In Norway, Teacher Education is strictly regulated by the Ministry of Education and Research, and it is up to each higher education institution to ensure the management of the quality of programs. Report no. 16 to the Parliament, “Culture for quality in higher education” (Meld. St. (2016-2017) says that program management is expected to ensure that the entire academic environment is engaged in the study programs and that there is academic coherence and coherence in the curricula. This is in line with what the European Commission (2017) describes as an important task in renewing the EU agenda for higher education: “Good institutional leadership and effective internal cooperation and resource management become even more important when the institutions’ range of tasks increases and more emphasis is placed on measuring and demonstrating performance”.

The program management is responsible for creating good arenas for discussing the program's development so that the entire academic community is engaged and feels ownership of the study program. The objective of these regulations is to ensure that teacher education institutions offer integrated, profession-orientated teacher education rooted in research and experience-based knowledge (Ministry of Education and Research, 2016, p. 1). The education shall be characterized by high academic quality, by coherence and coherence between subjects, subject didactics, pedagogy, and practical training, and by close interaction with the professional field.  

This project will especially look at how program leaders (head) of Teacher Education across disciplines in a matrix organization work with external and structural framework conditions, how to engage the academic community in the strategies, and how to build professional-orientated teacher education that is both research- and practice-based. We present a project and discuss some issues related to the study program’s role in a university in Norway where different departments of discipline deliver their service (knowledge) to the Teacher Education Program across institutes. The expectations are that the head of the program should work collaboratively in a matrix organization where institutes are organized according to subject discipline and must deliver to the various programs.

Leading and managing study programs has been pointed to as one of the most complex and challenging aspects of higher education, partly because program management often appears more as an important piece in coordination than as a strategic actor (Aamodt et al., 2016; Johansen, 2020). There is also a change in higher education institutions, for example, new strategic policy documents, whitepapers, new financing arrangements, lower recruitment, and changes in institutional structure that have a great influence on the role of leading and managing study programs.

Previous research nationally, and especially internationally (Evans, 2022; Irving, 2015; Johansen, 2020; Jones et al., 2014) points to the challenge it is for heads of study programs to see themselves as leaders in an educational institution. Therefore, we ask: what opportunities and challenges to strengthen quality lies in leading a Teacher Education Program in a matrix organization?   

Our methodology approach springs from ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019), where one tries to understand human behavior through what they do (the practices) in a social and cultural community. Data is collected from a workshop with a group of leaders at middle-level management in an institution in Norway, strategical policy documents, and the researcher's own experiences. The researchers use data from their practices and are both researchers and participants in this study where we analyze strategic government documents and compare them to lived experience and experiences from workshop methodology. The workshop has been a discussion of hypotheses and claims, related to leadership roles at the middle level, to explore the experience of leading a study program in a matrix organization. The policy documents are Report No. 16 to the Parliament, “Culture for quality in higher education” (Meld. St. (2016-2017), The Norwegian qualifications framework for lifelong learning (NQF), and Evaluations of quality in education. These two latest documents are from the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT). It is important to us that the project should be a contribution to research on study leadership in higher education, which response to the need for more research on the management of study programs, and in this context research on the challenges experienced by the leader responsible for the programs (Solbrekke and Stensaker, 2016, p. 145). Material is organized and analyzed based on Engström's model (1999), to identify conditions that can be challenged to increase the quality of the Teacher Education Program.

The hypotheses we discussed were about different issues we face, but we always ended up discussing cooperation/interaction in different ways. Management of large study programs that go across several institutes with many different stakeholders has loyalty challenges with the matrix organization, which in turn creates challenges in strengthening the quality of the study programs through collaborative management teams. Data showed that the lines of cooperation are of great importance for the implementation of quality in the program, but also that failing collaboration (dotted lines) weakens quality through weakened ownership and weakened communication. One of the major challenges seems to be engaging the whole academic community for a common goal, and leaders lack management tools. We will further discuss this through the poster presentation.

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