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Creative ways of developing teaching competencies at the university level
Conference paper

Creative ways of developing teaching competencies at the university level

Michael Christie and Tom Adawi
Proceedings of the XXIV Comparative Education Society in Europe International Conference on Comparative Education, pp.1-10
Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) International Conference on Comparative Education: Enlightenment, Creativity, and Education: polities, politics, performances, XXIV (Uppsala, Sweden, 16-Aug-2010–19-Aug-2010)
2010
url
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:390125/FULLTEXT02View
Published Version

Abstract

Education Systems
In 2003, a change was made in the Swedish Higher Education Ordinance, stating that those who want to be employed as a senior lecturer or as a subject teacher must be able to show evidence of pedagogical training. Today, most universities in Sweden have pedagogical development units that offer a ten week course in pedagogy for university teachers. The dilemma we face as academic developers is that the teachers are not always convinced that it is necessary to take such a course and they do not always have the time. In this paper, we describe some creative ways in which we have reformed and improved the pedagogy course we run at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, in order to meet this challenge. The reform was undertaken as an action research project and we have tracked the progress of one hundred full and part time teachers who have completed the course. At the end of the course the teachers were asked to write about what they had learned and how they had applied it in their own practice. Based on the written data, we draw a number of conclusions that can help others increase the competence of university teachers and assist them to teach and supervise in a more creative way. We discuss some of the reasons why many university teachers are locked into traditional teaching methods, starting with the architecture of teaching and learning, and we describe a four-stage 'conceptual change' model we have used to help teachers improve their practice. By expanding their repertoire as teachers they will make the learning process for their students more effective and their own job more enjoyable.

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