Academic Territory and Professional Identity: Toward a Differentiation of Teaching Practices at University

Over the past decade, many French universities have created professional development structures for university lecturers and researchers (LRs) with a view to “transforming pedagogy” in order to respond, in particular, to the questions posed by the diversity of students entering university and by the failure rate at the end of the first year of a bachelor’s degree. Knowledge of teaching (pedagogical knowledge) appears to be strongly related to the knowledge required to teach (disciplinary knowledge) and socially situated. In other words, the pedagogical practices and values of lecturers and researchers (social dimension) are influenced by the structures of disciplinary knowledge that Becher calls academic territories. This chapter argues that the dual dimensions of their profession, teaching and research, give them a different professional identity than pre-baccalaureate teachers. It presents some results on the professional identity of the LR.