<p>In
Colombia, as in the US, higher education institutions are charged with the
twofold responsibility of training well-rounded professionals and pushing the
boundaries of knowledge. Faculty enact this dual responsibility through their
teaching and research duties, among other job-related functions. Also like in
the US, research has increasingly become the foremost function of faculty at most
prominent Colombian universities. As the emphasis on research increased,
teaching became regarded as a simpler activity that requires less effort and
resources. Moreover, while discussions about the importance of quality teaching
and the need to better train faculty to enact their teaching function are
common, promotion and rewards systems at Colombian universities fail to reflect
a real commitment to quality teaching. Research has taken precedence over
teaching, and often is perceived as the only scholarly function of faculty.
While this continued perception cannot be attributed to a single reason, I
hypothesize that how faculty conceive of their teaching role impacts our
ability to make a compelling case for the scholarly nature of teaching.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Testing
this hypothesis requires a systematic approach to exploring faculty’s
conceptions of teaching within a context. To that aim, I pose this research
question: What are conceptions of teaching held by Colombian engineering
faculty interested in improving their teaching? I advance a framework for
exploring conceptions of teaching drawing from Bandura’s Social Cognitive
Theory and previous scholarly works on faculty’s conceptions and beliefs about
teaching. Drawing upon this framework, I explore the beliefs, practices, and
contextual factors of Colombian engineering faculty at three institutions.
While these faculty members differ in terms of their disciplinary backgrounds,
teaching experience, and research activity—both disciplinary and educational,
they all share an interest in improving their teaching practice. This
exploration first takes an analytic approach to identify the pieces that
constitute participants’ conceptions of teaching, and then knits those pieces
together to look at participants as wholes.</p>
<p><br></p><p>The
literature on conceptions of teaching has usually classified them between
traditional teacher-centered to more sophisticated student-centered views. However,
I believe that there is a continuum worth exploring defined by these extreme views.
In fact, I argue that there are multiple continua—or dimensions—that merit
exploration. Such dimensions include perceptions about the role of teachers,
the role of students, the nature of knowledge, the purpose and means of assessment,
and the outcomes of education—previously explored in the relevant literature—and
views of the interaction between college teaching and research—a dimension
distinctive of the present study. My findings suggest that while the role of
the teacher and of students, and the nature of knowledge can be described by the
teacher- to student-center and knowledge-transmission to knowledge-construction
continua, the latter three dimensions are better described along different scales.
Moreover, while there are certain correlations between these dimensions (e.g., perceptions
of the role of the teacher as a guide correlate with perceptions of a more
active role of the students) none of them alone can accurately describe the
nuances of an individual’s conception of teaching. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Conceptions
of teaching uncovered and characterized in this multidimensional way can inform
professional development programs that go beyond the diffusion of pedagogical
innovations to a perspective transformation among participants. Specifically, my
findings corroborate that changes in faculty views of assessment toward more formative
stances foster positive transformations in faculty’s overall conception of
their teaching role and duties. My findings also suggest that faculty members intrinsically
interested in improving their teaching constitute the seed to start educational
reform. Community-building efforts to bring together these faculty should, in
the long term, help transform the views of academic administrators, thus
fostering lasting reform in the perception and recognition of teaching as a
scholarly function of faculty.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/8289533 |
| Date | 15 August 2019 |
| Creators | Juan D Ortega-Alvarez (6852047) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/Conceptions_of_teaching_among_Colombian_engineering_faculty_An_exploratory_study/8289533 |
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