Uppeldi og menntun - 01.07.2012, Side 161

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 21(2) 2012 161
gUðrún geirSdÓttir
um hÖfundinn
Guðrún Geirsdóttir (gudgeirs@hi.is) er dósent í námskrár- og kennslufræðum á
menntavísindasviði Háskóla Íslands. Hún lauk BA-prófi í uppeldisfræði frá Háskóla
Íslands ásamt kennslufræði til kennsluréttinda árið 1983, meistaraprófi í námskrár-
fræði við Pennsylvania State Univeristy 1996 og doktorsprófi í menntunarfræðum frá
Kennaraháskóla Íslands 2008. Hún er deildarstjóri og stjórnarformaður Kennslumið-
stöðvar Háskóla Íslands og hafa rannsóknir hennar einkum beinst að námskrárgerð
og kennsluháttum á háskólastigi og að námsreynslu háskólanema.
University teachers’ role in curriculum development
AbstrAct
This study explores the conceptions that university teachers have of curriculum deci-
sion making and development within three different disciplines as well as the space
and agency of university teachers in the curriculum process. The study makes use of
Basil Bernstein’s concepts of the classification and framing of the pedagogic discourse
of higher education disciplines and applies them to the pedagogic discourse of three
disciplines (i.e. mechanical and industrial engineering, anthropology and physics)
within one university to demonstrate how it appears in traditions, communication,
planning of instruction, student identity and teachers’ role.
The three disciplines were explored as specific cases. Data were collected through
interviews, observations and analysis of texts. Twenty-two interviews were conduct-
ed with fifteen university teachers, eight staff meetings observed and a variety of texts
relating to the curriculum were analysed. Mixed phenomenological methods of data
analysis were applied, such as looking for common themes and discourse analysis.
The main findings of the study confirm the existence of a local pedagogic discourse
of each discipline, characterised by different aims of the discipline, different concep-
tions of student identities and teacher roles, and specific instructional discourse. The
local pedagogic discourse is created when universal pedagogic discourse is recontex-
tualised within a local socio-cultural context. The transformation creates spaces for
different ideologies (personal, disciplinary, institutional and external). In the transfor-
mation process, or in the curriculum development, the university teachers hold a sig-
nificant and powerful role. The local pedagogic discourse is most strongly influenced
by teacher conceptions acquired during their own time of studying the discipline and
their experience of teaching. The discipline’s organisational culture and structure as
well as its saga both mould the local pedagogic discourse and create its social context
within which different contesting ideologies arise. In the study, Bernstein’s concepts
were further used to analyse the organisational structure of the three different dis-
ciplinary departments and to demonstrate how they lend themselves differently to
teachers’ cooperation in curriculum decision making and development.