Conceptualising what it is that university teachers need to have

Résumé fourni par la source

In the general educational literature of the last 50 years, concepts such as knowledge, expertise, skills, and competence have been used to describe what it is that teachers need to have to be able to perform their teaching tasks in the best possible way. In this chapter, we build on this literature to analyse the concepts that are used in reviews on what defines a “good” university teacher. We begin by outlining how the concepts knowledge, expertise, skills, and competence have been employed in research on teachers and teaching in the past decades, as well as the paradigms they represent. We conclude this overview with a conceptualisation of competence as a continuum ranging from dispositions (affect, motivation, knowledge) to performance (teaching behaviour) based on the work of Blömeke and her colleagues. We then report on the analyses of 25 reviews of the higher education literature on teacher knowledge, expertise, skills, and competence. This analysis is guided by research questions focusing on the aims of the reviews and the conceptualisations they employ. We found that the aims of most reviews pertained to professional development for university teachers and that competence dominated as a concept. Definitions of competence varied but always encompassed skills or the ability to perform tasks and often also to knowledge and other dispositions in a general way. Attention for the specifics of pedagogical knowledge or pedagogical content knowledge was largely absent, even though, in the general literature on teachers and teaching, this is regarded an important concept when referring to adaptability and innovation.

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