Empowerment for Teaching Excellence Through Virtuous Agency

This books offers new ways to think about teaching excellence in higher education and presents a definition of the concept of teaching excellence. It offers a fresh interpretation of Boyer's famous account of scholarship as the foundation of university teaching. To fully understand the nature of teaching excellence in higher education, the book gives an account of the various dimensions of the domain of university teaching and the core drivers required to bring those domains to life. The idea of empowerment underlies the journey to excellence in teaching. The book argues that university lecturers aspiring to become excellent should be active agents, strongly pursuing the development of their perfectible abilities required for high quality teaching.
The work draws on recent developments in virtue theory to set out the qualities of character requisite for guiding and driving university lecturers to grow and develop into excellent teachers.


Hennie Lötter is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. His research interests include justice, human dignity, poverty, and environmental ethics. He has published forty articles and four books, the most recent is called Poverty, Ethics, and Justice [2011]. He has given twenty talks on teaching at various forums in the University of Johannesburg. He developed a tutorial programme in his department, offering specialised training to make postgraduate students proficient in tutoring. He played a key role to secure international accreditation for the tutor training programme of the University of Johannesburg. He has served on the Teaching and Learning Committee, the Higher Degrees Committee, and the Research Ethics Committee of his university. He won a Vice-Chancellor's Distinguished Award: Teacher Excellence at the University of Johannesburg in 2012. He loves photography, gardening with indigenous plants, and spending time in the African wilderness.