Quality Managers ‐‐ How Shall We Educate Them?

SUMMARY

This paper argues from a personal view of teaching, drawing on forty years of experience, supplemented by what has been learned from academics studying teaching in five years of graduate classes. The stance towards these data is phenomenological and hermeneutic. The question is asked ‘What do university teachers experience teaching to be, both when they are teaching, and when they are reflecting on it?’ while also trying to illuminate the larger, generic question ‘What does it mean for anyone to be a teacher?’ The immediate concern is to study the implications of four possible answers to that question, for the theory and practice of ‘quality management’ in universities today. Four conceptions of teaching are described and each in turn discussed in the context of quality management.