The role of ideology in shaping academics’ conceptions of their discipline

This paper examines the role of ideology in academics’ conceptions of their discipline. The focus is on how individual ideologies affect the way academics conceptualise and enact the discipline in practice. It uses data collected for a study involving 18 academics in 15 disciplines working at seven different institutions which had the broader remit of examining the pedagogical constructs of university lecturers. It established that a number of ‘filters’ came into play to ‘colour’ the way academics conceive of and approach teaching and learning in higher education. One of those filters concerned academics’ own conceptions of their disciplines which were found to be at the same time more complex, and more grounded in the material context of practice, than both epistemological or socio-cognitive studies of the discipline infer.