Reconceptualizing teaching in higher education: interpreting the belief orientations shaping academic practice
本研究通过分析全球高校教师的信念取向，识别出四种教学取向（古典、经验、变革、发展），为理解教学实践提供了超越结果导向的哲学框架，对教育研究者和政策制定者有参考价值。
Understanding how academics conceptualise teaching is central to advancing pedagogical theory and practice in higher education. Prior research has predominantly examined teaching conceptions through Western-derived frameworks, often associating student-focused approaches with deep learning and teacher-focused approaches with surface outcomes. This literature frequently overlooks the broader philosophical orientations that underpin such approaches and the diverse epistemic traditions from which they arise. This study addresses these overlooked dimensions by reconceptualising teaching through an interpretive analysis of academics’ belief orientations across global higher education contexts. Using a quasi-structured interview design informed by repertory grid techniques and analysed through interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study explored how faculty articulate the aims, values, and assumptions that inform their teaching practices. Anchored in Elias and Merriam’s philosophical traditions of education, the analysis was interpreted as identifying four contemporary teaching orientations: Classical Scholarship, Experiential Scholarship, Transformative Scholarship, and Developmental Scholarship. These orientations represent analytically derived patterns in how participants framed the relationship between educational means and ends. Participants’ accounts suggest that teaching orientations were shaped less by jurisdictional traditions than by globally circulating academic cultures, mobility, and institutional norms. The study offers an empirically grounded heuristic for interpreting teaching orientations that moves beyond outcome-driven models and avoids the is-ought fallacy that has shaped much of the teaching and learning literature. By foregrounding why academics teach as they do, this study advances a philosophically informed and globally oriented understanding of teaching practices in higher education.