. Regardless of whether our students come from the same country as ours or from elsewhere in the world, “there is ample evidence that students are largely understood in ways that are decontextualised from their histories and socio-economic realities” (Boughey & McKenna, 2021, p.56; see also Looker, 2011). Being attentive to the unique histories and specific socio-economic realities of students matters immensely because as contexts differ, students have been influenced by different realities and different conceptions grounded in diverse cultural practices, including what the purpose of higher education is and how students relate to their learning environment, for example in terms of motivation (Looker, 2011, p. 30). Supporting students to succeed—transforming their lives, which as we saw is a key purpose of SoTL—and thereby offering them opportunities to make a difference within society, requires that we approach students in ways that provide them with ‘epistemic access’ (Young & Muller, 2016), which goes beyond a narrow, psychologized approach to learning. Not all students are the same; who they are and where they come from should make a substantial difference to how as university teachers we design, teach, and assess our courses as we transform research into curriculum and pedagogy (Bernstein, 2000). For this reason, it’s important to focus on developing a “situational ethos” (Behari-Leak, 2022, p.33) that attends to these contextual matters. We should be asking not only ‘what works?’, but ‘what works where?’ and ‘what works for what purposes?’. This situational ethos further requires “a more expansive view of learning to inquire seriously into ‘what works’ for enabling student well-being, metacognition, belonging, engagement with difference, and more” (Felten & Geertsema, 2023, p.1107).

Through international exchanges—and by looking beyond one’s immediate local context — it becomes possible to see that “institutions … might better improve the learning of our students by making the faculty’s intellectual work in teaching visible for discussion and collaboration than by inviting our colleagues to discover new frontiers in educational practice or theory” (Bernstein, 2010, p.5). In this way, globalizing the local can be not only incredibly enriching for us in our own specific locations, but can make a difference locally and more widely, beyond this crucially important local context. These ideas have also been influential in my home institution, as we revised the university’s education-focused promotion pathway, in that it seeks to honour academics as first and foremost experts in their chosen discipline (or interdiscipline), and understands educational leadership as non-positional: as involving the sharing and peer review of inquiry that is informed by scholarly literature on teaching relevant to, and integrated with the academic’s discipline.

Engagement in SoTL, while necessarily focused on local contexts, can at the same time transcend those contexts and become “cosmopolitan” through international connections. We can and should be local-level leaders, whether formally appointed to positions where we can make change, or through sharing our inquiries into ways in which to support diverse students to succeed. By sharing this highly contextualized work more widely too, we can enact ways of rethinking leadership that can make a wider difference in the world.

Endnote