Approaches to teaching, understanding of subject matter and emotions in teaching

What recent research on university teaching has to say about how teachers' approaches to teaching are related to how they understand their subject matter, and their emotions in teaching  

Keith Trigwell, Institute for Teaching and Learning, The University of Sydney 

These relations were explored in two different studies, one qualitative and the other quantitative. In interviews with 37 university teachers, it was possible to identify variation in how they understood the subject matter they were teaching. Some saw it in terms of parts of the whole curriculum and they presented it to students as parts. Others saw these parts as being related to the whole, and others saw the whole (bigger picture) as being made up of parts. It was found that teachers who adopted more of a conceptual change/student-focused approach to teaching were more likely to see their subject in terms of wholes rather than parts. How teachers experience their subject matter may therefore be an element of good teaching given the relations between teaching approach and the quality of student learning.
In the second study, 175 teachers described both their emotions and their approaches to teaching in rela-tion to one of the subject they were teaching. The results suggest that there are significant relations be-tween the ways teachers emotionally experience the context of teaching and the ways they approach their teaching, with positive emotions being associated with student-focused teaching approaches and negative emotions with transmission approaches. The relations help explain why new teaching strategies may not be successful or not even adopted

Keith Trigwell is a visiting VELUX professor at Department of Science Education November 2011- January 2012. He is Professor of Higher Education in the Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Sydney, and was previously Director of the Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice and Reader in Higher Education at the University of Oxford. His research interests include investigating qualitative differences in university teaching and students' learning experiences, including development of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory, teaching-research relations and the scholarship of teaching. He is a former co-president of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and in 2010 received a Lifetime Achievement Award (Leadership) from the Society.

The seminar will be held in English
Time: Kl. 15:00-16:30, 26 January 2012
Venue: Auditorium 1, August Krogh Bygningen, Universitetsparken 13, 2100 Kbh. Ø
Registration: Please complete this web form

Further information, please contact Camilla Rump, cr@ind.ku.dk