Team teaching in doctoral education: guidance for academic identities on the threshold

ABSTRACT

Team teaching in higher education offers academics the opportunity to better understand their individual teaching approaches and to learn from their colleagues. Whereas the benefits of team teaching have been widely researched, so far few findings exist regarding its value for doctoral education. This paper introduces findings of a quantitative study, which collected data from mixed-experience teaching teams. Embedded in an educational development programme for the group of teaching newcomers, team teaching here is closely linked to doctoral training. The findings suggest that – for PhD candidates – team teaching does not only provide information on the role as academic teacher, it even supports their transition towards their new academic identity. Grounded in theoretical assumptions on identity construction and the concept of liminality, this paper provides arguments on how team teaching evokes situations of encountered otherness and why this can support doctoral candidates who are on the threshold of becoming independent scholars.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic identity
• team teaching
• doctoral education
• encounters
• liminality

Acknowledgements

My profound gratitude goes to the academics who participated in one of the team teaching programmes at our University. Their openness to share their experiences as teaching team member was and still is amazing to me. Thanks to all of you for joining in discussions on teaching and learning, for critically reflecting on the benefits and challenges as teaching team, and – of course – for enriching my research with your perspectives. Furthermore, I would like to thank Dr Tanja Reiffenrath and Dr Eva-Maria van Straaten for their never-ending valuable feedback and for continuously helping me to find a balance between my social anthropological roots and my methodologically diverse approaches as educational researcher.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This postmodern understanding of identities is rooted in Eurocentric beliefs and focusses on individualism. In consequence, it neglects Non-Western ideas of self, identity, or learning which often focus on collectivity and the importance of social networks (Merriam 2018; Yin 2018). In the conclusion of this paper, I will, however, address this issue.

2 Even though, as Becher and Trowler (2001, xiv) argue, “[…] the ‘special' significance [!] of disciplinary knowledge has been diminished”, epistemological beliefs as well as a person’s disciplinary socialisation (still) have an effect on her/his teaching, learning, and research practices (cf. Lindblom-Ylänne et al. 2006).

3 For example, communities of practice provide this kind of support by facilitating a modified form of participation which is called ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998, 100–101).

4 I am aware of the critical discussion on using means and standard deviation when dealing with ordinal data (cf. Liddell and Kruschke 2018). Due to the relatively small sample size in this study, however, mean values and standard deviation can help to better display differences in the data, why both values are being used here.

5 Significance is indicated based on an alpha value p < 0.05 (Cohen 1988).

6 Referring to Cohen (1988) I consider r = 0.10 a small effect, r = 0.30 a medium effect, and r = 0.50 a strong effect.