A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Teaching in the disciplines
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Component
Beliefs related
to teaching:
Personal and
most often
untested
assumptions,
premises or
suppositions
about instruction
that guide one’s
teaching actions.
Emerging dimension and description
Beliefs about the purpose of instruction:
The teacher’s views about the long-term finalities of higher education
systems, his or her expectations directed at graduates.
Beliefs about the conditions for instruction:
The teacher’s views about the basic requirements or conditions for
effective university teaching and/or learning to take place.
*Beliefs about teaching and teachers:
The teacher’s views about the role and responsibilities of the university
teacher or what constitutes ‘good’ university teaching.
*Beliefs about learning and learners:
The teacher’s views about the roles and responsibilities of a learner in
the university context.
Component
Table 15.2 Dimensions associated with components of disciplinary specificity
Emerging dimension and description
Socio-cultural
characteristics:
Characteristics
that are socially
constructed
through the
establishment
of norms,
practices or rules
within a group
of individuals.
Epistemological
structure:
Characteristics
that directly
depend on the
epistemological
structure of
the field.
*Teaching in the discipline:
Norms, conventions, or rules about teaching that seem to prevail among
colleagues teaching the same discipline and/or students learning that
discipline.
*Learning in the discipline:
Norms, conventions, or rules about learning that seem to prevail among
colleagues teaching the same discipline and/or students learning that
discipline.
*Knowing in the discipline:
Norms, conventions, or rules about knowing that seem to prevail among
colleagues teaching the same discipline and/or students learning that
discipline.
Practising in the discipline:
Norms, conventions, or rules about practising that seem to prevail
among colleagues teaching the same discipline and/or students learning
that discipline.
*Description of the discipline:
The nature of the teacher’s discipline or what their discipline is about
(the level of complexity or difficulty of the discipline).
Organisation of the discipline:
What the main branches and/or sub-branches of the teacher’s discipline
are, how these have evolved over time.
Relation to other disciplines:
How the teacher’s discipline relates or compares to other disciplines
(similarities and/or differences, changes in the relative status of the
discipline in relation to others).