Creating reflective space for teachers in higher education: the use of story completion

This paper describes a study how higher education teachers conceive of and approach their teaching and how they connect their conceptions and approaches to critical incidents. This study draws on university teachers’ self-inquiry through a story completion method. Signature pedagogies provide the analytical framework in our thematic analysis through which we analyzed teachers’ narratives. Our analysis depicts the heterogeneous complexity of university teachers’ experiences in different disciplines. We found that concepts and approaches may be bridged through story-mediated reflective conversations which created space for multiple interpretations of these stories. Story-mediated narratives about teaching also encouraged teachers’ academic development grounded in self-inquiry.