Celebration and Reflection

Craig E. Nelson
Department of Biology
Indiana University
Bloomington , Indiana, USA

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) movement in the United States and internationally is now sufficiently mature to justify a bit of celebration and reflection. The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) in the US has completed its first seven years. CASTL has provided key books, a Gallery of SOTL projects, the KEEP Toolkit for reflective documentation and refinement of teaching and learning, and an evolving program for fostering leadership by individual campuses (currently the CASTL Leadership Program). Some individual campus programs in the US were also started by 1998 (including the Hesburgh Award winning program at my own institution. These campus programs provide local venues for involving faculty in this important project. National venues are provided by the annual Colloquia cosponsored by CASTL and by an increasing number of sessions at disciplinary meetings. Parallel developments have been occurring in other countries, perhaps most prominently in the UK, Canada and Australia.

International venues are provided by new or transformed journals such as MountainRise and by the new International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) which has just completed its second, oversubscribed (650 participants), annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. Planning is underway for meetings in 2006 and 2007 in Washington, D.C., and Sydney, respectively. ISSOTL provides scholars the opportunity to give internationally peer-reviewed presentations (thus fostering higher standards and raising the prestige of SOTL for promotion and tenure), to explore developments across continents, and to develop networks and intensive conversations both nationally and internationally. More fundamentally, it consolidates the momentum of this emergent field in a way that makes it independent of the vagaries of support at particular institutions and from individual funding sources. At the risk of pride going before a fall—this feels like remarkable progress in a relatively short period. I think that this progress is largely the result of the alignment of five coupled levels of interest and importance.

1. Interest in Effective Teaching
Most obviously, on the level of the individual faculty member, SOTL fosters systematic, comparative examination of the extent to which the pedagogical practices we use effectively foster the kinds of learning and the competencies we most desire. Many faculty have found such questions at least intermittently interesting, but only a few have previously pursued them vigorously. SOTL programs on individual campuses provide intellectual and other resources for doing this more effectively and provide venues for making such thinking public. ISSOTL and MountainRise and similar journals provide sources of external validation that may be especially important when a campus program is underdeveloped.

Two key consequences follow from faculty beginning to apply research thinking to improving teaching and learning. Although faculty rarely have asked about current best practices or prior pedagogical research when they thought about teaching and curriculum development, they automatically begin to ask such questions when they think about doing the scholarship of teaching—it is just part of doing research. Secondly, as some faculty learn how to efficiently ask such questions, they become a resource for their colleagues—and begin to ask different questions of them. This fosters a culture of research-based teaching that extends well beyond the faculty who are actually doing SOTL.

2. Support from Faculty Developers
A major force in the rapid development of SOTL has been the extensive support offered for it by the faculty development units at many institutions. About one third of the presentations at the first ISSOTL conference were tied to faculty development. Faculty interest in improving teaching has typically been short-term, often focused on particular problems or on the initiation of a new course. SOTL, in contrast, generates sustained engagement in individual projects and attendance at colloquia. Some campuses cite SOTL as their most effective faculty development initiative. And faculty development itself has become more transparently a vehicle for directing faculty to specific resources.

3. Expanding Definitions of Scholarship
There has been a sustained attention to expanding the definition of scholarship, a shift catalyzed by Boyer’s 1990 Scholarship Reconsidered. This has made it easier to argue that SOTL should be considered as research for purposes of promotion and tenure. At the same time it has in some institutions generated considerable controversy as to what should count as SOTL—over its definition. Indeed, I initially participated in such discussions in ways that I would now regard as counterproductive. I now see that it is essential to distinguish between defining SOTL and deciding how to count individual SOTL productions for promotion and tenure and other rewards on a particular campus. SOTL itself is a spectrum that begins with any reflective analysis of one’s teaching, often now augmented by tools such as classroom assessments, course portfolios or the KEEP Toolkit. From this base, SOTL extends though a wide array of increasingly sophisticated kinds of research.

Once the analysis of any SOTL study is made public either in a presentation or by publication, it can be considered as potentially counting for promotion and tenure. Two comparative points are then crucial. For normal disciplinary scholarship, whether and how much a particular form counts for promotion and tenure varies radically across institutions. In biology, some institutions that require “research” accept as sufficient the presentation in a departmental seminar of a review of new developments from the literature. Others accept as sufficient all publications in any scientific journal, including for example the proceedings of various state academies of science. Still others only really count publications in high-impact journals and require appropriate documentation for each journal.

Standards for SOTL obviously will need to vary across institutions in ways that parallel the variations in standards used by those institutions for disciplinary research. But there is an important second complication. Quite important SOTL can result from a wide variety of techniques—ones that span, for example, the entire range from purely qualitative to complex, pre-specified multivariate quantitative analyses. Again, existing disciplinary practices provide instructive parallels. Outside advice becomes crucial whenever disciplinary research uses techniques that are unfamiliar to most members of the department or ranges into questions on which the department lacks sufficient expertise to render sound judgment. Similarly, outside advice will be especially important when the techniques used in a SOTL project or the questions it addresses lie beyond sound departmental judgment.

4. Shifting Contexts for Higher Education
Several developments are challenging or changing higher education in quite important ways. Three US examples will suffice. Alternative delivery systems such as the University of Phoenix are explicitly challenging the tradition of requiring a Ph.D. for instructors of introductory level material, especially in high enrollment areas such as writing and basic math. Across academia as a whole, much recent faculty hiring has been into non-tenure tack positions. And there is an increasingly rapid expansion of on-line, pod-cast and distance education. Each of these developments raises the question of what, if any, are the advantages of having tenure track faculty teach particular classes.

At least in the US, one common response during the hiring process has been to increase the emphasis on teaching experience and, more recently, on knowledge of SOTL. At Indiana University we have found that students who have had courses in pedagogy and who have collaborated in SOTL projects typically are invited to do more faculty job interviews than those who have concentrated solely on disciplinary research. This has driven interest in SOTL among graduate students and faculty. Some 20 of our departments now offer SOTL based graduate pedagogy courses for their own Ph.D. students.

5. Accelerating real world problems
For a variety of reasons, it is becoming much clearer that major real world problems are collectively worse than most faculty have previously realized. These include global climatic change, social inequity, national and international disease situations and geopolitical problems.

Public discourse in a nation’s capital on these issues can be seen as a collective final exam for the institutions of higher education in that country. Most of the major players in the national government, at least in the US, have an undergraduate degree and many have a graduate or professional degree. But policies and public discourse rarely seem to adequately grasp the complexities and tradeoffs. Perhaps I am being too optimistic in suggesting that more than a few faculty see SOTL as a way of focusing higher education on finding more effective ways to foster fundamental outcomes like critical thinking, engagement with the real world and sophisticated ethical judgment. I, for one, certainly hope that the effects of SOTL will extend this far.

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