The profound changes that are taking place in Higher Education are having a great impact on the teaching processes and training of university teachers. Consequently, new curricular structures, new student-centred teaching methods, and new definitions of teachers’ work are generating new pedagogical demands, which are unprecedented in the recent history of European universities. Specifically, EHEA guidelines require a teaching profile that able to promote significant learning, higher thought competences, learning how to learn, and the ability to develop reflexive thought.

The aim of university teachers should be to promote learning that is consistent with curricular goals. For Barnett (2001), the university can only be understood by taking into account its relations to the labour market and its employment patterns. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the knowledge and skills needed by teachers and to analyze how to transfer this to professional practice. Keeping in mind that the subject is part of a specific curriculum and, therefore, that others university teachers develop abilities that are complementary or juxtaposed to the subject matter approach.

So our research questions are: how do we define the knowledge of university teachers? What knowledge do they possess and which should they possess to address the increasing challenges for change resulting from the demands of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA)?

The category of teacher knowledge as an object of study “connoting propositional and procedural knowledge as well as dispositions” (Munby, Russell and Martin, 2001:877), is relatively new in the context of research on teacher education in general, and even more so with respect to university teaching practices. Furthermore, in the last Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (Cochran-Smith, Feiman-Nemser and McIntyre, 2008), “teacher capacity” is proposed as a wider category including knowledge, beliefs, skills, representations and commitments. Nevertheless, we continue to prefer Shulman’s category of teacher knowledge, because it is more pertinent for research in higher education. More than twenty years ago, Shulman (1986) introduced Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) as a specific category of knowledge, one “which goes beyond knowledge of subject matter per se to the dimensión of subject matter knowledge for teaching (p.9, original emphasis). Pedagogical content knowledge has been defined by Shulman as:

“The most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, the most useful forms of representations of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations –in a word, ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others. Pedagogical content knowledge also includes what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult; the conceptions and preconceptions that students of different ages and backgrounds bring with them to the learning of those most frequently taught topics and lessons (Shulman, 1986: 9-10)

Barnett, R. (2001). Los límites de la competencia: el conocimiento, la educación superior y la sociedad. Barcelona: Gedisa. Cochran-Smith, M; Feiman-Nemser, S.; McIntyre, J. (Eds.) (2008). Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts. New Yok and London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group and the Association of Teacher Educators. Munby, H., Russell, T. And Martin (2001). Teachers’ knowledge and how it develops. In V. Richardson (Ed.). Handbook of Research on Teaching. Washington: American Educational Research Association, 877-904. Shulman, L. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge grow in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15 (2), 4-14.