Nowadays, in Sweden, it is mandatory for university teachers to participate in a course that highlights what it means to be a teacher in higher education, focusing on planning, teaching and evaluating teaching practices. This incentive comes from the Swedish Government and the aim it to develop and increase the pedagogical and didactical awareness in teachers within higher education. Participants on these courses are not homogenous i.e. they work in different disciplines and differ in work experience. These are some of the facts which influence how the teachers react to different teaching practices. This paper aims to describe how some participants in a mandatory teaching course experience the course per se and also to reflect on what a good teacher is actually good at. To enable students to develop a deep approach to learning, teachers should work with what can be called a student focused strategy (Trigwell et al.,1999). Different disciplines can be looked upon as having various scientific paradigms and this can also be transferred to the educational context (see studies Johansson, 2007, Nilsson, 2007, Axelsson, 2008). One of the main issues in the referred thesis above and in this small scaled study is the question of how the different scientific disciplines design for lifelong learning. In this paper we analyze how the participants in a mandatory course perceive their experience of teaching; i.e how they percieve their role as teachers, including both their reflection about themselves as teachers, as well as their educational practice.

The analysis is inspired by content analysis, the origin of which was described by Berelson as early as in 1952. He described it as a technique to find an objective, systematized and quantitative description of the content in a message (Löfgren, 2008). At that time this technique focused on the directness of the text and the exclusiveness of the text, so that independently of how, where, or who read and interpreted the text, the answer should remain the same. Depending on the ontological standpoint this can be viewed as an impossible mission. The method/technique later became subject for a more qualitative analysis, with the aim to find underlying and embedded messages. Now the researchers agree that the technique per se always implies a phase that demands interpretations.

The result shows so far that there is a span of how the participants perceived the course, a good teacher embrace courage and self-confidence in the interaction with the students’. Among those that embraced the course fully, we find new as well as experienced teachers. The analysis is mainly based on interviews with ten participants from two cohorts. Further, course and university policy documents will be analysed in order to understand the different educational contexts. What is a good teacher good at? Or how should you be to be perceived as a competent teacher? We are, of course, well aware that these questions are extremely hard to answer, because the normativity involved and that we ask our own participants, how critical can they be?