Practice-as-Inquiry in Higher Education
Abstract
Practice-as-inquiry refers to the blending of instructional practice with systematic curricular inquiry. College and university teachers, while experts in their disciplines, typically are not specialists in instructional practice. Practice-as-inquiry (also referred to as teacher-as-researcher) may function as a mechanism of continuous teaching improvement in the context of higher education. The author presents a three-phase approach to practice-as-inquiry: identification of an instructional concern and plan of action, plan implementation and data collection, and data interpretation and instructional decisions. She argues that practice-as-inquiry can be applied across academic disciplines and illustrates its utility and applicability with examples from dentistry and information management courses.
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