Call: Proposals for the ZHdK Teaching Award 2022

The ZHdK Teaching Award is announced by the Dossier Learning & Teaching with a specific topic. The conditions of the call are binding. Teaching prize topic: "Collaboration concepts".

Collaboration is one of the central working models in artistic/design teaching. The art university in particular uses it to formulate fundamental concepts of learning and teaching. These concepts are oriented towards artistic and design practice and as such carry an aesthetically shaped learning model within their center.

The completed change of perspective in didactics points away from teaching and has moved learning and its forms into the focus. Linked to this shift the student perspective came into view and with it the topic of "individual support", which has also long been a focus of teaching development at the ZHdK.

If the individual or the singular is emphasized and promoted, greater diversity and plurality emerge, which demand greater appreciation within the forms of collaboration. What new qualities are needed to foster connections between students, when diversity is a fundamental condition of working, is one of the current central questions for many formats of collaboration.

Spaces for students to build their individual profiles will be further expanded with the Major-Minor model. As an accompanying phenomenon of the call for students to find their "individual" learning path, individual choice in the class is increasingly resulting in compositions of students that are more heterogeneous than we have been used to. This creates new challenges for collaborative work. These challenges will continue to increase at the ZHdK in the foreseeable future.

All of this brings the value of collaboration in teaching at ZHdK into focus.

Call for proposals for the teaching award

We call for proposals of collaboration concepts from examples of teaching practice at ZHdK! Please describe your solution for a teaching sequence or module that addresses some of the described aspects or further challenges of collaboration:

• What value do you assign to collaboration issues in your teaching?
• How and to what purposes are you creating collaboration formats for collaborative work in the classroom today?
• How is the trend toward a focus on students, their learning, and the increasing individualization in studies changing your collaboration formats?
• What competencies do you want to foster in collaboration and how does this meaningfully complement individual student profiles?
• How does collaboration define your teaching or the allocation of roles in the classroom?
• In the context of diversity, how can teachers facilitate equitable collaboration on an eye-to-eye level and deal with inequalities and power relations?
• What concepts are successful in producing challenging collaborative outcomes today?
• How does peer learning work best and at what moment does it become collaboration?  
• How do you deal with the ambivalence when individuals put their interests aside when collaborating for the benefit of the learning groups?
• What challenges in collaboration do you encounter and what solutions have you found to resolve them in the classroom?

Propoasals can be the work of individuals, tandems, teams, and mixed groups of teachers and students. The proposal should take into account both the student and the teacher perspective and should present aspects of learning as well as teaching. Concepts formulated with a certain degree of abstraction are desired, in order to make the model-like nature and transferability to other teaching situations imaginable.

The Teaching Award 2022 does not promote concepts for future developments, but is granted for existing and proven concepts.

Award conditions

The teaching prize is endowed with CHF 10,000. It is donated by Credit Suisse as the "Credit Suisse ZHdK Award for Best Teaching 2022".

Four of the submitted concepts will be nominated for the teaching award - we ask these four nominees to prepare their concepts for the exhibition and presentation in November 2022 as an audio documentation and to present them at the teaching award event. Documentation, presentation, and attendance at the 2022 Teaching Award Ceremony on November 30, 2022 are mandatory. The production of the documentation and the audio production will be supported by the Dossier Learning & Teaching.

At the Teaching Award Ceremony, the nominated concepts will be discussed by the Teaching Award juries with regard to their qualities, and they will decide on the awarding of the Teaching Award. The juries consist of all teachers and students participating in the event Teaching Award 2022. The three concepts in the final round that are not awarded with the teaching prize are entitled to a production cost contribution of 1,500 each for the documentation of their concept as appreciation. Please note the conditions of participation.

How can you apply for the Teaching Award

The Proposal for the Teaching Award should present a collaboration concept on one to three pages in written form. The Application Template should be submitted by email to Yanne Balzer yanne.balzer@zhdk.ch.

We look forward to your proposals and are happy to answer any questions you may have! The Teaching Award Team of the Learning & Teaching Dossier, Bernadett Settele, Anne Gruber, Yanne Balzer, Suzana Richle, Wanja Kröger

Submit proposals till June 1, 2022, 12:00 p.m.

Award Timeline

wann	was
till May 11, 2022	Make suggestions for Teachers to be nominated for the Award
till June 01, 2022	Teachers apply for the Award with a Teaching & Learning Concept
June 05, 2022	4 nominations for the Award are made by Dossierkommission Learning & Teaching
June to November	4 nominees prepare detailed documentation of their concepts
November 30, 2022	Award juries select the winning concept from the 4 nominees

The teaching prize has been awarded according to a new concept since 2020. The teaching prize promotes teaching development by awarding it for innovative concepts on a current topic of teaching development at the ZHdK. Furthermore, with its new jury procedure, the Teaching Award is organized in a dialogical way, so that the qualities of the submitted concepts are discussed by different juries and their particular strengths are pointed out. In these discussions, the juries develop points of reference and criteria for successful teaching in a specific subject area.

In this way, the Teaching Award promotes the exchange on acute topics of teaching development between lecturers and students who participate in the Teaching Award juries. In 2020, more than 60 people were able to discuss the teaching award topics together and a broad support of the teaching award topic in the ZHdK emerged.