Efforts to improve teaching in order to improve student learning in higher education generally focus on the repertoire of strategies that teachers might employ. There is growing evidence, particularly within the ‘approaches’ to teaching literature to suggest that these strategies are not arbitrarily conceived but are more likely to be part of an integrated system of a teacher’s thoughts and actions. As a corollary, there has been increased interest in investigating teachers’ beliefs about teaching. Few studies however, have focused specifically on accounting education. The motivation for the study described here is to address this lack of research. The study investigated the approaches to teaching of accounting academics working in universities in Australia and New Zealand. A range of approaches and their relationship to other aspects of their teaching work are described. The results contribute to our understanding of what constitutes excellence in teaching in accounting in three main ways. Firstly, they help to map the range and nature of teaching conceptions held by academics in a relatively under-researched area. Secondly, they help to define excellence in teaching by identifying the educationally critical features of conceptions more likely to be associated with better quality teaching than those which are not. Thirdly, they offer additional insights into what constitutes quality in teaching by describing the relations between conceptions of teaching, learning and approach.

Efforts to improve teaching in order to improve student learning in higher education generally focus on the repertoire of strategies that teachers might employ. There is growing evidence, particularly within the ‘approaches’ to teaching literature to suggest that these strategies are not arbitrar...