This book explores disciplinary teaching excellence through a diverse range of student-staff partnership research projects. Despite being a highly contested term, ‘teaching excellence’ is something that universities aspire to and are expected to have. However, the editors and contributors argue that not only are definitions of excellence often broad and generic, but they lack nuanced understandings of disciplinary excellence in higher education. This book begins by unpacking some of these contested definitions of teaching excellence, followed by a series of co-authored chapters produced by students and staff who have undertaken research projects where they examine teaching excellence in their respective disciplinary areas. These chapters demonstrate that teaching excellence may be better understood as a process of becoming that is achieved through partnership between teachers and students. This book will be of interest and value to students, educators, and policy-makers concerned about teaching excellence, as well as scholars of student-staff partnerships.

This book explores disciplinary teaching excellence through a diverse range of student-staff partnership research projects. Despite being a highly contested term, 'teaching excellence' is something that universities aspire to and are expected to achieve. However, the editors and contributors argue that not only are definitions of excellence often broad and generic, but they lack nuanced understandings of disciplinary excellence in higher education. This book begins by unpacking some of these contested definitions of teaching excellence, followed by a series of co-authored chapters produced by students and staff who have undertaken research projects where they examine teaching excellence in their respective disciplinary areas. These chapters demonstrate that teaching excellence may be better understood as a process of becoming that is achieved through partnership between teachers and students. This book will be of interest and value to students, educators, and policy-makers concerned about teaching excellence, as well as scholars of student-staff partnerships. Marion Heron is Senior Lecturer in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey, UK. Her disciplinary background is applied linguistics and she currently researches in the area of educational linguistics. She has worked in a teacher education role in a variety of national and international contexts. Laura Barnett is Lecturer in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey, UK. Her disciplinary background is in sociology and her research interests relate to everyday social experiences, inequalities and widening participation linked to learning and teaching in higher education. Kieran Balloo was Lecturer in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey, UK. His disciplinary background is in psychology and his current research broadly explores the impact of students' backgrounds and the university environment on their experiences of higher education.

What makes a university teacher 'excellent'? As debates rage about whether this is down to subject knowledge, communication skills, taking a research-led approach or being a technological whiz, this book provides the first in-depth examination of teaching excellence in higher education. Identifying and examining interpretations of teaching excellence, it considers what ‘excellent’ means and implies for practice.

This book offers inter-disciplinary, evidence-informed discussion around notions of excellence in higher education teaching. It will act as a key stimulus for institutional and sector-wide debates and a reference point for initiatives around the TEF agenda.

University teaching and learning take place within ever more specialized disciplinary settings, each characterized by its unique traditions, concepts, practices and procedures. It is now widely recognized that support for teaching and learning needs to take this discipline-specificity into account. However, in a world characterized by rapid change, complexity and uncertainty, problems do not present themselves as distinct subjects but increasingly within trans-disciplinary contexts calling for graduate outcomes that go beyond specialized knowledge and skills. This ground-breaking book highlights the important interplay between context-specific and context-transcendent aspects of teaching, learning and assessment. It explores critical questions, such as: What are the ‘ways of thinking and practicing’ characteristic of particular disciplines? How can students be supported in becoming participants of particular disciplinary discourse communities? Can the diversity in teaching, learning and assessment practices that we observe across departments be attributed exclusively to disciplinary structure? To what extent do the disciplines prepare students for the complexities and uncertainties that characterize their later professional, civic and personal lives? Written for university teachers, educational developers as well as new and experienced researchers of Higher Education, this highly-anticipated first edition offers innovative perspectives from leading Canadian, US and UK scholars on how academic learning within particular disciplines can help students acquire the skills, abilities and dispositions they need to succeed academically and also post graduation. Carolin Kreber is Professor of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and the Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment at the University of Edinburgh

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)’s aims, implementation and effect on the English higher education sector remains a controversial and contested subject. This text offers a wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of the implications of the TEF on the UK’s fast-moving policy environment, and increasingly neoliberal higher education sector.

There has been an explosion of interest in teaching excellence in higher education. This book constitutes the scrutiny of how and why it should be achieved. It provides a guide for those supporting, promoting and trying to achieve teaching excellence in higher education.