Recently, the perspective of institutional culture (Hénard & Roseveare, 2012; Transatlantic Dialogue, 2014) for quality teaching has emerged as an important topic among policy makers, practitioners, and academics. But what is quality when we use it to refer to university education? Governments, students and their families, employers, and funding agencies increasingly demand value for their money and desire more efficiency through teaching (Hénard & Leprince-Ringuet, 2008), but others may hold differing conceptions of quality. Lee Harvey and Bjorn Stensaker (2008) have cited five ways that quality is typically defined in the literature: exceptional, perfection or consistency, fitness for purpose, value for money, and transformation. Applying a cultural theory framework to the notion of a quality culture, Harvey and Stensaker (2008) further described four types of quality cultures: responsive, reactive, regenerative, and reproductive.
This poster applies these notions of quality definitions and quality cultures (Harvey & Stensaker, 2008) to a recently developed Teaching Culture Perceptions Inventory (Wolf, Goff, Dawson, Legwegoh, Joe, Kustra, and Hughes, 2013) that is currently being pilot-tested at three Ontario universities. In addition, we present an initial review of promising practices that could provide future guidelines to support institutions in transforming their institutional culture into one that more deeply values quality teaching and promotes an innovative learning culture (Cox et al, 2011).