Transforming Teaching in Higher Education: Uniting Pedagogy, Learning Design and a Community of Practice

This paper reflects on the development of an overarching emergent theory to support a major university portfolio initiative involving the concurrent development of approximately 30 new undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. As a starting point, Schulman’s (1987) theory of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), based around pedagogical knowledge and curriculum content knowledge, was used to underpin the complexities of the portfolio developments.
Within the emergent model, set in a university context, the ownership of the planned ‘teaching’ evolved within a ‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1998), based around a shared commitment to the continued development and refinement of expertise, which required a division of labour with numerous key stakeholders to ‘create leverage in practice’ (ibid). Furthermore, the development of a ‘learning design’ theory was an additional element used for ‘transforming education practice for a rapidly changing world’ where technological, environmental and inclusive elements were prioritised.
Emerging from this embryonic theory of ‘portfolio development’ is the acknowledgement that the understanding of the complexities and evidence base for ‘teaching, learning and assessment’, within Higher Education, can benefit significantly from distributed endeavours (Spendlove, 2023). Typically, such programme developments have been isolated activities with the alternative being adoption of centralised or historical models of ‘delivery’ where ‘academic’ agency and ownership are removed. In this paper the opposite is demonstrated, through developing a model based upon a combination of PCK and Learning Design, set within a community of practice, in order for the complexities of transformation of teaching and student experiences to be successfully achieved.