The relationship between HE teachers' mission and teaching approach: Interaction inspiring enthusiasm as the basis for building knowledge and commitment to the profession

Abstract

The fundamental role of higher education is to help students learn to cope in a constantly changing and uncertain world. The key to this is to support the development of their agency and commitment to learning. Although technology is the main tool of knowledge transfer, according to the OECD, it is teachers who represent the values of their field and that of knowledge and learning.Since academic development is a relatively recent topic in the Hungarian literature, the present research aims to explore teachers' role interpretation, goals, missions, approaches to teaching, and their commitment to academic development at one of Hungary's leading business universities, the Budapest Business University (BBU). The study is based on 33 semi-structured interviews recorded at BBU involving 33 teachers of economics-related subjects in three faculties of the university. The interview transcripts were analysed by thematic analysis.The results show that participants have markedly different teaching approaches, and the interrelationships between their objectives, missions and academic development can be seen as constituting a system. Finally, the potential interrelationships among the different themes were examined. The findings show that the teachers' goals and missions are strongly related, although more affective factors can be identified in relation to missions. These affective factors include inspiring enthusiasm and building partnership and mutual learning. In line with this, most participants adopt a teacher/student interaction strategy, only few cases of student focus were identified.