Software engineers are in charge of developing high quality software products. Such products are increasingly demanded in several economic sectors. For this reason, universities are concerned with continuously improving of the teaching-learning process in software engineering. Consequently, software engineering education is arising as a research topic aiming at preparing professionals with sound knowledge of theoretical concepts and well-developed soft competencies. Such competencies should enable them to comply with the software industry demands. Software engineering education intends to answer some questions for software engineering: What to teach? and How to teach? Facing the first question, some standards like SWEBOK (IEEE, 2014) and Software Engineering Curricula (ACM & IEEE, 2004) have been developed to define the body of knowledge required by software engineers. Concerning the second question, although several papers in journals and conferences describe experiences of software engineering teaching, a standard about the way to teach courses in this discipline is still underdeveloped. Bareiša et al. (2005) suggest the importance of identifying strategies for organizing all knowledge generated from several experiences in order to make it available to the software engineering education community. Some problems of the software engineering teaching-learning process can be summarized as follows: i) lack of motivation of software engineering students (Juanhua, 2013); ii) lack of integration of methods, techniques and tools acquired in software engineering courses, with other topics of the curriculum (Way, 2005); and iii) the complexity of continuous change management in course contents as a consequence of changes in technologies and models for developing software (Bareiša et al., 2005). The formulation of a general theory for software engineering education comprising the core elements of different teaching strategies and/or experiences reported by researchers can be an option for achieving Bareiša’s purpose. Such theory will be a first guide for teaching software engineering; it could aim to: i) identify the current practices, methods, and teaching strategies for software engineering; ii) define the minimal set of elements to be included in any software engineering teaching strategy in order to achieve the intended learning objectives; and iii) establish an instrument for comparing different teaching strategies (current and future) on a common ground.