Towards an Understanding of Individual Acts of Teaching and Learning

This article uses a phenomenographic perspective to interpret and integrate the results of relational research, including phenomenography in particular, in analysing the experiences of teaching and learning in higher education. In this analysis the experience is conceived of as temporal and not extended over time. We describe conditions associated with two qualitatively different approaches to teaching which, as suggested by other research results, are associated with differences in the quality of student learning. Such an analysis can help explain the variation in the experience of the same lecturer in different teaching contexts or of different lecturers in the same teaching context.