A scientific approach to teaching – to reach innovative pedagogical approaches

This paper is about interdisciplinary common initiatives to enhance and encourage quality of engineering education nationwide, by means of a scientific approach to teaching. To reach innovative pedagogical approaches it is seen as important to stimulate collaboration and knowledge sharing across discipline borders. STEM, referring to the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is in Norway an important field addressed by education policy to improve competitiveness and technology development.Recruitment, to reduce dropout and to increase throughput within STEM is an area of priority. The Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions (UHR) is a cooperative body for Norwegian universities and colleges, whose purpose is to develop Norway as aknowledge based nation of high international standard. Within UHR academic strategic collaboration in the STEM-fields consists of the National Faculty meeting of Natural Sciences (NFmR) and the National Council for Technological Education (NRT), where all Deans within these areas are members. Together with the national center for recruitment to STEM higher education they have started a common top-down initiative with a goal tofacilitate a bottom up initiative for a scholarly approach to planning, carrying out, evaluating, assessing and reviewing teaching, a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) practice. Among others, answers in a survey within mathematics (2989 students and 80 teachers) which documented a lack of formal educational and didactic skills among teachers, underlies the initiative. Many students also rated teacher expertise as high, but educational and didactic skills as inadequate(http://www.uhr.no/ressurser/temasider/samarbeid_arbeidsdeling_og_konsentrasjon/matematikkundersokelsen).To encourage a SoTL approach among higher education teachers has been a main goal. To encourage and give credibility to a SoTL approach it has also been used for the development of these national initiatives. Experiences from LTH, the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University in Sweden, which is very active within the area of teaching and student learning, and from DTU, the Technical University of Denmark as well as from Norwegian Centres of Excellence in Higher Education, have been considered and incorporated during the process.The paper will present the scholarly approach to planning and carrying out the 1st Norwegian STEM conference on teaching and learning, its background and results. It will evaluate, assess and reflect on the process and the experiences from this national initiative to achieve a scholarly approach to teaching and learning within the STEM are