Movement of change: how university teaching is rewarded and recognised
The project involves an international university collaboration, developing knowledge on how teaching can be rewarded, an ongoing change currently happening at many higher education institutions around the world. Best practice is collected and shared. KTH, Chalmers and Lund participate from Sweden.
Project context
Recent decades have seen growing calls to reform the criteria underpinning academic career progression, with concerns raised about the undervaluation of university teaching in appointment and promotion processes. A global shift is now underway, as pioneering research-intensive universities rethink how they reward teaching in academic careers and introduce initiatives that could redefine how teaching is supported and recognised across the sector. The momentum for change has been accelerated as universities unite with national and global peers to drive cross-institutional reform to career pathways and promotion criteria.
This global movement has now reached a tipping point, with a critical mass of institutions engaged in ground-breaking initiatives to improve the support, evaluation and reward for university teaching and learning. The transformative policies and practices at these leading-edge universities hold the potential to be widely adopted and mainstreamed across the higher education sector.
Purpose (outcome)
The purpose of the project is to deepen and systematise knowledge via an international university collaboration in two phases; first via an interview study with leaders and change managers at a number of universities and then via an anonymous survey open to all academics at participating universities.
Project results (output)
The project will deliver the following concrete results:
- Phase 1 (work performed 2024): The review ‘Mapping the global movement for change to the reward of university teaching’ which is based on interviews with 131 leaders and change-makers from across the world, all of whom are engaged in improving the systems of evaluation, support and reward for university teaching.
- Inventory of the global movement for change
- Best practice solutions from across the world.
- Phase 2 (work performed 2025): The ‘2025 Teaching Cultures Survey’, which is based on an anonymous enquiry open to the full academic community at each participating university. 12,071 academics from 17 universities, spanning nine countries and four continents, participated.
Time plan
Start date: 2023-11-01
End date: 2026-02-01
Project documentation
If you have a KTH ID, you can read the documents when logged in:
- Poster: Poster_FrU24ht_2327-KTH_ChangeMovement.pdf (Swedish)
- Project initiation document: Projektdirektiv_FrU23_2327-KTH_ChangeMovement.pdf (Swedish)
Final result
- Resultat1_2327-KTH_2025-Global-mapping-report.pdf (engelska)
- Result2_2327-KTH_Teaching-Cultures-Survey-March-2026.pdf
- In addition to the reports above, there are several resources for the practical work of changing how university teaching is rewarded and recognised: advancingteaching.com/resources