Module II: Research-Based Teaching and Teacher Roles

In the February newsletter, we followed the PhD students as they encountered the teacher role for the first time: the nervousness right before the door opens, the many ideas about what teaching “ought to be", and their first experiences with encouraging students to talk to one another and to feel comfortable being doubtful together. Module I supports them in planning teaching, selecting learning activities, and creating safe learning environments.

In this newsletter, we take the next step and turn to Module II, which gives PhD students the opportunity to discuss the connections between their research field, their teaching, and their roles as teachers.

Research-Based Teaching at SDU

At SDU, all teaching is research-based — this is a fundamental premise and a shared starting point across disciplines and faculties. Research-based teaching includes:

• Ensuring that teaching is anchored in active research environments, is carried out by researchers, and draws on current research.
• Enabling students to understand both the subject matter of their discipline and the methodological foundations that allow them to assess and develop new knowledge. This means that they also encounter the field’s choices and omissions, disagreements, and uncertainties.
• Presenting research as a practice — something that is produced, argued for, and applied in real academic contexts — not only as a set of results.

In this understanding, research-based teaching is not a specific method but a way of thinking about teaching. Through research-based teaching, we adopt a particular perspective that, across an entire study programme, enables graduates to engage with knowledge in a critical and informed way — ultimately equipping them to contribute to change and development through their disciplinary expertise.

Conversations about research-based teaching have a tendency to take off and drift into higher levels of abstraction, making it difficult to see what it actually means for one’s own teaching practice. In Module II, we keep research-based teaching firmly grounded. The course helps PhD students recognise what they are already doing and how small shifts in perspective on existing content can make the knowledge foundations of their discipline more visible to students.

Making Research Visible in the Small Things

As preparation for Module II, the PhD students interview the teacher responsible for the course they are teaching. They ask about course content, the reasoning behind the structure, and the choices made in the teaching. They also speak with a few students about their experiences of teacher roles and what they perceive as good teaching. On the course day, these insights form the basis for examining where the research foundations of the discipline show up in practice.

• Where and how does research surface in my course?
• When and how do students get the opportunity to explore questions for which they themselves do not yet know the answer — and thereby practice some of the approaches the discipline uses to generate new knowledge?
• How do I show students how the discipline thinks, and not only what the discipline knows?

The PhD students are placed in groups with as much similarity as possible in terms of teaching contexts and academic disciplines. The groups support each other in articulating the research-based elements of their own and each other’s courses, developing new angles, and trying out learning activities that can be adapted to their individual contexts.