Marita Sánchez Moreno

Las actividades de aprendizaje en la enseñanza universitaria: ¿hacia un aprendizaje autónomo de los alumnos?

Introduction. One of the activities that characterizes teaching is the design of student learning. Teachers are continually making decisions that affect one way or another what students learn and the way they do. Usually this process takes place in contexts of privacy. Until the entry into the European Higher Education Area, the visibility of learning design that teachers performed was limited. In this research we analyze the way the university teachers designed the learning of their students. To do this we focus on describing and analyzing the learning activities that teachers selected to guide the processes of acquisition of competence by students. Methodology. The collection of data in our study was conducted through semi-structured interviews with 58 teachers from different universities of Andalusia and representatives from different areas of knowledge. We have interviewed teachers with a proven track record of innovation projects and activities. The purpose of the interview was that the participants describe a sequence of learning that usually planned and implemented for the development of the subject they teach. Results. The interviews were recorded and analyzed using a category system that has allowed to classify the activities and tasks that teachers used to plan student learning. We have grouped the learning activities in the following categories: assimilative, information management, application, communication, production, experiential and evaluative. The results show that the assimilative activities are the most common and generally there are no differences between teachers from different branches of knowledge in terms of learning tasks that plan.

Women leaders as agents of change in higher education organizations

Purpose – This paper seeks to point out the relationship between women leadership and their role in the transformation of university organizations, on the basis of eight case studies analysed in the framework of a broader research on women who occupy high‐managerial posts in Spanish universities.Design/methodology/approach – Two of the eight cases studied are more deeply described and discussed in terms of the relationship among the organizational context in which these women leaders perform their managerial functions, the leadership styles that they deploy, as well as the transformations they promoted in critical moments of the organizations that they head.Findings – Even though the differences in all these aspects between the two cases studied do not allow a single and homogeneous “feminine style” of management to be identified, a flexible and adaptive common orientation in terms of leadership was found, which leads one to suggest that leadership style is not a relevant issue when managing loosely coupl...