TY - JOUR AU - Zhu, Carina Jia Yan AU - White, Diana AU - Rankin, Janet AU - Davison, Christina Jean PY - 2018/09/25 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Making meaning from student evaluations of teaching: Seeing beyond our own horizons JF - Teaching and Learning Inquiry JA - TLI VL - 6 IS - 2 SE - Articles DO - 10.20343/teachlearninqu.6.2.10 UR - https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/TLI/article/view/57486 SP - 127-142 AB - <p>Within postsecondary education, the assessment of effective teaching has largely relied upon student evaluations of teaching. However, the process through which teachers make sense of their student evaluations is unclear. A research team of six undergraduate nursing students and four nursing educators explored the research question: How do nursing educators make meaning from their student evaluations of teaching? Gadamerian hermeneutics guided unstructured interviews with nursing educators working at a Middle East campus of a Canadian university. The interview transcripts were interpreted through a process of naïve readings, rereadings, interpretive dialogues, and interpretive writing that generated the following hermeneutic interpretations:</p><ol><li>Teachers make meaning of their student evaluation through generalized subjective characterizations of students and through their expressed <em>intentions</em> for their teacher-student relationships.</li><li>Some of these characterizations and expressed intentions obscured what truths could be learned from the student evaluations of teaching.</li><li>The experience of receiving critical student feedback invoked a personal response, at the same time, paradoxically, teachers worked hard to “not take it personally.”</li></ol><p>We suggest the practice of deep listening as a way to understand students’ feedback. The main takeaway message from this research is that teachers need a supportive and sustaining community of peers who are also open to listening deeply to the truths embedded in student evaluations of teaching.</p> ER -