Sharing practices, but what is the story? Exploring award-winning teachers’ conceptions of teaching

This paper critically considers the attempt by a research-intensive university in Asia to draw on and make public the practices of teaching award winners in different disciplines through the use of narrative vignettes. More specifically, this paper examines what the vignettes suggest about the connection between award-winning teachers’ conceptions of teaching (CT) on the one hand, and scholarly investigations of practice on the other, and to what extent the vignettes meet the aim of using the scholarship of teaching and learning as an instrument of effective academic development. Content analysis of the vignettes revealed that award-winning teachers’ CT tend to focus predominantly on enhancing learning, followed by encouraging collective knowledge creation and transmission of knowledge. A two-dimensional framework was also used to analyse the vignettes along a tacit-integrated continuum and within an intuitive-reflective frame of inquiry. The findings are discussed in relation to teachers’ perception of their impact on students’ learning and ways to enhance their own practice, with implications for teaching awards, documentation, and dissemination of high-level teaching achievement.