Enabling leadership capacity for higher education scholarship in learning and teaching (SOTL) through action research

Action research (AR) offers an ideological fit with the culture and the work of the academy - they share a culture of collegiality, evidence- and theory-based practice, and a focus on reflection and evaluation to inform change and innovation. An AR approach and methodology are also integral to the development of leadership capacity for learning and teaching. This paper focuses on a distributed leadership approach for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) enabled by, and researched through, AR. Discussion and findings are presented through the lens of 20 funded Australian AR projects that used distributed leadership to build capacity for SOTL. These projects have made contributions to SOTL that extend the boundaries of pedagogical AR to a new area of focus: that of a distributed leadership approach to SOTL. An AR meta review of the projects revealed a synergy between AR and distributed leadership. The review generated evidence-based good practice actions for AR that also enable a distributed leadership approach for SoTL. These good practice action statements, together with illustrative vignettes, are presented in this paper. The intention is that the statements can provide a simple guide to using an AR approach to facilitate distributed leadership for higher education SOTL.