Exploring the role that the conceptions of teaching (COTs) and reflections on experience have in professors instructional choices.

The European Higher Education Area, better known by the name of the Bologna process, was implemented in 2007. Bologna meant a landmark in university education that changed the curricular and methodological conception of undergraduate education. It implied a shift to a student-led model that brought active methodologies to the stage of our classrooms. Active methodologies are consistent with a constructivist approach to learning that has the student experience at its core. While research provides conflicting supporting evidence on active learning outcomes it does significantly increase student motivation, so it seems a reasonable assumption to recommend its use when employed along other instruction methods. However, the use of active methodologies is not yet as widely extended as we could presume and lecture remains the main instructional method in the Political Science and International Relations university classrooms. The obstacles for not using active methodologies are well reported in the literature and include a wide array of individual, student-based and institutional constraints (Lean et al, 2011: 235). However, the reasons that motivate professors to change their instructional methods and include active methodologies has not been widely researched. Building on Devlin’s (2006) study where she questioned the assumption often made in the literature that conceptions of teaching (COTs) precede changes in practice, this study seeks to explore the factors that sparked change in teaching methodologies in professors who started their teaching career using lecture as the prominent way of instruction to change their practices to include a combination of traditional and active learning methodologies. To this respect, there are some questions we want to address: Do professors decide to include active methodologies in their classes because their conception of learning became constructivist? Or does the story follow an opposite rationale where the experience in class as only lecturers made them reflect on either or both their conception of teaching and learning and the methodologies they were using? The study is based in ten in-depth interviews conducted to Spanish Political Science and International Relations instructors, in different stages of their professoriate career. To analyze personal accounts of their teaching experience we have used a grounded theory approach as it allows us to see what categories emerge as relevant in this process of change.This research does not assess professors actual teaching methods in a class setting, so the study focuses on what instructors say they believe and what they report they do.