Teaching unfamiliar content can lead to brilliant teaching: Data-led reflections

Abstract

Unfamiliarity constitutes one of the major challenges faced by novice practitioners while constructing teacher identities. It is often associated with the perceived uncertainties and lack of ownership or autonomy in navigating pedagogical complexities. In practice, any module may entail a sense of unfamiliarity for PGR teachers because they are not involved in the content development processes, usually initiated by the senior module leaders. In writing this article, we seek to reflect on our teaching experiences in three academic departments/centres. As our data-led reflections will show, multiple situated complexities play out in our attempts to mitigate the initially perceived unfamiliarity and externally prescribed non-expert role. The overarching aim is to shed light on strategic negotiation and construction of effective Higher Education professional identities while engaging in interdisciplinary practice. Following a qualitative methodological tradition, the data is generated from iterative reflective journaling and a series of peer dialogues, spanning two academic terms. We approach the data inductively via reflexive thematic analysis, highlighting three major themes in the two narrative reflections: 1) taking a humble stance to acknowledge the signature pedagogy of the unfamiliar field; 2) recognising the core threshold concepts from an etic perspective; and 3) fostering a bottom-up awareness of taking the students’ perspectives as near-peers. The data analysis is based on concrete examples to foreground actionable pedagogical recommendations, which are tried and tested in our own professional development. As such, we will argue that teaching unfamiliar content can lead to brilliant teaching.