Abstract:
Scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching are associated with student-focused
conceptions of teaching, both explicitly by some writers, and implicitly in their focus on
engaging with students and investigating relations between teaching and student learning.
This paper focuses on the extent to which development and change in conceptions of
teaching relate to the development of the attributes of scholarly teaching and the scholarship
of teaching. The paper is based on a longitudinal study of 27 university teachers. Four
patterns describing development or change in teachers’ conceptions of teaching over time are
described, varying from remaining teacher focused with teaching-focused ways of
experiencing change in teaching to becoming or remaining student-focused with a studentlearning
and teacher-understanding focused way of experiencing change in teaching. In the
two patterns in which teachers remained teacher focused, there was little evidence of the
attributes of scholarly teaching. Teachers reflected on and changed their content or strategies
and developed selective knowledge of teaching but did not reflect on or investigate the
relations between their teaching and students’ learning. By contrast, in the two patterns in
which teachers became or remained student focused in their teaching situations, teachers
described many of the features of scholarly teaching: pedagogic content knowledge,
investigating and reflecting on connections between teaching and their students’ learning,
learning from students and seeking to communicate with peers, either informally or through
publication. The paper concludes that a focus on learning from students might be not just a
feature of scholarly teaching but critical for its development.
