Understanding Early Career Academics’ Learning to Experience Teaching in Higher Education : Integrating Theory and Empirical (Poetic) Work

Sánchez, Felipe and McArthur, Jan (2025) Understanding Early Career Academics’ Learning to Experience Teaching in Higher Education : Integrating Theory and Empirical (Poetic) Work. PhD thesis, Educational Research.

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Abstract

Early Career Academics (ECA) often find themselves starting a lecturing position in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) without knowing how to teach and/or with limited comparable previous experience. This is by itself a difficult task to face emotionally and cognitively speaking, and it adds to the already long list of demands that ECAs face when freshly starting the role. This issue leads us to wonder how ECAs experience teaching in Higher Education. This broad question has been tackled by offering descriptions in the literature as mixed feeling and overall negative emotions. In turn, this project contributes to the field by looking into how experiencing teaching may itself be inscribed in a learning process. Theory Work is undertaken to elaborate and argue for a constructivist and processual understanding of experience, emotions, and learning. Here, the argument is that experiences can be conceptually understood through perezhivanie (Vygotski, 1994) to highlight how they are learnt and lead to learning, while elaborating how learning is itself an emotional experience. Then, the project moves towards the empirical (re)creation/production of the experience of teaching with ECAs through the Art-Based Research method of Poetic Transcription done jointly with the lecturers. The experiences are presented as an exhibition of collected poems, curated and commented on by the researcher following an entrance and three rooms structure. Taking the theory and empirical work together, this project sheds some light on the experiencing of teaching as something that is learnt and worked-through as an experience. Here, experiences are complex as they integrate into larger processes. Thus, specific previous experiences and stories can be identified as anchors that relate to each other in particular ways for the reconstruction of the ECA’s experiences of teaching: their purposeful conjunction is identified as the precursors of the lecturer’s current way of (re)constructing the experiences of teaching.