Key ideas

briefly describes origin of term SoTL, two divergent understandings, also difference K12/higher education, and then talks about attempts at digital representation of teaching

• definition (what counts as scholarship of SoTL)
• execution (how to facilitate representation, interpretation, analysis of teaching)

• How can teaching be represented in ways that reflect the practioner’s perspective and respect the complexity of teaching?
• How can audiences, particularly novice teachers and others who have limited experience in teaching, learn from complex and sophisticated representations?

Term covers all kinds of scholarship that takes teaching as a focus, including teacher inquiry as one strand. A relatively new form of scholarship in higher education.

Excludes a lot of literature, but ties in with practices that go much further back historically than SoTL, carried out in a similar way in K12 and higher education.

one can imagine the scholarship of teaching and learning as both a specific movement in higher education and a general description of a broad range of practitioner inquiries into teaching and learning at all levels of education

Ernest Boyer, President of Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, colleagues with Eugene Rice and Mary Huber got credit for introducing the term Scholarship of Teaching. Boyer was firmly planted in higher ed, interested in the diverse roles and responsibilities of faculty, and expanding the notion of “scholarship”. Synonymous with “scholarly teaching” - teaching itself is a scholarly act that helps to communicate to students what the scholar has learned through what Boyer terms ‘the scholarship of discovery.’

Current president Lee Shulman, with Pat Hutchings and Mary Huber, use term differently. Shulman has more of a background in K12. To engage in the scholarship of teaching, teaching well is not sufficient. Blur lines between scholarship of discovery, and scholarship of teaching, suggesting rendering teaching public, amenable to critique and peer review, so others can build upon it. Want scholarship of teaching to bring teaching status and respect, build a knowledge-base of teaching that can advance the entire field, not just recognize and reward good teaching.

• the establishment of the CASTL scholars program that gave a small number of faculty in higher education a fellowship to pursue the scholarship of teaching
• the launching of the CASTL Campus Program (in conjunction with the Association for the Advancement of Higher Education), which sought to develop a network of campuses that were committed to supporting the scholarship of teaching
• partnerships with scholarly societies such as the American Historical Association and the Mathematical Association of America
• later also launched Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for K-12 Teachers and Teacher Educators

Established in 2004, creation of International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In higher education one can see the scholarship of teaching in the work of faculty

• involved in conducting classroom research (Cross and Steadman 1996)
• developing teaching portfolios or leading ‘pedagogical colloquia’ as part of hiring and evaluation processes (Shulman 1995)
• reflecting on their practice as part of faculty development initiatives (often supported by the work of the Centers for Teaching and Learning that have emerged on many US campuses)
• experimenting with new ways to document and demonstrate what their students are learning

• established 1998, to help K12 and higher ed CASTL scholars to use multimedia and new technologies to carry out inquiries and present results to others

• Dennis Jacobs, a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Notre Dame, drew on the traditional organization of scholarship in the sciences and shared his research on the use of cooperative learning methods in his introductory chemistry course by organizing materials into traditional sections for methods, findings, and discussion.
• Mills Kelly, an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University, took the form of an electronic course portfolio that he could use as part of his file for promotion and tenure.
• Heidi Lyne, a middle school teacher, offered viewers video and supporting materials from a documentary Lyne produced
• Websites for several other K–12 teachers followed an ‘inquiry’ format that provided examples of or reflections on different stages of teachers’ inquiries as well as the products of those inquiries.
  • a website documenting the inquiries of Sarah Capitelli – a first/second-grade teacher in a bilingual school in Oakland, California – offered video from an inquiry she undertook with her students, examples of narratives she produced over the previous few years, and her reflections on the inquiry process and the development of her thinking about English language instruction.

These classroom-focused rather than inquiry-focused representations included the development of a format dubbed a ‘class anatomy’ (Shulman 1998) that could be used to document teaching in a variety of different contexts. Class anatomies were designed specifically to try to respect the complexity of teaching while helping viewers to both get an overall sense of a teacher’s work in one classroom and provide manageable entry points for investigating their teaching in greater depth

• viewers need prior knowledge in a number of areas to make sense of and critique the teaching represented
  • of the specific contexts in which teachers worked
  • experience with subjects, topics and pedagogical approaches represented
  • knowledge of how to read or view these kinds of web-based representations of teachers' practice

Inviting teacher educators to use web-based representations of teaching in their own courses.

The teacher educators documented their use of these representations in their own websites that brought together curriculum materials and videos from their classes, their reflections, and, in some cases, student work and reflections – see Inside Teaching (2008), an online exhibition that brings together many of these sites.

CASTL scholars have established their own projects

• Bill Cerbin, a Psychology Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse, has gone on to establish a project modeled on Japanese Lesson Study, in which the faculty develop websites that document their teaching of a particular ‘lesson’ or class and their reflections on it.
• Dan Bernstein, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, led a ‘peer-review project’ that engaged faculty from a number of institutions in preparing and reviewing electronic course portfolios.
• Randy Bass, a Professor of American Studies at Georgetown, launched the Visible Knowledge Project, designed to engage faculty across disciplines and institutions to produce electronic ‘posters’ that enable them to share data and collaborate in conducting research into their own practice.
• Toru Iiyoshi, the Knowledge Media Lab of the Carnegie Foundation went on to develop a tool that faculty anywhere can use to develop websites that document their teaching and share them with others on their own campuses or in their own groups or with anyone who has an Internet connection.
• Lesson Study Project, located at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.