Document Type

Chapter

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Documenting Teaching Excellence

Editor

Karin deJonge-Kannan and Travis N. Thurston

Publisher

Utah State University

Publication Date

2025

First Page

189

Last Page

204

Abstract

As teaching in higher education becomes increasingly complex (De Courcy, 2015), documenting one’s teaching practice requires instructors1 to take a more nuanced approach. The diversity associated with teaching today, impacted by COVID (Scholkmann et al., 2024), the various teaching modalities now available (McManus et al., 2024), and the introduction of artificial intelligence into academia (Li, 2025; Sok & Heng, 2024), has created a concoction of elements available to each instructor. This means that every instructor, bringing their own philosophical and ontological approach to teaching, has a myriad of decisions to make about how to best teach each course to students. Despite the ubiquitous use of the term innovative teaching to indicate an instructor’s intentional curriculum design to enhance student learning, teaching today is not about innovation but rather about being contextually relevant. Innovation implies employing one’s agency to embrace change, but instructors in post-secondary do not have a choice anymore whether to change. What instructors can do is exert their agency in the decisions they make about the many elements associated with the course and where it is being taught, making teaching excellence highly context and instructor specific.

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