Academic development for knowledge capabilities: Learning, reflecting and developing

In this paper, we look backwards to educational development principles and practices as implemented in the 1990s at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and forward to ideal principles and practices for the design of courses for teachers in higher education. The bridge between the two lies partly in an evaluation study, which we will describe, and partly in the theoretical work of John Bowden on knowledge capabilities for learning for an unknown future. The underlying framework depends on phenomenography, with its theoretical emphasis on learning as becoming able to discern the whole from its background, and how the constituents of the whole relate to one another and to the whole, and its empirical emphasis on qualitative variation in the ways in which students understand, conceptualize or experience phenomena they meet in their studies. A PET model and PET process are described, relating Practice, Experience and Theory through reflective problematization.