Helping lecturers address and formulate teaching challenges: an exploratory study

In this paper we present an exploratory study on the kind of questions or difficulties lecturers point out at the beginning of an educational course – to be addressed in it. These questions happen to be very general and are poorly connected to the knowledge to be taught. We suggest a twofold interpretation of this phenomenon. On the one hand, and in the line of the didactic transposition theory, teachers do not allow themselves to raise questions about the knowledge that is supposed to be their main field of expertise. On the other hand, the prevailing institutional pedagogy does not provide teachers with a fruitful enough conceptual frame to formulate this kind of questions. From the experience of several lecturer education courses, we postulate that didactics can help university teachers better interpret their practice and question it in a more productive way.