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The article discusses the results of a study that examined the early teaching practice of university professors and the challenges they face in promoting learning among students. Some of the difficulties experienced by university lecturers in their early training practice are related to how to promote learning among students and how to assess learning. Also discussed are the implicit difficulties and the study's conclusion suggesting ways to ameliorate implicit presuppositions.

This article reports on a small-scale interview study of all the professors in one social sciences department in a university in England. The study asks for advice on how academic teaching staff can best develop their research activity whilst effectively fulfilling their teaching position. The findings identify five strands of advice for developing research: teach as part of your research activity; use your research when planning lectures; be a flexible researcher and adapt your research interests to available opportunities; proactively promote yourself and your research; and engage in research as a collective activity. Such advice comments on the possible relationships between teaching and research. The data are also considered in terms of a Bourdieu analytic framework, where the importance of building research capital and creating a research habitus is emphasised in order to succeed in what is an increasingly competitive research environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current article provides a perspective on the day-to-day challenges that a group of new teachers experienced as they adopted more student-centred approaches to teaching. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted over two years with 11 new teachers from a range of higher education institutions and subject disciplines. The analysis used case studies, alongside a search for common themes, to provide fine-grained insights into the teachers' development. A main finding was that in using approaches that more actively involved the students, the teachers described challenges specific to their local contexts. In particular, the idiosyncrasy of the topic being taught was a key factor. The second finding was that regardless of the conception of teaching held, all teachers described challenges in translating this way of thinking into practice. Such data provides a useful resource for academic developers to open dialogue with new academics about the challenges they face in developing as teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]