Arab Educational Information Network

Higher education in Tunisia has recently launched a quality enhancement program. Often scant attention is paid to the role of academics in impeding or facilitating change. This paper reports the experience of a group of lecturers who spontaneously engaged in quality conversations and designed collective measures to improve their teaching and learning. The conditions as well as the processes for engaging in such bottom-up experience are reviewed. The outcome of such experience on the academics’ theories of teaching and specifically readiness and metaphors for change are discussed. This is compared to the results of previous studies on resistance to change to argue that both top-down and bottom-up approaches are necessary to the implementation and success of a quality culture in higher education.