One of the things I enjoy most about my new role is listening to faculty across campus reflect on what they are trying in their classrooms and why. I’m continually struck by how much creativity and critical reflection there is in our teaching, and yet we don’t always do a good job of communicating this important work to each other or to the community of peers beyond Carleton. LTC lunches highlight only a small fraction of the innovative approaches we are using in our classrooms or the challenges we are tackling.
After Ernest Boyer first published Scholarship Reconsidered (1), Lee Shulman wrote an essay (2) about teaching as community property. Shulman noted that we don’t assume that our research projects will evolve and live on only through hallway conversations with our colleagues; he emphasized that teaching must be made visible in ways that can be used by communities of peers beyond the colleague in the next-door office. Boyer’s work and the subsequent emphasis on making teaching community property led to the growth of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). In the decades since, there has been much hand-wringing about what constitutes SoTL, how it relates to scholarly teaching, and the effectiveness of these two paradigms in promoting student learning. A 2011 article by Michael Potter and Erika Kustra (3) considers the relationship between scholarly teaching and SoTL. Scholarly teaching, which is embraced at Carleton, is critically reflective, evidence-based teaching (using evidence gathered from the literature and from one’s own teaching experience), which puts the evidence and the faculty reflection within a larger theoretical framework that becomes integrated into one’s identity as a teacher. Scholarly teaching cannot occur in isolation -- evidence from one’s own classes is rarely a sufficient foundation for scholarly teaching and the larger framework that scholarly teachers aim to build is often best built through conversation with other scholarly teachers. Yet, when time is limited, it becomes easy to withdraw from the engagement with the larger community of scholarly teachers.
I’m interested in helping us as a community make our scholarly teaching more visible to each other. Some of that visibility comes through LTC lunch presentations and conversations, but I want to find other channels to highlight what people are doing in the classroom. I also hope that the LTC can provide support to those faculty who want to make their scholarly teaching visible to audiences outside of Carleton by engaging in SoTL conversations, defined broadly. Potter and Kustra (3) note that the transition from scholarly teacher to the practice of SoTL can happen on many different levels:
"At the level of reflective practice, one may be interested only in gathering information about, and reflecting on, the progress of one’s students relative to a specific intervention. At the level of evidence-based teaching, one might review the literature on a given intervention, create and run a study on its use with one’s own students, and thereby add to the information publicly available regarding that intervention. At the theory-guided teaching level, one may examine the foundational assumptions and implications of a set of practices."
Moving into the realm of SoTL can seem intimidating, but there is space in the SoTL conversations for scholarly teachers who want to share what they have learned with other practitioners. A number of Carleton faculty and staff are already engaging in SoTL conversations through conference presentations and scholarly publications, and we are compiling a bibliography of publications on scholarly teaching or SoTL projects by Carleton faculty and staff. For junior faculty thinking about such work and wondering about how it might fit into the tenure process, talk to me.
Ultimately, as a community that values teaching and learning, we benefit when we share our approaches to scholarly teaching with each other and with others in our discipline outside of Carleton. Finding ways to foster those conversations is at the heart of what the LTC does, and I invite suggestions for how we might do this better.
- Boyer, Ernest L. Scholarship reconsidered. Princeton, N.J. : Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990.
- Shulman, L.S. “Teaching as community property: Putting an end to pedagogical solitude.” Change, 25(6): 6-7, 1993.
- Potter, M.K. & Kustra, E. “The relationships between scholarly teaching and SoTL: Models, distinctions, and clarifications.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 5(1), 1-18, 2011.