The motivation for the activity is to accommodate new teaching staff who have asked for an introduction to their section’s or department’s approach to teaching and a possibility to speak about teaching in general in an informal setting. The meetings are intended to create a space where teachers can discuss among them the didactic framework for teaching and share experience and challenges from their own teaching practice. The meetings also help to highlight teaching as an important undertaking at the University.
The activity is organised as lunch meetings, and all teachers who wish to attend are invited to just turn up. At the meetings they can discuss the challenges they encounter in their teaching, exchange good advice or simply their teaching experience. The meetings take place in the lunchroom, and meeting invitations are sent out in advance in Outlook. This ensures a fixed system regarding time and place for the meetings and gives them a status equal to that of other activities in the degree programme.
Speaking about teaching in an internal setting helps to streamline the approach to teaching taken by the department’s teaching staff. The meetings contribute to good internal communication and better understanding among the course teachers, which hopefully rubs off on the students attending the courses. Moreover, the meetings invite the participants to continuously focus on pedagogic and didactic issues and to exchange ideas with their colleagues, which contributes to ensuring development in the individual teachers’ approach to teaching.
This example of practice is developed in connection to "Projekt 1. studieår", where initiatives for retention at the faculty of arts at Aarhus University was mapped.
