Abstract
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Improving teacher design promises to be a scalable, sustainable approach to building
capacity amongst a workforce faced with complex and evolving drivers of change in
higher education worldwide. While design has long been recognised as a routine part of
teaching, there has been renewed interest in supporting and understanding the design
work that teachers do to foster innovation, particularly in technology-enhanced
learning, at institutional scale by influencing teachers’ practices. Re-framing teaching
as design usefully emphasises the creative problem-solving needed to balance
pedagogical, logistical and technical considerations within specific educational
contexts, tailored to learners’ needs. There is potential for this re-framing to build on
and advance work in “learning design” and “design for learning” that has generated a
wide range of practical supports and tools. In this article, we explore, problematise and
conceptualise the notion of “teacher as designer” within the complexity of contemporary
higher education through a critical review of existing empirical and conceptual work
internationally. We offer insights into the current state of knowledge about teacher
design in higher education, highlight gaps and possibilities, offer a new conceptualisation
drawing on practice theory and set out propositions to provoke further debate about
teacher design as a vehicle for sustainable innovation in higher education.