Keith Trigwell retired in recent years from his role as Professor of Higher Education at The University of Sydney where he served as director of the academic development unit. Prior to this, he was Director of the Oxford Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice, a Fellow of Kellogg College, and Reader in Higher Education at the University of Oxford.
Keith completed his PhD in chemistry at the University of Western Australia (UWA) and subsequently taught chemistry at UWA and then the Open University in the UK before changing direction by taking an academic development role with Griffith University in Brisbane in 1984 researching in the areas of student learning, teaching and leadership in universities. His research work in Oxford and Sydney has largely focused on investigations into qualitative differences in university teaching and the students’ learning experience, on teaching-research relations, the scholarship of teaching and emotions in teaching, and the PhD curriculum. In 2016 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Lund University, Sweden.
He has an impressive and sustained academic career, with more than 100 published journal articles, conference papers and books, with seven joint ARC research grants and a Google Scholar h-index of 58. With Mike Prosser, Keith co-wrote one of the seminal texts about university teaching and learning Understanding Learning and Teaching: the experience in higher education. His research and leading role in the development of higher education teaching and learning has had a major impact on Australian and international educational development. His work, with colleagues, on developing the approaches to teaching inventory (ATI) instruments for exploring the relations between the way teachers teach and conceive of assessment, and the ways students of those teachers experience learning, including the assessment demands, has been highly influential, and is widely translated and used across the world in a variety of contexts (disciplines, university types and teaching at different student study levels) and shows, with some consistency, how qualitatively different ways of teaching are related to a range of teaching-related variables.
Keith is a talented teacher and presenter and is in high demand internationally as a keynote presenter at conferences. He has mentored students and colleagues with a number of his PhD graduates progressing to prestigious academic careers including deanships and directors of academic development units and graduate research assistants now holding professorial positions.
He is a past co-president of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and was a co-ordinating editor of the International Journal of Higher Education from 2005-2011.
Keith has made a distinguished and sustained contribution to teaching and learning, academic development and the higher education community in Australia and internationally.
