72 Chapter 3 BACKGROUND Most studies on educational beliefs until now have investigated the beliefs of academics from the perspective of teaching,1-10 without paying attention to personal aspects of teachers. Focusing on academics’ beliefs about teaching while leaving out their beliefs about being a teacher may result in too narrow an understanding of the phenomenon of academic teaching,11,12 and does not take into account aspects such as the personal motivation of academics for teaching.12 Thus, in order to obtain a more complete picture of all aspects relevant to beliefs about teaching, this study focuses on the beliefs that academics hold about being a teacher. Since the teaching beliefs of academics influence student learning and learning outcomes, it is important to obtain further insight into these beliefs.1-10 First we will define some of the terms used in this study. Next, we will discuss the current state of knowledge regarding beliefs about teaching, and introduce Korthagen’s model which was developed to enable reflection on teachers’ beliefs about being a teacher and which we use to analyse our data. Educational ‘beliefs’ refer to conceptions or convictions about aspects of education, such as teaching, learning, knowledge, students, or teacher qualities. The term ‘beliefs’ is generally used for those convictions that are formed early in life, are deeply rooted, and are harder to change than conceptions.13 They are closely related to practice and can consist of both cognitive and affective aspects.14 An example of a cognitive aspect is what teachers believe about desired learning outcomes, which may vary from recall of atomised information to a change in a student’s way of thinking. An example of an affective aspect is the role of interest and motivation in learning: some academics believe this to be teacher-initiated, while others believe it to be student-initiated.14 Several terms are used to describe the personal aspects of being a teaching academic. We chose to use the term ‘teacher qualities’: an academic’s behaviours and competencies as well as the more personal attributes such as an academic’s identity and mission, both tangible and intangible, relevant to the functioning of a teaching academic. Academics in a medical context have not only an educational role, but other roles as well: those of clinician, researcher and/or administrator. Therefore, we have opted to describe medical teachers working in an academic context as ‘academics.’ The beliefs that academics hold about teaching and student learning have been investigated in a number of studies. While the outcomes of the studies differ in certain aspects, there is a consensus that teaching beliefs can be
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw