Variation in education doctoral students’ conceptions of university teaching

Abstract

The development of doctoral students as university teachers has received substantially less attention compared with their development as researchers, with a similar deficit extending to research on how they experience and understand university teaching. This article reports the results of a phenomenographic study of education doctoral students’ conceptions of teaching in higher education. Using samples from two education departments in England and Sweden, we conducted interviews to identify variation in doctoral students’ experiences of university teaching. Analysis of the transcripts produced six qualitatively different conceptions of teaching: doctoral students conceptualised university teaching as a means of (A) transmitting knowledge, (B) presenting contrasting concepts of education, (C) communicating and engaging with students, (D) enabling students to apply knowledge and skills, (E) enabling students to interpret and compare concepts of education, and (F) promoting personal, professional and societal development and change. While in broad agreement with previous studies on university teachers’ conceptions of teaching, the study offers a unique insight into how the subject of education is understood by doctoral students who teach. The findings also underline the need to introduce common frameworks of academic development for academics and doctoral students alike that prioritise ways of representing and engaging with the structure of the subject, rather than the acquisition of teaching skills.

A phenomenographic outcome space for ways of experiencing lecturing

“…Beliefs about teaching have been studied in many different contexts, including adult education (Pratt, 1998), police training (Shipton, 2020), education doctoral students (Mimirinis & Ahlberg, 2020), and many more. However, excepting one study focused on small tutorials (Ashwin, 2006), class size has not been considered.…”

Phenomenographic Approaches in Research About Nursing

“…Based on similarities and differences, the researcher groups and re-groups these meaningful utterances until they form a set of categories of understanding about the phenomenon. Tentative categories of description are re-compared to the pool of meaningful utterances, and categories adjusted until a limited set of logically, internally, and hierarchically related categories of description have been defined (Mimirinis, 2019; Mimirinis & Ahlberg, 2021). These categories should stand in “clear relation to the phenomenon” and each should tell us something unique or “distinct” about one way of experiencing the phenomenon (Marton & Booth, 1997, p. 125).…”

Variation in Black students’ conceptions of academic support

“…The categories of description, which depicted qualitatively different ways of understanding, were found to be logically related to one another in terms of complexity and inclusiveness. Aspects of meanings found in prior categories were included in further, more nuanced and complex categories (Marton, 2015, p. 99; Mimirinis & Ahlberg, 2021). We have selected illustrative quotes from the data to exemplify the key meaning in focus in each category.…”