Revisiting academics’ beliefs about teaching and learning
KATHERINE SAMUELOWICZ1,∗ & JOHN D. BAIN2
1The University of Queensland, Australia;2Griffith University, Australia(∗author for correspondence; E-mail: [email protected])
Abstract. In the last decade, several classifications of the ways in which academics concep-tualise teaching and learning have been proposed, including our scheme (Samuelowicz andBain 1992). This paper reassesses the framework described in our earlier paper, evaluates theadequacy of the belief dimensions and categories in that framework and considers whetherthere is a ‘transitional’ orientation to teaching and learning as argued by Kember (1997a) inhis recent synthesis of the domain. Thirty-nine academics representing a range of disciplineswere interviewed and in accordance with a ‘beliefs’ framework we sought their typical waysof thinking about teaching and learning, and their dispositions to teach in particular ways.The constant comparison method (Strauss and Corbin 1997) was applied to whole interviewtranscripts to identify broad orientations to teaching and learning, which were then analysedto identify the qualitatively distinct beliefs constituting them. An extended framework ofacademics’ beliefs about teaching and learning is proposed in which seven orientations aredescribed in terms of nine qualitative belief dimensions. There is considerable overlap with ourprevious findings, but there also are some important refinements and additions. Three formsof evidence (the qualitative analysis itself, a hierarchical clustering based on that analysis, andnarratives of two academics) are presented to demonstrate that there are fundamental differ-ences between teaching-centred and learning-centred orientations to teaching and learning.Thus our data are broadly consistent with previously reported evidence, but they provide noempirical support for Kember’s (1997a) ‘transitional’ category acting as a bridge between thetwo major sets of orientations.
Keywords: academics’ beliefs, academic staff development, beliefs, conceptions, conceptionsof teaching, educational beliefs, orientations to teaching and learning
Introduction
In the last decade a number of papers have been published which describeways in which academics conceptualise teaching and learning. Among thosepapers is our article (Samuelowicz and Bain 1992) in which a five levelclassification of orientations to teaching and learning was proposed. Thatframework was derived from global judgments of interview transcripts, eachresulting orientation being analysed subsequently into its constituent beliefs.As is apparent in Table 1, the belief orientations can be ordered in such a
way as to contrast variants of knowledge transmission (teaching-centred) withvariants of learning facilitation (learning-centred).
Despite important differences in method, particularly between pheno-menographic studies concerned with ‘conceptions’ (e.g., Martin and Balla1991; Prosser et al. 1994) and those concerned with ‘belief orientations’(e.g., Fox 1983; Kember 1997b; Samuelowicz and Bain 1992), there aremany points of calibration between the descriptive categories that havebeen used in the literature, so much so that Kember (1997a) has proposeda five category synthesis of the domain. Our variant of that synthesis isprovided in Table 1, where it will be noted that, although the number ofcategories and their boundaries differ from researcher to researcher, theycan be organised along the continuumdescribed above, with an intermediatecategory often appearing between the teaching-centred and learning-centredcategories.
In addition to contributing to the theory of teaching and learning in highereducation, this line of research has practical implications. For example, itimplies that the way in which teaching is conducted in higher education isdependent on the educational beliefs and presumptions of academic staff(Bain 2000; Quinlan 1999; Trigwell et al. 1994; Trigwell and Prosser 1996),and that there may be consequences for the nature of the learning that results(Kember 1997b; Trigwell et al. 1999). The research also implies that newteaching initiatives, such as those related to technology and the internet, arelikely to have quite varied uptake and implementation because of differencesbetween the educational presumptions inherent in the new initiatives andthose of academic staff implementing them (Bain et al. 1998). Connected toboth these observations is the prospect that staff development methods mayhave to take academics’ beliefs and presumptions into account if they are tohave lasting benefits for student learning (Kember 1997b).
The research reported here was undertaken to evaluate the generalityof the belief orientations and dimensions described in our earlier paper(Samuelowicz and Bain 1992). Because the original sample was limited insize (13) and in discipline mix (science and social science), we anticipatedthat a further study based on a larger sample and broader mix of disciplinesmight elicit more variation in perspectives than we were able to observe inthe original sample, perhaps resulting in additional belief orientations and/ordimensions and/or refinements of the belief descriptors.
An issue that assumed prominence once the initial analyses werecompleted concerned the fate of the intermediate orientation. The natureof this category in our 1992 study,facilitating learning, and its analoguein other studies (Table 1), led Kember (1997a) to suggest that academicsexpressing such an orientation were in transition from a transmissive to a
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facilitative perspective, and that interaction between student and teacher wasthe active agent in the change process. We were not aware of Kember’sproposal before the initial analyses were completed, but we re-examined thedata carefully because of the theoretical interest of the intermediate categoryand its potential importance for staff development practices.
Method
Sample
The sample consisted of 39 academics from three universities in Brisbane,Australia representing a range of disciplines: architecture (7), education (3),nursing (7), psychology (2), physiotherapy (7), engineering (3), chemistry(5), physiology (2) and entomology (1). The participants were volunteerswho responded to a request for involvement in the study. Most were teachingundergraduate classes, although the teaching of some was concentrated inpostgraduate courses.
General procedure
As in our 1992 paper, the questioning procedure and the data analytic methodsought the respondent’scharacteristicperspectives, consistent with researchof school teachers’ educational beliefs (Brickhouse 1990; Smith and Shepard1988; Thompson 1984; Wilson and Wineburg 1988). That is, participantswere asked about the teaching and learning in which they usually engagedand how they construed such activity, and the analysis procedure focussedupon broad characteristic trends in each individual’s interview.
Interviews
The semi-structured interviews were guided by a schedule that was basedon the one used for our 1992 research but with several modifications andadditions that were designed to clarify areas insufficiently probed in the1992 study (see Samuelowicz 1999, p. 81). The questions ranged widelyover educational issues, but with a focus on:beliefs about teaching(the aimof teaching; the teacher’s and students’ roles; the nature of good teaching;pleasant and unpleasant teaching experiences; perceived obstacles to goodteaching);beliefs about knowledgeand the construction of courses;beliefsabout student learning(the nature of learning; desired learning outcomes; andindicators of ‘good’ learning); andbeliefs about the links between teachingand learning(does one affect the other; how?). To pursue their typical waysof thinking about these matters, and their disposition to teach in a particular
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Table 1. Ways of conceptualising teaching and learning (studies using phenomenographic and other qualitative methods)
Study Knowledge conveying categories Intermediatecategories
Facilitation of learning categories
Larsson (1983)(phenomenographic)
Transmittinginformation
Facilitatinglearning
Fox (1983)* Transfer Shaping Building Travelling Growing
Dall’Alba (1991)(phenomenographic)
Presentinginformation
Connecting theoryto practice
Developingconcepts
Exploringways ofunderstanding
Bringing aboutconceptualchange
Transmittinginformation
Developingcapacity tobe expert
Martin and Balla(1991)(phenomenographic)
Presentinginformation
Encouraging activelearning
Relatingteaching tolearning
Samuelowicz andBain (1992)
Imparting informa-tion
Transmittingknowledge
Facilitatingunderstanding
Changingstudents’conceptions
Supportingstudents’learning
Pratt (1992)(phenomenographic)
Delivering content Modelling waysof being
Cultivating theintellect
Facilitatingpersonal agency
Martin andRamsden (1992)(modifiedphenomenographic)
Study Knowledge conveying categories Intermediatecategories
Facilitation of learning categories
Gow and Kember(1993) Kember andGow (1994)
Knowledgetransmission
Learningfacilitation
Prosser et al. (1994)(phenomeno-graphic)
Transmittingconcepts
Helping studentsacquire concepts
Helping studentsdevelop concepts
Helpingstudentschange concepts
Transmittingteacher’sknowledge
Helping studentsacquire teachers’knowledge
Trigwell et al.(1994) Trigwell andProsser (1996)(phenomenographic)
Informationtransmissionteacher-focused
Conceptacquisition/teacher-focused
Conceptacquisition/student-teacherinteraction
Conceptualdevelopment/students-focused
Conceptualchange/students-focused
Kember and Kwan(in press)
Passing information Making it easierfor students tounderstand
Meetingstudents’learning needs
Facilitatingstudents tobecomeindependentlearners
Kember (1997a)(synthesis ofliterature)
Impartinginformation
Transmitting struc-tured knowledge
Student-teacherinteraction
Facilitatingunderstanding
Conceptualchange/intellectualdevelopment
*Although Fox did not order his ‘personal theories of teaching’ along one dimension, he did favor ‘developed’ over ‘simple’ theories and impliedthat student-initiated learning is more appropriate than teacher-initiated learning. His categories have been ordered in accordance with theseconstraints.
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way, we asked academics to describe characteristic instances and concreteteaching situations to exemplify their perspectives, and further probing of theissues was centred on the examples they offered. Care was taken to ensurethat potential links between topics and views were explored no matter wherethey arose in the interview sequence. The interviews were of about 1 to 1.5hours duration and were audio-taped and fully transcribed.
Analysis
As in the 1992 paper, we conducted a three phase grounded analysis toestablish and describe the teaching and learning orientations. In the firstphase, the constant comparative method (Strauss and Corbin 1997) wasused with the full interview transcript as the basis of comparison. The tran-scripts were read and re-read in their entirety to gain an overall sense ofthe academics’ orientations to teaching and learning, then category form-ation commenced. In general, tentative categories formed when severalcases seemed sufficiently similar in orientation to warrant being consideredtogether, provided they were sufficiently different from other nascentcategories to be considered distinct. Repeated re-categorisation occurred asalternative groupings emerged, and the process continued until the categories(orientations) stabilised. This process was very lengthy (hundreds of hours)but as far as possible it was based upon the transcripts rather than on ourpreconceptions (although, as acknowledged earlier, we had broad expecta-tions about the range of categories likely to be formed). Seven orientationsemerged from this process.
In the second phase the global orientations were compared and contrastedso that the implicit beliefs comprising them could be extracted. Thisprocedure is analogous in some respects to the repertory grid technique foreliciting ‘personal constructs’ (Fransella and Bannister 1977). This also isa constant comparative process and it also is lengthy and continues untilthe belief dimensions and their constituent beliefs stabilise; that is, until allbetween-orientation differences can be adequately captured and all within-category differences are ignored. Nine belief dimensions were required tocharacterise the major differences between the orientations in our sample.These dimensions varied in the number of beliefs constituting them, but inall cases it was possible to order the beliefs to reflect variation ranging fromteaching-centred (transmissive) to learning-centred (facilitative).
In the final phase, the individual transcripts were coded on all beliefdimensions to check the adequacy and consistency of the global orientationcategories and their constituent beliefs, as well as to confirm the placement ofindividuals within those categories. Some adjustments were made to place-
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ments and belief descriptors during this phase and as a consequence the wholeframework was rechecked to ensure consistency.
Orientations to teaching and learning: an updated and extendedframework
The basic findings are summarised in Table 2 where the seven orientations areset out as columns, each defined as a unique pattern in nine belief dimensions(rows). The orientations have been ordered from left-to-right according tothe degree of emphasis placed on ‘student-centred’ beliefs (beliefs centred onteaching, or on the teacher, or on the primacy of established discipline knowl-edge were construed as teaching-centred, whereas beliefs focussed uponlearning, or on the student’s role, or on the student’s knowledge constructionwere construed as learning-centred). To facilitate interpretation, beliefs havebeen coded as A (teaching-centred), A/b (teaching centred but with aspectsof a learning emphasis), B/a (learning centred but with aspects of a teachingemphasis), and B (learning-centred), The orientations have been ordered inaccordance with the number of ‘B’ codes in their profile, as in our 1992study (lowest to highest, left to right, which also is the only order that isconsistent with the dissimilarity matrix referred to in the next section). Theseven orientations have been partitioned into two broad groupings in Table 2(teaching-centred and learning-centred) at the point of major differencebetween the belief profiles, judged in terms of the preponderance of teaching-centred versus learning-centred codes in their profiles. Italicised orientationsand dimensions are very similar in the 1992 and current frameworks, despiteslight changes to descriptors.
Comparison with the 1992 framework
Orientations to teaching and learning
The orientations reported in our 1992 paper reappeared in the present study,with the exception that two of the original five categories –facilitatinglearningandchanging students’ conceptions– each divided to form two neworientations (see Table 3) because of the patterns of similarity and differencein the data.
One consequence of these changes is that the intermediate category in the1992 data was not apparent in the present transcripts: orientations were eitherteaching-centred or learning-centred, even though emphases varied withineach of these broad groupings, as Table 2 demonstrates. The two orienta-tions either side of the teaching/learning ‘divide’ –providing and facilitating
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Table 2. Teaching-centred and learning-centred orientations to teaching and learning defined in terms of their constituent belief dimensions andbeliefs
*Italics denote orientations to teaching and learning common to the 1992 paper andthe present study. The names of two of the original orientations have been altered tocharacterise the orientation more adequately.
understandingandhelping students develop expertise– share just two beliefsin common, those to do with students’ conceptions and the control of knowl-edge. These two orientations previously constituted the intermediate categoryfacilitating learning; they emerged as separate orientations in the present databecause there were sufficient cases of each to make their differences apparent.
One way to confirm the teaching-centred versus learning-centred group-ings in Table 2 is to convert the qualitative profiles of each orientation intoa numerical analogue and subject the data to numerical taxonomy. This wasachieved by assigning the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 to the qualitative codes A,A/b, B/a and B respectively, thus preserving their rank order on the teaching-centred/ learning-centred axis, computing all 21 dissimilarities between theseven orientation profiles, and clustering them by a hierarchical method.Essentially the same structure resulted whether we used: (a) untransformedor standardized1 dimensions; (b) Euclidean distance or squared Euclideandistance2 as the measure of dissimilarity; and (c) any of the seven clus-tering methods provided by SPSS. The cluster hierarchy provided in Figure 1resulted from the Ward method applied to Euclidean distances computed onuntransformed data.
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Figure 1. Hierarchical clusters of the seven belief orientations using the Ward Method withEuclidean distances computed on untransformed data. Numerical values within the figure arethe distance coefficients at the formation of each cluster.
It will be evident from Figure 1 that there are two quite distinct clusters,which correspond to the teaching-centred and learning-centred groupingsdefined in Table 2. These two major clusters appeared in all variants ofthe analysis, which differed only in the distances at which clusters andsub-clusters formed.3 Note that there is no intermediate category. The twoorientations either side of the ‘divide’ in Table 2 – the teaching centred andlearning centred orientations that are most similar – are also either side ofthe ‘divide’ in Figure 1, and neither forms an intermediate category. Furtherconfirmation of these groupings is offered in a later section which providesillustrative stories for the two orientations either side of the ‘divide’.
Belief dimensions
There was an increase in the number of belief dimensions relative to our 1992sample (from 5 to 9) largely as a consequence of the increased number oforientations, although the governing factor in both cases was an increase inthe consistent patterns of similarity and difference in the transcripts. Fourof the five 1992 dimensions reappeared, but the number of intermediatedistinctions increased in two of the dimensions and more adequate descriptorswere derived for most of them. One dimension (‘beliefs about direction-ality of teaching’) split into two dimensions (‘beliefs about who should beresponsible for organising and/or transforming knowledge’ and ‘beliefs aboutteacher-student interaction’) and three new dimensions emerged. Two of thelatter included affective domains that were not consistently evident in our1992 data but have been reported in the literature (e.g., Dunkin 1990; Fox1983; Gow and Kember 1993). Table 4 provides a comparison of the present
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Table 4. Comparison of belief dimensions used in the 1992 paper, in the present study, and in other studies in higher education
Belief dimensions* Samuelowicz andBain (1992)
Present study Other studies in higher education
Desired learningoutcomes*
know more (A), orintermediate (AB),or know differently(B)
retention of atomised informa-tion (A), or reproductive under-standing (A/b), or changed waysof thinking (B)
(i) reproduction of knowledge vs purposeful use of knowl-edge (Dall’Alba 1991; Martin & Balla 1991; Pratt 1992)
(ii) academics’ conceptions of learning: accumulating moreinformation to satisfy external demands vs acquiringconcepts to satisfy external demands vs acquiring conceptsto satisfy internal demands vs conceptual development tosatisfy internal demands vs conceptual change to satisfyinternal demands (Prosser, Trigwell & Taylor 1994)
Expected use ofknowledge
curriculum bound(A), or interpreta-tion of reality (B)
within the subject (A), or withinthe subject for future use(A/b), orinterpretation of reality (B)
curriculum bound vs interpretation of reality (Pratt 1992)
Nature ofknowledge
A (externally constructed) or B(personalised)
(i) taken for granted it vs structured by teachers vsdiscovered by studentsvs socially constructed (Martin &Ramsden 1992); (ii) “what is there to be revealed”vssocially constructed (Bain 1998); (iii) possessed by lecturervs discovered by students within lecturer’s framework vsconstructed by students vs socially constructed (Kember,1997a)
Agent responsiblefor transformingknowledge
teachers (A), or teachers showinghow knowledge can be organisedand questioned (A/b), or studentswith teachers (B/a), or students(B)
(i) students vs teacher (Martin & Balla 1991; Pratt 1992;Prosser, Trigwell & Taylor 1994); (ii) external agency (text-books, syllabus, teachers)vs teachers (Prosser, Trigwell &Taylor 1994)
one-way, teachers to students(A), or two-way, to maintainstudents’ attention (A/b), or two-way, to check/clarify students’understanding (B/a), or B two-way to negotiate meaning (B)
teaching as an interactive process** (vs four other teachingconceptions; Kember, 1997a)
Students’ existingconceptions
not taken intoaccount (A),or taken intoaccount (B)
not taken into account (A),or used to prevent commonmistakes (a/B), or used tonegotiate meaning (B)
(i) taking vs not taking students’ conceptions into account(Dall’Alba 1991; Martin & Balla 1991; Pratt 1992; Prosser,Trigwell & Taylor 1994) (ii) students’ prerequisite knowl-edge (Prosser, Trigwell & Taylor 1994)
Control of content teacher (A), orstudents (B)
teacher (A), or students (B)
Students’personal/professionaldevelopment
not stressed (A), or stressed (B) teaching focus on student development** (vs the academicdiscipline; Fox, 1983)
*italics denote dimensions common to the 1992 paper and the present study; **analogous belief rather than full belief dimension.
312 KATHERINE SAMUELOWICZ AND JOHN D. BAIN
nine dimensions with those identified in 1992 and with analogous dimensionsused implicitly or explicitly in other studies.
Illustrative stories
Overview
Although the framework summarised in Table 2 shares the advantage offeredby similar analytic schemes of permitting similarities and differences to beportrayed efficiently, what it cannot provide is a contextualised sense of anindividual academic’s beliefs and practices (Bain 2000; Quinlan 1997, 1999).The following two stories are provided to offset this limitation as well as toillustrate the fundamental difference between teaching-centred and learning-centred orientations. The stories represent the two orientations positionedeither side of the ‘divide’ in Table 2 (i.e.,providing and facilitating under-standingandhelping students to develop expertise) and hence they are moresimilar than a comparison of any other teaching-centred and learning-centredorientations (corroborated by the Euclidean distances upon which Figure 1is based). The academics whose stories we have summarised here differ inage, sex, discipline4 and institution, and no doubt on several other attributesthat may have influenced their perspectives. Our purpose, therefore, is notto speculate upon the reasons for their differences, but rather to demonstratehow dissimilar these two orientations are, notwithstanding their proximity inTable 2. The stories also illustrate how closely coupled an academics’ beliefsand practices tend to be, although that is not the focus of this article.
Academic A: Providing and facilitating understanding (teaching-centred;Chemistry)
What underpins Academic A’s views about teaching is his desire to providean established understanding of his subject matter to his students so they willbe able to use this knowledge and understanding in the future. In his story,the teacher is the main character who tries to get students to understand, andwho contributes much effort to make it happen. He, as a teacher, is in charge,and the language he uses describes his actions; he “. . .imparts knowledgeand wisdom and thinking”, he structures, he explains, he gives examples, andoften he has “. . .to drag answers out of students”. He tries to involve studentsto make sure that they can understand the material he teaches, that is to ensurethat they can reproduce complex chemical knowledge and reasoning.
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Beliefs about learningHe wants students to understand what he has “taught them and use thisunderstanding in the future”. Academic A wants to givehis or the textbook’sunderstanding of the subject matter to his students. Consequently, he expectsthem to remember techniques and methods needed to solve problems, to beable to remember ‘how it works’ and reproduce it, to be able to recall hisreasoning in similar situations in the future: “. . .you end up being in Siberianoil fields and the boss says ‘Analyse this oil and tell us if it’s worth drillingfor more’. What do you do? Phone me? No, you think about it and say ‘howwould Peter do it’ and you do it”. For now, he expects his students to be ableto solve problems that illustrate theoretical concepts taught in the course:“ . . .so they can say, ‘oh, I remember the way to do this’, and then apply theknowledge”, but at the same time he chooses problems that are likely to arisein practice. He expects that some time in the future students will be able todeal with such standard problems. The immediate use of the understandingstudents receive is limited to the subject, yet students are expected to learnfor later, to be able to apply knowledge to analogous problems and situationslater in their professional practice.
Beliefs about knowledgeHe defines the chemistry discipline in terms of its subject matter: “chemistrydeals with the interaction of the different elements”. Since there is a corpusof knowledge as defined by the discipline and developed by great thinkers,Academic A thinks that it would be “very silly” to expect students “to rein-vent the wheel”. [He uses the Periodic Table as an example]. But he thinksthat they could be asked to think about trends and apply knowledge. Thus,although he sees the knowledge and understanding to be gained by students asexternally constructed, he tries to involve students in the process of teachingby “. . .giving them some facts and drawing out some from them”.
Beliefs about the roles of teacher and student and about the nature of theteacher-student interactionConsistent with his beliefs about knowledge and learning, Academic A seesthe ability to “explain it or bring it across to students” as an important charac-teristic of a good teacher and as his main role. Consequently, in his teaching,Academic A uses more than one way of explaining content to students in aneffort to make the understanding easier.
He believes that the interaction between himself and students improvestheir understanding of the subject. Consequently he encourages students tointerrupt him during lectures to ask questions to clarify their understanding:“ . . .a student might say ‘excuse me, but why does this nitrogen attack that Hover there?’ so I stop and explain”. To facilitate students’ understanding, he
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gives them an opportunity to be active, albeit in a limited way: “I give themsome facts and then I play with the facts and try to drag answers out of them,and try to connect it to many things in the world around them”.
Consistent with his desire to make students understand, and with seeinghimself as responsible for giving his understanding to students, AcademicA tries to read the reactions of students and change his ways of deliveringknowledge to students: “I will teach them, for example, resonance theory,give them ten examples, they can’t fail to understand it and I give it andthen I think: ‘Well, they looked at me as if they were living in limbo andI must admit it was a bit boring so next time I will cut it down to maybethree examples and I will go a bit slower and expand on what I thought wasthe problem’. . .I change the order sometimes to see, perhaps it is better toexplain one mechanism before another and I see their reactions”. For the samereason, he tries to present the same content in different ways “I try to teach itmaybe three different ways in case they didn’t understand one view and thenI say ‘there is the book’. I try to keep with the book”.
Academic A stresses his enthusiasm and interest in what he teaches andhis expertise as factors that should motivate students, capture their attention,make them curious. He tries to make things less boring by using humour,by trying to make the content relevant to students, by giving examples ofsubstances known in everyday life, familiar to students. Consistent with hisbeliefs he tries to use everyday examples in his teaching: “I might ask ‘hasanyone here been to a birthday party?’ and they all laugh. ‘What is thatcoloured paper that you look through?’ and they go ‘oh cellophane’. AndI say ‘right, the chemical that I have just drawn on the board is a precursorto cellophane’. He explained that he hopes that “. . .the next time they seecellophane they will think ‘that is the chemical’ and I hope that they wouldhave learned something for life. And then when they see another thing they’llthink ‘I wonder what that is’ and they’ll get curious”. Despite his attempts tocreate relevance, at no time does Academic A try to investigate the nature ofstudents’ ‘nonunderstanding’; he concentrates exclusively on finding betterways of explaining and transmitting his understanding.
Academic B: Helping students develop expertise (learning-centred;Architecture)
What underpins Academic B’s orientation to teaching and learning is herbelief that students have to become independent learners and that she can helpthem achieve this by “. . .opening them up to their own possibilities”. She seesthe process of becoming an independent learner as crucial in the professionaland personal development of students, a lifelong process that will lead to
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acquisition of the knowledge, attitudes and skills needed to function as acompetent practitioner.
Academic B talks about teaching in a ‘student-centred language’. It isstudents who take the centre stage when she talks about teaching and learning.She talks about their learning, their attitudes, their problems in becomingindependent learners, about the importance of their motivation to do wellfor their personal and professional development. She does not see teaching(in her words, “empowering activity”) as a simple affair where knowledgeis dispensed to students by the teacher. Rather it is a challenging two-wayprocess.
Beliefs about learningAcademic B sees learning as a lifelong process during which students (aswell as learners and practitioners in general) undergo a change in their way ofthinking and acting. She expects students to develop professional knowledge,attitudes and skills and to use them appropriately for the tasks and the contextsencountered in real life. This belief is clearly reflected in the way she teaches.Since Academic B wants students to learn to think and act as architects, shegives them learning tasks simulating the work of an architect: “. . .what I try todo is to simulate the professional’s task. So I took them through the steps thata professional architect would go through to solve the problem”. She stressesthe process of learning, the process of doing architecture and not, especiallyin the early stages of the course, the finished projects: “. . .the answers they’vegot were unbuildable, silly, and it didn’t matter, because the object was notto get this product at the end. The object was to undergo the process and tobegin to feel what it’s like to be an architect”.
As part of developing professional expertise, students should learn toreflect on their approaches, to be able to judge what works and what doesnot, and to identify the reasons for successes or failures. Consequently, as apart of her teaching strategy, she expects students “to keep reflective diaries”in which students document their thinking and approaches to the design tasks.The ability to reflect upon one’s work and to be self critical are the criteriaAcademic B uses in assessing students’ work. Since Academic B regards theability to judge the quality of one’s work to be a part of being a professional,she expects students to be involved in assessing their work as well as the workof their fellow students.
Beliefs about knowledgeShe sees knowledge in architecture and design as growing from many sourcesbut mostly from “the experience of practitioners”. What distinguishes archi-tecture and design from other disciplines is a way of thinking grounded in theknowledge and experience of the discipline and practitioners and at the same
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time lateral, creative, innovative. For Academic B “. . .architecture synthes-ises information from various sources, jumbles it up somehow, proposes it asa scheme, evaluates that as a scheme, tests it, builds it, learns from it, criticisesit, all that”. Consequently, she sets real life design tasks where students haveto be “. . .very clever about the way that they integrate and synthesise andthink about the evaluations they make”.
In accordance with her view of knowledge and learning, Academic Bexpects students to be the ones who develop their knowledge, the ones whounpack and repack it, the ones who analyse and synthesise it, the ones whotransform it, the ones who make it their own. Her approach to teaching closelyreflects her beliefs. She expects students to do the learning and she sets taskscarefully balancing the degree of challenge; she thinks that projects whichare too easy do not sustain students’ interest and enthusiasm “. . .it’s muchbetter to do something that’s really hard and fall a bit short rather than haveeveryone thinking how clever they were and how right they’ve got the lot”.
Beliefs about the role of teacher and student and about the nature of theteacher-student interactionConsequently, she sees her role as “. . .enabling the student, coaxing thestudent and in some ways convincing the student that it is possible forthem to do it”, to become independent learners and later competent practi-tioners. This means working with students, not doing learning for students. Itmeans defining the content, setting up a learning environment where learningis possible, making expectations clear, expecting students to produce highquality work, treating students as adults, being fair but demanding. She callsit “a tough love”.
She sees her role as changing students’ ideas about learning “. . .thehardest part for the novice students is to withdraw from the security of ‘thereis a right answer, it’s in a book, I’ll look it up, I’ll write it down and you’lllike it’ ”. Students need help to learn being independent and this is what theteacher tries to achieve “I say to them ‘stop sucking my brain out of my ear;it’s my brain, it’s not going to help you. You need to make it your own work’ ”.
Academic B regards the interaction between herself and students as vitalto the process of learning. It is through this interaction that students becomeinvolved in their learning and this is how they develop the understanding,knowledge, attitudes and skills needed in their future profession. Her beliefsare reflected in her approach. She interacts with students in small groups andon an individual basis, she works with them closely so they “. . .get fromme a way of being, of doing things” and thereby she creates an opportunityfor students to learn from a professional architect. Since she believes thatflexibility and innovativeness in thinking are important, she uses, for example,
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role-play simulating real life situations where not everything is predictable,where the unexpected happens: “. . .it brings reality into their lives, and theyenjoy it; it’s fun”. Similarly, students’ motivation, interest and enthusiasmfor study are used by Academic B to further their personal and professionaldevelopment.
Comparison of the two illustrative stories
Table 5 provides a brief summary and comparison of the two stories, organ-ised to make their belief codings more evident. Although there are points ofsimilarity between the two stories (they share beliefs on two dimensions, forexample), they are quite different in their fundamentals.
Discussion
Belief dimensions
Seven of the nine dimensions of the present framework have their counter-parts in the literature, as shown in Table 4, and some beliefs comprising theother two dimensions are also to be found in other studies. This common-ality is encouraging, as Kember (1997a) has observed, but it should not beconstrued as making the present study redundant. On the contrary, there areimportant points of departure in the present study, including some distinctionsnot previously made by others or ourselves.
For example, four beliefs about ‘student-teacher interaction’ were neededto distinguish between the orientations in our present data, whereas twosufficed in our 1992 study. Other researchers (Trigwell et al. 1994; Kember1997a) have used the notion of teacher-student interaction to differentiatetheir categories, but they focus on the interactionper serather than on itspurpose and nature. This may turn out to be crucial to Kember’s (1997a)proposal that the transition from teaching-centred to learning-centred orient-ations depends on the academic coming to believe in teacher-student inter-action. This was what our intermediate category in 1992 implied, but, as wewill note in more detail later, it is the purpose and nature of the interactionthat differentiates between orientations in our data, not its mere presence orabsence.
Another example of refinement of constituent beliefs is to be found in thedesired learning outcomesdimension. In contrast to studies which make atwo level contrast between reproduction of knowledge and purposeful use ofknowledge (Dall’Alba 1991; Martin and Balla 1991; Pratt 1992) or betweenlearning as accumulating more information versus learning as conceptual
318 KATHERINE SAMUELOWICZ AND JOHN D. BAIN
Table 5. Comparison of the two illustrative cases organised by belief dimensions
BeliefDimensions
Teacher A (Chemistry)Orientation: Providing andfacilitating understanding
Teacher B (Architecture)Orientation: Helping studentsdevelop expertise
Desired learningoutcomes
Teacher A believed it wasimportant for students to beable to reproduce and use hisunderstanding of the domain
Teacher B wanted students tobecome professional architects,and this involved changing theways that they thought about thebuilt and social environments
(A/b) (B)
Expected use ofknowledge
his focus was upon chemistryand the ability of students’ toapply the chemical knowledge heprovided to conventional chem-ical problems and situations.
the knowledge students acquired,while centred on her discipline,was intended to alter the waythey construed the world and thesocial processes associated withit
he assumed responsibility fororganising and transforming theknowledge that students were tolearn
she set the learning tasks, but thetasks required substantial knowl-edge organisation and transform-ation by the students
(A/b) (B/a)
Nature ofknowledge
the knowledge that students wereto gain was pre-established by thediscipline
although grounded in the archi-tecture discipline, the knowledgethat students were to gain wasthe knowledge they personalisedunder her guidance
(A) (B)
Students’existingconceptions
he did not incorporate students’existing (mis)conceptions into histeaching
she did not incorporate students’existing (mis)conceptions intoher teaching
(A) (A)
Teacher-studentsinteraction
he did interact with students, butprimarily to ensure that they hadunderstood what he had told them(and to clarify the ideas if theydid not)
she interacted closely withstudents to help them think andact as architects, in a process thatinvolved two-way negotiation ofwhat being an architectcomprises
(B/a) (B)
REVISITING ACADEMICS’ BELIEFS ABOUT TEACHING AND LEARNING 319
Table 5. Continued
BeliefDimensions
Teacher A (Chemistry)Orientation: Providing andfacilitating understanding
Teacher B (Architecture)Orientation: Helping studentsdevelop expertise
Control ofcontent
he determined what was to belearned and when it would appearin the syllabus
she determined what was to belearned and when it would appearin the syllabus
(A) (A)
Professionaldevelopment
he did not stress professionaldevelopment, although he didpresume that students wouldapply the knowledge theyacquired from him
she stressed students’ develop-ment as professionals, both asarchitects and as informed inter-preters of the world
(A) (B)
Interest andmotivation
he saw it as his responsibilityto motivate and interest studentsby demonstrating his own enthu-siasm for the subject
she emphasised the importance ofengaging students’ interests andmotivation through the use ofengaging learning tasks
(A) (B)
change (Prosser et al. 1994), our data necessitated a distinction between twotypes of knowledge reproduction: recall of atomised information (and itsapplication to well known problems and/or situations); and reproduction ofa structured, cohesive body of knowledge (and its application to modifiedproblems and/or situations – cf., Bain 1994). The second, more elaboratebelief is exemplified in Academic A’s story above.
The final example we consider is the ‘students’ existing conceptions’dimension. Whereas in 1992 we only needed to code whether or notacademics took students’ subject-matter conceptions into account in theirteaching (i.e., the orientations could be adequately distinguished with thislimited coding), our present data required a distinction between two differentways of ‘taking students’ conceptions into account’. One is represented byacademics whose primary purpose is to prevent common misunderstandingsby highlighting them to students and indicating why the established view ismore appropriate. The other belief is represented by academics who see animportant part of their task as changing students’ existing (mis)conceptions,much as the conceptual change literature would advocate (e.g., Strike andPosner 1985; Roschelle 1992). This distinction, like those noted above, was
320 KATHERINE SAMUELOWICZ AND JOHN D. BAIN
central to the differentiation of orientations which otherwise would havecoalesced.
Orientations to teaching and learning
As noted in relation to Table 3 earlier, the intermediate orientation in the1992 paper,facilitating learning, divided into two very distinct orientationsin the present study:providing and facilitating understandingand helpingstudents develop expertise. The first of these is teaching-centred, whereas thesecond is learning-centred (Table 2), as the stories presented earlier clearlyillustrate. Although in both cases the academics want their students to gain athorough understanding of the subject matter, their beliefs about the natureof understanding and learning and about their roles in knowledge organ-isation and teacher-student interaction differ substantially. In the first casethe academic provides ready made understandings and methods for students,shows them how to apply the knowledge, and interacts with them to ensurethat the understanding has taken hold. In the second case, the teacher assiststhe students, through extensive interaction, to personalise their understandingof the material, and to use their new understanding to interpret the world in analtered way. Although these two orientations are juxtaposed in Table 2, theyshare only two of nine beliefs.
The other 1992 orientation which divided into two in the present studywas changing students conception. In this case the difference between thetwo new orientations is localised to one dimension, namely how students’existing conceptions are taken into account. Consequently, the names we haveassigned to the new orientations reflect this defining difference:preventingmisunderstandingsandnegotiating understanding. Both are learning-centred,in part because they place importance upon students’ understandings, but theymake different use of this knowledge, one by seeking to prevent commonmistakes from happening, the other by assisting students to move awayfrom inadequate interpretations. Bain and McNaught (1996), use the labels‘preemptive’ and ‘collaborative’ to make the same distinction in relationto academics’ orientations to computer-facilitated learning. At the heart ofthe distinction may be a difference in emphasis on assimilative and accom-modative learning processes (Ausubel 1968). Those who seek to preventerror appear to think of learning as accumulative and misunderstandings aspreventable diversions from the process of adding knowledge to what alreadyexists (assimilation). Those who seek to negotiate meaning appear to assumethat misunderstandings reflect alternative conceptions that must be alteredif fundamental understanding is to be achieved (accommodation). It wouldappear that it is the second, accommodative perspective that other researchers
REVISITING ACADEMICS’ BELIEFS ABOUT TEACHING AND LEARNING 321
have detected in their data, given that ‘conceptual change’ is the phrase usedto describe it (eg. Dall’Alba 1991; Pratt 1992; Prosser et al. 1994).
Finally, we turn briefly to the orientation labeledencouraging knowledgecreation(which was inadequately referred to assupporting student learningin our 1992 paper). This orientation has only been evident at the postgraduatelevel in our data, no doubt because of its emphasis on the student’s creation oforiginal knowledge (coded on the ‘control of content’ dimension). Althoughnot all academics teaching postgraduate students expressed this orientation,none of those teaching undergraduate students did so. This may have been aconsequence of discipline representation, however.Encouraging knowledgecreation may be more evident in humanities disciplines, particularly thoseemphasising a postmodern perspective. Bain et al. (1998), for example, havereported a related perspective underpinning two of 36 computer-facilitatedlearning projects, both of which emphasised the importance of constructingand defending a potentially new interpretation of historical events andcontexts.
Is there a transitional orientation and does it have a role in development?
The clear division of orientations into two contrasting groupings (teaching-centred and learning-centred) within which there are strong similarities(Figure 1), highlights the issue of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ boundaries betweencategories (Kember 1997a). In the preliminary scheme presented in our 1992paper, four of five orientations clearly belonged to one of the broader group-ings, but the other category,facilitating learning, seemed to be ‘in-between’.It was not clear, due to the preliminary character of that study, whetherfurther research would result in locating this orientation within one of thebroader groupings or whether it would remain intermediate between them.As it turned out, neither of these possibilities eventuated in our present databecause the intermediate category split into two that were located either sideof the ‘divide’ (Table 2) with no evidence of a hybrid positioned betweenthem (Figure 1).
This finding (and the evidence reported by Kember and Kwan, in press) iscontrary to Kember’s (1997a) proposal that a category centred on teacher-student interaction marks the transition from transmissive to facilitativeorientations. Kember proposed such a category partly because it appearedin several analyses, including our own (see Table 1), partly because teacher-student interaction seemed to be a common element, and partly because suchinteraction seems inherently to stand at the crossroads between transmissionand facilitation. Yet, as the evidence presented here shows, it is thepurposeand natureof the interaction, not interactionper se, that differentiates orient-ations (together with other beliefs). Some forms of interaction are teaching
322 KATHERINE SAMUELOWICZ AND JOHN D. BAIN
focussed in that they are intended to maintain students’ attention and concen-tration upon what the academic is saying, or to check whether students arefollowing the academics’ reasoning, Transition from either of these to a beliefthat interaction is needed to help students construct appropriate understand-ings appears to require a profound shift in what the venture is about, so muchso that six other beliefs would also have to change to result in the orientationlabeledhelping students develop expertise(Table 2).
Thus the boundary between teaching-centred and learning-centred orient-ations appears to be relatively ‘hard’ and may require the equivalent ofconceptual change (i.e., an accommodative process) to cross it. Boundarieswithin the two broad groupings, on the other hand, may be relatively ‘soft’,as Kember (1997a) has proposed, because the differences between adjacentorientations are small in number and often subtle in character. The availableevidence on aided change (Martin and Ramsden 1992) suggests that shiftsfrom teaching-centred to learning-centred orientations are possible, and thatshifts occur at varying rates, but it remains to be determined whether differentmethods are need to effect changes across the soft and hard boundaries.
Conclusion and further research
Although more has to be done to fully substantiate our position, we never-theless claim that the belief orientations we have reported here reflect ourparticipants’ characteristic perspectives and dispositions to teach in particularways. These claims derive from the method which, during interviewing andcoding, sought the characteristic perspectives of the participants exemplifiedwith descriptions of their usual educational practices. We have provided twostories to illustrate the nexus between belief and practice and to demon-strate that the differences between teaching-centred and learning-centredorientations are substantial.
Further research is needed in several areas. Firstly, we need to determinehow much of the variation in description in the literature (e.g., Tables 1 and 4)is attributable to interview and data analysis methods and their underpinningepistemologies (Richardson 1999), and how much to variations in discip-line representation in the sample and other factors. Secondly, the couplingbetween belief and practice should be examined more closely, with a varietyof methods (e.g., Bain 2000; Kember and Kwan, in press; Quinlan 1997,1999), particularly in view of increasing constraints on resources and theupsurge of computer-based methods. Thirdly, there is a paucity of evidenceconcerning the influence of academics’ beliefs on the uptake of alternativeteaching methods, and very little which examines the adaptation of staffdevelopment methods to address beliefs as well as practices (Kember and
REVISITING ACADEMICS’ BELIEFS ABOUT TEACHING AND LEARNING 323
Kwan, in press). Finally, because efforts to improve teaching are predicatedon the assumed link between teaching and learning, this relationship has to beinvestigated further even though the available evidence is encouraging (Gowand Kember 1993; Kember 1997b; Kember and Gow 1994; Sheppard andGilbert 1991; Trigwell et al. 1999).
Notes
1. Standardising the values for each variable is one way to obtain equal weighting of thedimensions in the clustering procedure.
2. The squared Euclidean distance between any two orientation profiles is the sum of squareddifferences between their corresponding values on each of the nine belief dimensions. Forexample, the squared Euclidean distance between the 3rd and 4th orientations (providingand facilitating understanding, andhelping students develop expertise) is: (2–4)2 + (2–4)2
+ (2–3)2 + (1–4)2 + (1–1)2 + (3–4)2 + (1–1)2 + (1–4)2 + (1–4)2 = 37.00. The Euclideandistance for this example is the square root of 37.00, namely 6.08. The Euclidean distancesbetween adjacent orientations, beginning withimparting information and transmittingstructured knowledgeand moving successively to the right in Table 2 are: 1.72, 1.41,6.08, 2.24, 1.00, 3.00. The clustering algorithms are based on these six values plus allother pair-wise distances amongst the seven orientations.
3. Although for six of the clustering methods the orientationhelping students developexpertisejoined the learning-centred cluster beforeencouraging knowledge creation, thereverse was the case with the complete linkage method.
4. There was a tendency for disciplines to be distributed unevenly across orientations. Withthe teaching-centred orientations, there was 1 case from education, 3 from nursing, 5from physiotherapy, 2 from engineering, 5 from chemistry, 2 from physiology and 1 fromentomology. With the learning-centred orientations there were 7 cases from architecture,2 from education, 4 from nursing, 2 from psychology, 2 from engineering and 2 fromphysiotherapy.
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