The papers for EuroSoTL 2019 will be organised based on the following themes as a guideline:

1. Developing inquiry and research in undergraduate students

Higher education students, regardless of the future awaiting them, must be able to show insight when observing reality, embrace solving new and complex problems, rigorously analyse information and data, communicate and disseminate results and evidence-based interpretations and ethically commit to the challenges of sustainable development and social justice. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning advocates for those approaches being present in students’ experiences regarding their degrees.

Papers on Inquiry based learning and Research oriented learning, experiences where the students act as co-participants of wider research processes (Students as partners), extended learning communities and learning focused on sustainable development challenges will be welcomed.

2. Experiences that stimulate student engagement

Student Engagement is a theoretical construct that has been widely considered in Higher Education literature, particularly in English-speaking countries. Hu & Kuh (2002) define this concept as “the quality of effort students themselves devote to educationally purposeful activities that contribute directly to desired outcomes”. Even though engagement is something attributable to people individually, there are approaches that make engagement depend on the environment conditions in which the subjects interact. In other words, students engage or not, to a certain extent, depending on certain conditions that are observed in the environment. Research has been extensive insofar as determining what those environment conditions are that, according to the empirical studies conducted so far, foster the engagement of the students.

Nowadays, a new generation of young people are coming to university who significantly socialise through social media and electronic devices, a fact that shapes and determines their ways of learning and thinking. The contributions that provide new views of the engagement of students with this profile, most specifically in the first years on their degree courses, will be relevant.

3. Emerging and unpublished experiences that foster significant and deep learning

This Conference will welcome teaching and learning experience that are ground-breaking, undermine routines and progress in experimentation. The search for new pathways for a most cutting-edge scientific and university learning, without overlooking rigour, ethics, creativity and emotion, is a challenge that all of us making up the SoTL community must address and confront. The contribution that students can and must take to this “go further”, along with and in conjunction with the other stakeholders, is particularly relevant. We here want to specifically answer the question regarding which fields are unexplored by SoTL.

4. The professional approach to teaching and learning as the objective of the professional development of academic staff

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) requires a change in the ways that  the  professional development and training of university academic staff is conceived. Schemes such as  UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and supporting learning in Higher Education  and the Australian University Teaching Criteria and Standards Framework open up new perspectives and encourage the units and services of this task design programmes that are more in line with these new ways of conceiving university teaching. We are aware that there are countries that are developing similar framework to the British and to the Australian ones, and, also universities and training units (Academic/Educational Development Units) that are already implementing interesting practical experiences that stimulate the development of SoTL among the academic staff. We are reaching out to them here so that they share their reflections and findings in this stimulating field.

5. SoTL and the Sustainable Development Goals (2030 Agenda)

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has always taken an ethical approach to Higher Education, committed to certain values and ways of acting. The Sustainable Development Goals approved by 193 countries in 2015 are a common framework, an international agenda that must be present in universities at all levels. We therefore wish to invite those SoTL groups and communities that explore practices where they assume challenges to contribute to Sustainable Development through projects, ideas and actions working on different goals or including teaching-learning process as a cross-cutting dimensions of the SDGs. Any academic and institutional actions and/or projects, with multistakeholder participation of teachers, students and social agents, contributing to the development of the SDGs from Higher Education will also be welcome.