Developing critical questions from faculty tensions: an approach to collegiality in course teams

The authors of this paper are academic developers in an Australian university. In thispaper, we discuss the outcomes of a small pilot study about value tensions; completed toinform a larger research project about the possibilities of making collaborative collegiality an explicit aim of a curriculum review. After interviewing four course leaders, we were
interested in the highly specific nature of the course leaders’ challenges. Could a criticalenquiry schema based on each course leader’s emerging value tensions provide a scaffold for scholarly, critical discourse? Making tensions explicit in teaching and learning development work in university course teams may begin a process of situated, critical questioning and discourse on the curriculum itself. We acknowledge this work can, at
times, elicit a form of difficult discourse.