Essentials of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Darren CambridgeQuinnipiac University

August 24, 2010

Inquiry

• Inquiry is at the heart of all scholarly activity

• SoTL is not a separate activity from teaching but an integral part of doing it in a way that is both effective and continually improving

Provisional Knowledge

• Knowledge about student learning in complex, and situated

• Therefore not the province of any single discipline or universally generalizable

Educational Capital

• “The progressive accumulation, in forms usable by educators, to validate experience and knowledge about successful educational ideas and strategies” - Ray Bachetti and Tom Ehrlich

• Connecting up local knowledge about teaching and learning can reveal larger patterns and stimulate systematic innovation

Inquiry into teaching needs to be something that everyone who teaches does–at differing levels of formality at different

times– in a variety of disciplinary styles– shared and critique by a variety of

means

Shulman’s Definition of Scholarship

• Public• Susceptible to critical review and evaluation• Accessible for exchange and use by other

members of one's scholarly community

CASTL Campus Program Definition

• “Problem posing about an issue of teaching or learning, study of the problem through methods appropriate to the disciplinary epistemologies, applications of results to practice, communication of results, self-reflection, and peer review”

• Customized by each campus team

Educational Research Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Research on practice Research as part of practice

Rigor and originality Impact of practice

What Why

“Significance” Both significance and error

High ground The swamp

Significance and error

Understanding the exceptions in the classroom may tell teachers far more about the learning process than understanding the majority; teachers must be just as concerned with the 30 percent who do not change “significantly” as with the 70% who do.

—Patricia Cross and

Mimi Steadman

Going Into the Swamp

The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients of the larger society, while in the swamp of the problems of the greatest human concern. Shall the practitioner stay on the high, hard, ground where [he or she] can practice rigorously, as he understands rigor, but where [he or she] is constrained to deal with problems of relatively little social importance? Of shall [he or she] descend into the swamp where [he or she] can engage the most important and challenging problems if [he or she] is willing to forsake technical rigor? —Donald Schön

SoTL vs. Reflective Practice

• Scholarship means going public • However, there are multiple levels of

publicness that may be appropriate for a given purpose

DISCIPLINARY STYLESCurrent Trends

Disciplinary Styles

EXPANDING “LEARNING”Current Trends

Evolution of the SOTL: New Questions and Partners

• 1990 Scholarship of Teaching

• Late 90s Scholarship of Teaching &Learning

• 2008 Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

Three curricula

Kathleen Yancey, Reflection in the Writing Classroom

Expanding Participation

LINKS WITH ASSESSMENTCurrent Trends

Scholarship of Learning/Assessment

• Faculty and students generate research questions about NSSE scores

• Student led focus groups and interviews

• Recommendations for curricular and programmatic reform

INTERMEDIARIES, PROTOPUBLIC AND MIDDLE SPACES

Current Trends

Gradations of Going Public

New Gradations of Publicness

Network

Intermediaries, a category of knowledge builders, “can offer the stability, expert depth, and field-wide research to make assembling and circulating elements of educational capital a signal contribution to their constituents. —Ray Bachetti and Tom Ehrlich

Middle Spaces as Intermediaries

To be continued after lunch …

Scholarship Assessed

• Clear goals • Adequate preparation• Appropriate methods• Significant results• Effective presentation• Reflective critique • Rigor• Peer review

Clear Goals

• Audiences? • Communities of practice? (context)

Everything else follows from audience and community

• Clear goals • Adequate preparation• Appropriate methods• Significant results• Effective presentation• Reflective critique • Rigor• Peer review

Everything contingent on impact of practice

INNOVATIONS IS DISSEMANTION

New Genres: The Course PortfolioKnowledge Media Lab Gallery of Teaching and Learning

http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/

New Genres: Course portfolios at San Francisco State

New genres: Online “posters”Visible Knowledge Project

http://cndls.georgetown.edu/crossroads/vkp/

Capstone Course Portfolio

• Composed within a faculty learning community focused on the senior capstone experience

• One context for more deliberate collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning

• Working portfolio as a genre and wiki as a tool for collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning

New forms of review: MERLOThttp://merlot.org/

New forms of reuse: OpenEd Practices and CAMELhttp://openedpractices.org/