Dorothy Spiller

The teaching portfolio: institutional imperative or teacher’s personal journey?

This research draws on the experiences of a group of tertiary teachers who compiled a multi‐purpose portfolio as an assessment component of a postgraduate certificate in tertiary teaching at a New Zealand University. The research was initially undertaken in response to feedback from some of the participants that the experience of compiling a portfolio generated intense emotions. The data for this study were the retrospective reflections of the tertiary teachers on the experience of creating a portfolio as well as the portfolios themselves. The authors chose a narrative research methodology as an appropriate way to investigate a process that essentially involved the storying of the participants’ achievements and identities as tertiary teachers. The findings revealed that some participants felt uncomfortable about the blend of the formative (or developmental) and summative (or evaluative) functions of the multi‐purpose portfolio and that producing the portfolio evoked a range of complex emotions. These findings have led to the reformulation of the portfolio task.

Tertiary teachers and student evaluations: never the twain shall meet?

Internationally, centralised systems of student evaluation have become normative practice in higher education institutions, providing data for monitoring teaching quality and for teacher professional development. While extensive research has been done on student evaluations, there is less research-based evidence about teachers’ perceptions of and engagement with student evaluations, the focus of the research reported in this paper. An interpretive approach framed the study in which data were gathered through questionnaire and interview responses from teaching staff at three New Zealand tertiary institutions. Results highlighted the general acceptance of the notion of student evaluations, recurring ideas about the limitations of evaluations and significant gaps in the way academics engage with student evaluation feedback. Recommendations for enhancing teacher engagement with student evaluation are made to optimise the potential for student evaluations to inform teaching development and to improve students’ learning experiences.

Language and Academic Leadership: Exploring and Evaluating the Narratives.

This paper draws on a study of academic chairpersons’ experiences in one research‐intensive university in New Zealand. The research goal was see if there were recurring threads in chairpersons’ narratives about their experience and management of conflict and challenge. The research revealed that one of the most pervasive stories concerned a set of beliefs about the nature of academia. This tale that was interpreted in a variety of different even contradictory ways was the notion that academia was or should be based on collegiality. This idea was often presented in conjunction with other stories about academia such as autonomy and professionalism and in opposition to the concept of managerialism. A second significant thread was a range of perspectives about the expectation that chairpersons should be managers of resources. This paper discusses these findings in relation to the literature and argues that we need to find new ways of expressing and enacting the values that the term collegiality attempts to capture and a means of integrating them into the current demand for performance, stringent resource management and accountability.

You can’t teach me: exploring academic resistance to teaching development

Abstract Societal, governmental, and research expectations of universities in contemporary western society have led to increasing calls for teacher professionalism and accountability as well as research excellence and research-informed teaching. Consequently, demands on academic staff development continually emerge, which academics may view as oppressive. This paper reports research that critically examined the commonalities between a pre-established set of discourses about resistance to teaching development and views about teaching and learning in academics’ comments on student evaluations of teaching. The comparative study and the identification of commonalities are used to speculate about implications for academic development approaches both with teachers and institutions.

Critical thinkers and capable practitioners

Purpose – Educating the students to be capable practitioners for the future suggests that teachers be visionaries and futurologists to identify the skills required for the communication needs of society. The purpose of this paper is to argue for a sustainable curriculum – one that meets the needs of the present and prepares students to meet the demands of the future. Such a curriculum identifies the importance of developing student capability in critical thinking and in research methodology. It is an approach in which discussion, research activities and peer assessment can help to develop these dispositions and prepare students for effective participation in work and society for the long term. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on the pedagogical literature on discussion-led learning for critical inquiry and the use of peer review and feedback to provide the theoretical framework for the paper. Response data were collected from a postgraduate public relations (PR) class where two initiatives we...

Writing to learn: A Collaborative Endeavour

SUMMARY An interrelated problem in teaching and learning development in higher education is that staff development may be divorced from the disciplines in which teaching and learning occurs, at least this is the case in the New Zealand context. For example, while staff developers may engage with discipline‐specific tasks alongside staff, developmental units on university campuses exist independently of academic departments. A corollary of this is that the development of students’ learning skills such as essay writing, is perceived as the responsibility of learning developers on campus rather than academic staff. This can create an artificial division between teaching and learning. This paper outlines a process which has successfully been used to address these concerns. The focus on ‘writing to learn’ with undergraduate students was a collaborative endeavour which included staff developers working alongside academic staff and students within subject tutorials. This placed the developer at the nexus of both...

Developing Knowledge Connections to Promote an Integrated Learning Experience for Students in a First Year Management Course

A key challenge for lecturers of many first year Management courses is how to help students create meaningful knowledge connections while at the same time introducing considerable foundational material. This article reports on an instructional innovation that explores how we can better design and teach a first year Management course that provide strategies which assist students to engage with course ideas and recognize relationships between concepts. In addition to deliberate and systematic alignment of design, teaching and learning strategies, and assessment tasks, we use concept mapping to support learners in the construction of their own meaning of course material; to connect, and integrate key concepts. Our approach demonstrates that when students are provided with the space and tools to support the development of meaningful knowledge connections, their learning can improve.

Finding a Tūrangawaewae

To the uninitiated, the story of an academic career may appear relatively straightforward; individuals succeed in a particular discipline at undergraduate and postgraduate level, complete a doctorate in a specialised aspect of that discipline and then take up a position at a tertiary institution that usually requires some combination of teaching, research and administration.