Document Type
Article
Source of Publication
Teaching and Learning Inquiry
Publication Date
1-1-2018
Abstract
© 2018 University of Calgary. All Rights Reserved. Within postsecondary education, the assessment of effective teaching has largely relied upon student evaluations of teaching. However, the process through which teachers make sense of their student evaluations is unclear. A research team of six undergraduate nursing students and four nursing educators explored the research question: How do nursing educators make meaning from their student evaluations of teaching? Gadamerian hermeneutics guided unstructured interviews with nursing educators working at a Middle East campus of a Canadian university. The interview transcripts were interpreted through a process of naive readings, rereadings, interpretive dialogues, and interpretive writing that generated the following hermeneutic interpretations: 1. Teachers make meaning of their student evaluation through generalized subj ective characterizations of students and through their expressed intentions for their teacher-student relationships. 2. Some of these characterizations and expressed intentions obscured what truths could be learned from the student evaluations of teaching. 3. The experience of receiving critical student feedback invoked a personal response, at the same time, paradoxically, teachers worked hard to "not take it personally." We suggest the practice of deep listening as a way to understand students' feedback. The main takeaway message from this research is that teachers need a supportive and sustaining community of peers who are also open to listening deeply to the truths embedded in student evaluations of teaching.
DOI Link
ISSN
Publisher
University of Calgary
Volume
6
Issue
2
First Page
127
Last Page
142
Disciplines
Education
Keywords
Hermeneutics, Listening, Nursing education, Student evaluations of teaching, Student feedback
Scopus ID
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Zhu, Carina Jia Yan; White, Diana; Rankin, Janet; and Davison, Christina Jean, "Making meaning from student evaluations of teaching: Seeing beyond our own horizons" (2018). All Works. 2306.
https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae/works/2306
Indexed in Scopus
yes
Open Access
yes
Open Access Type
Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series