Nowadays, it is recognised the importance and the search for excellence in university teaching. Universities pay increasing attention to the quality of the pedagogy practiced in their classrooms (Ovando, 1989). It is important to remember that quality in Tertiary Education must promote quality learning among all their students. Therefore, it is extremely important to take into account, a process of teaching and learning that involves all the strategies with which teachers ensure the learning of a theoretical and practical knowledge within a specific field or content. University teachers must master not only the knowledge regarding their specific subject or specialization (Grossman, 1990), but also they need to master the pedagogical content knowledge that is a “blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and are presented for instruction” (Shulman, 1986, p. 8). According to Shulman (1986), pedagogical content knowledge is what often distinguishes the subject matter specialist from the pedagogue. It enables one to represent, illustrate, and explain ideas in ways that students are able to comprehend. Intimately related to this, there is an important ability that promotes this kind of learning that should be present in University teachers: the ability to reflect about their own discipline and teaching practices. As Schön (1998) says this reflection can serve as a corrective to over-learning: This author asserts that” Through reflection, he can surface and criticize the tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive experiences of a specialized practice, and can make new sense of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness which he may allow himself to experience” (p. 61). An interesting concept related to practical knowledge is Craft knowledge (Leinhardt, 1990; Grimmett & McKinnon, 1992) or the "wisdom of practice" to approach professional tasks (Cooper & McIntyre, 1996). This knowledge is firmly embedded in teachers’ practical experience and is developed throughout their careers. But, what happens with beginning university teachers who have not yet developed enough pedagogical experience? As beginners, at times it is difficult for them to manage plenty of factors related to teaching: context, working with others colleagues as a team and, of course, developing the necessary abilities to promote the learning of their students. Among some of the tasks University teachers must accomplish we find: managing the curriculum, knowing how to design a subject, how to use some planning, teaching and assessment strategies etc. The purpose of this research is to know, interpret and understand the process by which beginning teachers start building and developing the wisdom of teaching from their early pedagogical practices in order to enhance the learning of their students. Moreover, we focused on the type of strategies they use when teaching and which one of such strategies are more difficult to develop in order to promote learning. Finally, we identified and analyzed what kind of factors of the teaching-learning process have more impact on their pedagogical experience and which are the major challenges beginning teachers have to deal with. The research questions are: 1. Which are their beliefs about teaching and learning? 2. What kind of teaching strategies they actually use in class to promote learning among all their students? 3. Do they think it is necessary to improve them? How? 4. Which sort of factors impact on their pedagogical practices? 5. Which are the most important challenges they have to deal with, if any?

To study the development of craft knowledge in beginning teachers we used qualitative methods. The data was gathered at the University of Barcelona, Spain during the first and the second semester of the 2005-2006 academic year. The teachers studied were two beginning teachers (they had less than five years of teacher experience in Tertiary Education as teachers) from different fields of knowledge: Philology and Dentistry; one of them (Teacher A) is Teacher of Catalan Philology and the other one (Teacher B) is a Teacher of Clinical Dentistry in early childhood. These teachers, both women, were selected from a group of beginning teachers from the University of Barcelona bearing in mind the different fields of knowledge they come from and on the basis that only one of them was enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education that offers the University of Barcelona (Teacher B). Both of them agreed to participate in the study and allowed us to participate in their classes during an academic year: - Teacher A, had been teaching for four years as a Catalan teacher at the Catalan Language Centre (for foreign students who want to learn Catalan as a part of their academic studies). This teacher conducted short intensive courses with a maximum of 20 students (each of them were 40 hours course completed in one or three months). This means that in a year she made various courses with different students (each group of them were different) - Teacher B, is an associated teacher who had been teaching for three years at the Dentistry Faculty. She taught a course for undergraduate students who were in the last year of their degree at the University. The class group was approximately of 50 students but she decided on her own to divide it in three small groups in order to promote a personalized teaching for them because of the theoretical and practical nature of the subject. Data Collection To achieve triangulation of the findings, we used several data sources, as follows: a) Non participant Classroom observations: the researcher participated as a non-intrusive observer in a total of 37 sessions (18 sessions of the Catalan courses and 19 sessions of the subject of Clinical Dentistry in early childhood) taking ethnography field notes. b) In-depth teachers' interviews. Each teacher was interviewed twice: at the beginning and at the end of the academic year. Each interview was tape-recorded. c) Focus groups. Three focus groups were conducted with the students from de Dentistry Faculty and two more focus groups were made with one class group of students of Catalan; d) Students’ interviews: in addition, four interviews were made with some students of the Catalan courses. Data Analysis All taped interviews, focus groups and Classroom observations were transcribed and the content is being analyzed through an inductive method. This method consists in the constant comparative method proposed by Strauss & Corbin (1990). Content analysis allows discovering categories and macro categories and their interrelationships from textual database in order to propose a theory developed from the conceptualization of data. According to this, data collection and data analysis are consciously combined, and the initial data analysis is used to shape continuing data collection. “This is supposed to provide the researcher with opportunities to increase the "density" and "saturation" of recurring categories, as well as to assist in providing follow-up procedures in regards to unanticipated results. Interlacing data collection and analysis in this manner is also designed to increase insights and clarify the parameters of the emerging theory.” (Tuomela, 2005, p. 12)

Given that the data analysis is on its early stage, we will only present some preliminary results rather than final conclusions. Firstly, it seems clear that both teachers are willing to improve the learning of their students so that they would be able to be “good professionals” In other words, they try to promote and develop competencies and abilities that would allow them to practice their profession appropriately. Both of them believe that the teacher´s role consists in assisting and guiding their students in order help them in the process of acquiring meaningful learning. The main problem is to determine what exactly they have to do to achieve this purpose. In this sense, both of them consider that this dilemma might be solved through trial and error. By doing so, they can adapt their planning, teaching and assessment techniques in order to obtain the best learning results. In addition, by doing so they can manage their relationships with their students (especially if some difficulties arise). In general, the main challenge for them is to detect when exactly a meaningful learning is happening in order to be able to promote it. In sum, there is preliminary evidence which suggests that these teachers are developing in an early stage an intuitive knowledge with regards to their pedagogical practices. Secondly, with regards to the teaching strategies they used in the classroom to promote learning among the students, we observe/found some differences between teacher A and B. On the one hand, teacher A used to plan the lessons starting from some general grammar topics from where she then developed the same structure in every lesson. The lessons were normally structured as follows: first, she made a review of homework revising the main topics that were previously taught. Then she introduced some related contents and gave the students many exercises; when someone had a question or made a mistake, she explained the theory, and then the exercises continued. In sum we can claim that teacher A focused on teaching through practical exercises gave importance to continuous assessment. On the other hand, teacher B, used to plan the lessons in great detail. In fact, her students had to prepare every class by reading some articles related to a specific topic. Consequently, the class consisted in a clinical case analysis, which final purpose was to propose a diagnosis and a treatment for the patient. At the beginning of the course the teacher assessed the base level of knowledge related to the main contents of the subject, then in the middle of the course she made a another assessment in order to determine the main difficulties her students had regarding learning. Finally, at the end of the academic year she made a global assessment. Therefore, she was able to detect the learning progress of her students. In all these assessment stages, she tried to adapt the lesson plans according to her student learning needs. Unfortunately, at times this was difficult due to the original planning. In addition, the results indicate that this teacher maintained a very close relationship with her students which in turn was a key factor that enabled her to promote motivation on learning. Thirdly, both teachers are aware of the need of improving their teaching. However, teacher B seems to reflect more about it and try to change every year her activities of the lessons in order to find the most suitable pedagogical strategies that facilitated learning among her students. Teacher B also, tried to share her pedagogical practices with some colleagues although sometimes this was not simple as professors normally have different schedules due to their teaching commitments. By contrast, teacher A used to plan and make their teaching focusing in her intuition and in isolation Finally, both of them believed that context and organizational factors are very important in order to help teachers improving their pedagogical practices. For instance, they believe that team work is essential for sharing pedagogical strategies and for giving support among them to deal with teaching difficulties. In this sense, they reported/claimed, asserted that they need institutional time to meet, to discuss their experience as well as to learn from each other. Unfortunately, this is not easy to obtain for they don’t count with institutional time and they are used to work by in isolation In conclusion, for now two main ideas can be obtained from this research: the importance of the conception of a teacher as a reflective professional both individually and as a part of a team (Schön 1992; 1998) and the need of institutional support for teachers that would enabled them to share and research about pedagogical practices. These two elements can contribute towards the improvement of the quality of learning at the University and to transform the educational reality in Tertiaary Education.