Dr. Sabine Lauer

In this talk, I will present selected findings and a methodological reflection of my cumulative dissertation project on the topic of “transformational governance of academic teaching”. The four publications originate from the research project entitled “TeachGov – Transformational Governance of Academic Teaching,” which was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF; Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung), and which ran between October 2013 and September 2016.

Based on previous findings and the assumption of a continued cultural disregard for academic teaching, this project has investigated in a two-stage research design how universities can systematically upgrade the status of academic teaching beyond monetary incentives. In the first stage, a multiple-case study design targeting four teaching-awarded universities (two research universities and two universities of applied sciences) was adopted to identify and theorize institutional arrangements of supposedly ‘effective’ modes of teaching governance in more depth.

The second stage encompassed a follow-up survey among full professors at these universities to draw more representative conclusions regarding their effectiveness. Additionally, a complete survey of all German university professors was able to be realized, which further allowed the analysis of potential influences of different teaching governance modes on individual teaching behavior on a larger scale. Since methodological reflections of third-party funded projects have been largely neglected to date, the concluding chapter of my dissertation explained how textbook accounts on research designs and research methods have been applied in practice.

Sabine Lauer is a sociologist and (bio-)statistician who currently holds the position of a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Organizational Studies, Social and Continuing Education Management at the TU Dortmund University. In the last few years, her research focused on the managerial governance of academic teaching.