Context matters… does it? Insights into the scope of the journal 'die hochschullehre'

Abstract

<p>Over the last years, the number of scientific papers on teaching and learning in higher education has increased. Reasons for this development are changes in the educational settings and the teaching and learning approaches. Furthermore, they connect to the surge of scholarship of teaching and learning as well as scholarship of academic development projects. Nowadays, academic teachers and third space professionals can rely on different journals to publish their educational insights. But who are the authors of these papers? From which disciplinary contexts and theoretical perspectives do they approach their scholarly work? And what do they write about? Based on the scope of the journal 'die hochschullehre', a German outlet in the field of higher education teaching and learning, we analysed the contexts of papers, their authors, and respective thematic scope, focusing on the years 2015 to 2022. During this time, the German higher education system received extensive funding, which the scope of this journal's papers reflects. We found that, even though these papers originated from different types of higher education institutions and from various disciplinary backgrounds, there seems to be a tendency to address topics on the level of individual courses. Aspects related to the meso- or macro-level of higher education teaching and learning are less frequently considered. In our contribution, we discuss initial findings and share the analytic approach of our research. Beyond the institutional backgrounds of the authors, we analysed content-related parameters, e.g. keywords and abstracts, to grasp the addressed thematic fields. As a next step, we will explore the epistemological connotations of these thematic fields and question whether these publications indicate the emerging of higher education research as a new discipline. </p><p>The posters was presented at the ISSOTL 2023 conference in Utrecht (8-11 of November 2023).</p&gt