Higher education and the teaching profession have been facing increasing challenges in recent decades. Take, for example, the phenomena associated with the information society and the massification of higher education. At the same time, a convergence of trends regarding policies for higher education have led to the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), in which 48 countries have been implementing  reforms on the basis of common key values intended to make higher education systems more compatible and strengthening their quality assurance mechanisms.

The EHEA officially started in 1999 with the signing of Bologna declaration. Given that political framework, the countries involved started processes of curriculum restructuring in higher education, and changes within academics' professionalism were advocated, with a strong appeal to interrupt the hegemony of the instructional paradigm, emphasizing the need to adopt the learning paradigm. This paradigm transition is particularly underlined in Portugal across the implementation of the Bologna process that started in 2006 (Esteves, 2010). 

Within this context, the need to reject the conception of a teacher who holds and transmits knowledge has been emphasised, demanding the reconfiguration of teachers’ ways of being and acting with inevitable implications for pedagogical practices. Such a change is not intended to take place only at the most superficial level with the occasional resource to more active methodologies or with the incorporation of digital technologies in teaching. In fact, a deeper transformation in the core of the professionalism and professionality of the teacher is expected, reaching the level of teachers' beliefs, conceptions and implicit theories. 

However, despite the enormous pressure on higher education teachers to change its practices, it has been observed that this type of change does not necessarily follow from political pressure or normative imposition. Instead, it is suggested that pedagogical training might contribute to the reconfiguration of teaching and to improve its quality (Inamorato et all., 2019; Postareff et all, 2007), even if this idea is not fully embedded within higher education institutions, which restricts opportunities for the professional development of academics.

One previous qualitative study with Portuguese higher education teachers suggests, on the one hand, the presence of a dominant professional conception inscribed in the artisanal paradigm and matched with a teaching conception based on the transmission of knowledge, but, on the other hand,  indicates that formal pedagogical training might support changes in teachers’ conceptions about the meaning of teaching and learning, with effects on teaching practices and on the quality of student learning (Almeida, Viana, Alves, 2022). This is in line with the assumption that, throughout their professional development process which can be enriched by pedagogical training, teachers structure a personal interpretative framework corresponding to "a set of cognitions, mental representations that work as a lens through which they look at their profession, giving it meaning and acting in it” (Ketchermans, 2009, p.72).

Against this background, the aim of the research reported in the proposed paper is to deepen knowledge about higher education teachers’ personal interpretative frameworks, paying special attention to the dynamic nature of such frameworks when teachers are involved in formal pedagogical training directed to their professional development.  Namely, two main questions guide the research: 1) Which are the teachers’ conceptions about ways of being and acting as higher education teacher?  2) Are these conceptions reconfigured across the attendance of a post-graduation degree on pedagogy in higher education that lasts one academic year? The participants are a group of 19 Portuguese academics enrolled on a post-graduation degree on pedagogy in higher education at Instituto de Educação – Universidade de Lisboa in 2022/2023.

Narrative approaches in education have long been used to access and make teachers’ interpretative frameworks and lived experiences understandable (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Particularly, visual narratives, such as drawings, are signaled as strategic mediation tools in such process, due to their dual dimension: on the one hand, as a way of mediating professional learning regarding conceptions and images about teaching in professional development initiatives; on the other hand, as research artifacts, which due to their multimodality features, provide the researcher with the most salient representations teachers experience at a specific moment in time (Orland-Barak & Maskit, 2017). Considering the purpose of the current piece of research, a visual narrative approach was adopted and a set of 19 drawings and their corresponding explanations were collected in the context of the above mentioned post-graduation degree attended by higher education teachers from different institutions and disciplinary domains. Such degree lasts one year and the participants were invited to draw themselves as teachers in the 2nd class of the 1st semester of the degree (in the beginning of October 2022). As this is an ongoing study, this first dataset will be complemented by a new round of data collection at the end of the 2nd and last semester of the degree (in the end of June 2023), where the participants will be asked to revise their initial drawing, and to either re-draw it/update it or to draw a new one, according to what they consider to be more aligned with their interpretative frameworks at the time. This new process of data collection will be supplemented with an expanded written account by each teacher. A content analysis will be applied to both datasets, thus following what Barkhuizen (2011) describes as analysis of narrative content, which consists in looking for similarities and grouping them into categories, through processes like coding for themes, categorization, and pattern finding among them.

Preliminary results based on content analysis of the first dataset (the 19 drawings and their corresponding explanations collected in October 2022) point out to the centrality of the classroom context and organization, as well as of the pedagogical interaction between teacher-student(s); but it also reveals classroom diversity and the role of emotions and professional values. Interestingly, despite common trends in the teachers’ drawings, the disciplinary field as a teacher seems to play a significant role in the participants’ interpretative frameworks, when they refer to the type of lessons and field work. So, it will be important to deepen the analysis and debate whether changes within academics' professionalism reveal a tension between the instructional paradigm and the learning paradigm in what concerns teachers’ ways of being and acting. The collection of the second dataset of drawings and their corresponding explanations in June 2023 will be fundamental to examine if and how the attendance of the post-graduation in pedagogy in higher education might result in the reconfiguration of teachers’ ways of being and acting. More broadly, the results of the study will contribute to deepened awareness about the teaching work of academics exploring ways of being and acting as teachers, as well as how these might be changed across formal pedagogical training, based on a qualitative original approach. Given that research about teaching academic work, namely using qualitative approaches, is not an issue sufficiently developed in the research field on higher education (Tigh, 2019; Kwiec, 2019), the paper is expected to contribute to fill in this gap.

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