Key ideas

Short intro to a book of CASTL teaching fellows cases. Touches upon definition of SoTL, different kinds of enquiries, and methods. Also relationship between SoTL and educational researchers.

One telling measure of how differently teaching is regarded from traditional scholarship or research within the academy is what a difference it makes to have a “problem” in one versus the other. In scholarship and research, having a “problem” is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves.

But in one’s teaching, a “problem” is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation.

Changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing investigation is precisely what the movement for a scholarship of teaching is all about. How might we make the problematization of teaching a matter of regular communal discourse? How might we think of teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated

How it often starts. Question shared by many faculty, administrators, etc.

describing what an approach looks like

• could look at dynamics of class discussion around a difficult topic
• efforts to document the varieties of prior knowledge and understanding students bring to a particular topic or aspect of the discipline

new models and conceptual frame- works generate new questions that can, in turn, enrich the scholarship of teaching and learning and extend its boundaries

Mills Kelly, for instance, talks about methods in what is essentially a homecoming story. Early in his work, he tells us, he found himself casting about, trying to figure out how to do this thing called, somewhat dauntingly, “the scholarship of teaching and learning.” Behaving like a good historian, he went to the library and began reading about the use of multimedia in the teaching and learning of his field; what he found was a body of educational research (mostly not focused on history or, indeed, on any particular discipline) employing “a methodology that I knew nothing about—a new language, a use of control groups, a scientific approach.” It was not familiar or comfortable ground: “I’m not an educational researcher by training. I’m an historian.”

It was only later, when Mills read the work of another historian who had been studying the teaching and learning of history, that he realized the relevance of his own background—that the tools and dispositions of an historian might, that is, stand him in good stead in addressing questions about teaching and learning. His question about recursive reading, for instance, is an historian’s question about a process that Mills sees as essential to the doing of history. And his electronic course portfolio can be seen as a kind of chronicle of the course, an account of its unfolding over time, with links to relevant artifacts and evidence.

Craig Nelson, a biologist from Indiana Hutchings University and a 2000 Carnegie Scholar, recently developed a document (included on the CD-ROM) of “selected examples of several of the different genres of the scholarship of teaching and learning,” which he defines in large part by unit of analysis: reports on particular classes, reflections on many years of teaching experience, and summaries and analyses of sets of prior studies. Craig entitles his document “How Could I Do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?”