University teaching teams' contribution to workplace learning: An exploratory study

This exploratory research has the objective of studying a university teaching team as a community that offers a set of non-formalized opportunities for learning. The study has been carried out using a phenomenographic approach with semi-structured interviews with 40% of members of a university teaching team with varying experiences, contractual situations and work status. We extracted categories from the transcribed interview data and we carried out a content analysis. The analysis showed that participants identified some activities and characteristics of the teaching team as providers of learning. Also, it showed that among members with different positions there existed similarities and differences with respect to the recognition of different situations as potentially formative. Members with different positions point out different reasons that enable learning. We have to study further the features of workplace learning, especially, those of university teaching teams, not only as units of participation but also as units of knowledge construction, particularly, of professional knowledge construction.