Teachers’ Shared Expertise at a Multidisciplinary University of Applied Sciences

Shared expertise, team teaching, and cooperation among lecturersfrom different fields have become more and more important in promoting learning andachieving more innovative learning outcomes in multidisciplinary universities. Toincrease and improve sharing expertise between teachers from different faculties anddisciplines, we wanted, on one hand, to identify skills and competences that teachershave in common and, on the other hand, to find areas in which they identify that theyneed complementation. As a framework for this research, we applied Lee Shulman’s (1986)seven categories of teachers’ knowledge base including the theory of pedagogical contentknowledge (PCK). The data were collected by group discussions. The teachers (N = 22)represented all seven faculties of Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences(UAS), that is, Business School, Civil Engineering and Building Services, Culture andCreative Industries, Health Care and Nursing, School of Information and CommunicationTechnology (ICT), Industrial Engineering, and Welfare and Human Functioning. The datawere analyzed using theory-based content analysis. According to our data, the mutualcore competence of a teacher is the capacity to interact effectively. It is a basis forshared expertise. Interaction skills are necessary in collaborative construction ofknowledge as students, teachers of different fields, and their partners inside andoutside the organization co-operate. Multidisciplinary co-operation among colleaguesalso helps to maintain subject matter knowledge, as it supports peer learning andencourages everyone to move out of their comfort zones