Peer engagement for teaching and learning: competence, autonomy and social solidarity in academic microcultures

Abstract

University teachers’ engagement in teaching is a crucial aspect for the quality of student learning. In this article, we explore where such engagement comes from. We use a sociocultural perspective to investigate how teachers’ colleagues and leaders, in what we call academic microcultures, influence such engagement. A microculture can be a working group such as a teaching team, an educational programme, a department or the like. It consists of a collegial context functioning over time long enough to allow for traditions, recurrent practices and common, often tacit assumptions to evolve. In such environments, certain ways of teaching and assessing students, ways of talking about teaching and students gradually develop. This article draws upon two previous studies of five strong and four developing microcultures in a research-intensive Scandinavian university. The results show how engagement for teaching and student learning is highly collegial and very contextualised.