Abstract:

“Beliefs may be thought of as lenses through which one looks when interpreting the world” (Philipp, 2007). The pivotal role played by belief system may be realised from the age old assumption that beliefs are the best indicators of the decisions individuals make throughout their lives. Thus, within the academic arena, teachers’ beliefs play a fundamental role in determining classroom practices. There are numerous researches indicating the correlation between teacher beliefs and parameters such as ‘teacher efficacy’, ‘performance attribution’ and ‘self concept’ which in turn influence their perception and behaviour in the classroom. Furthermore, impact of teachers’ beliefs do not restrict to their pedagogical practices but also have a bearing on the quality of student cognition and even students’ personal constructs. Therefore this whole area of teachers’ beliefs which is relatively new renders itself very crucial for research. In our paper, we propose to present our study on a very vital aspect of this area i.e. interface between teacher beliefs and pedagogy. We explored through semi structured interviews, how university teachers’ epistemological beliefs influence their pedagogical knowledge. We tried to investigate what ‘learning’ means to them, how do they ‘assess’ learning and are they cognizant of issues associated with learning with focus on ‘alternate-conceptions/misconceptions’. The data was content analysed and results exhibit that there remains a significant gap between teaching and learning, which teachers are oblivious of. Implications of our research make a strong case for creating platforms for university teachers, wherein interaction between their practices (and hence their personal constructs) and research in pedagogy can be facilitated. This endeavour will not only contribute towards teachers’ professional development but will also help in creating a more conducive environment for learning.

Keywords:

Teacher Beliefs, Alternate conceptions.