Reframing the roles of tutors in terms of pedagogical content knowledge : a study of a tutor-led planning process and the impact on tutors' knowledge and roles.
Date
2012-09-20
Authors
Duncan, Catherine
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Abstract
Postgraduate tutors have an important role to play in teaching and
learning in higher education. There has been substantial research conducted
in this area - much of it is orientated towards improving the quality
of the methods of instruction and classroom practice. Far less research
has been focused on the postgraduate tutors as producers of content. This
research is based on an intervention that tasked five postgraduate tutors
with planning two tutorials and designing an assessment task: activities
that fell outside the scope of their usual work and roles. The aim of the research
is to discover more about how postgraduate tutors, who typically
have extensive and expert content knowledge, but very little pedagogical
knowledge, develop pedagogical content knowledge. The study tracks
the decision making process and the knowledge reservoirs that the participants
emphasise in their planning and design in order learn about the
teaching beliefs and priorities of these novice teachers. The analysis goes
on to explore the criteria for legitimation that the postgraduate tutors establish
and/ or entrench. The study finds that the participants are highly
sensitive to the many kinds of constraints that circulate and that they
in turn re-circulated. It goes on to suggest that postgraduate tutors are
likely to reproduce the regulative rules that they find in operation and the
cumulative messages of what is valued in terms of student and teacher
performance in a given context.
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Keywords
Postgraduate tutors, Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), Regulative discourse, Recontextualisation rules, Higher education