In 1990 in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate Ernest Boyer said the professoriate must "...break out of the tired old teaching versus research debate and define, in more creative ways, what it means to be a scholar." Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, adds that "viewing teaching as scholarly work is essential. Teachers have to so open carry out their work in isolation from their colleagues. The result is that those who engage in innovative acts of teaching do not have many opportunities to build upon the work of others… we seek to render teaching public, subject to critical evaluation, and usable by others in the field" as the work of the The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Boyer again: "The work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others. . . When defined as scholarship. . . teaching both educates and entices future scholars. Indeed, as Aristotle said, 'Teaching is the highest form of understanding.'"

In 1997, Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff in Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate say that "In 1990, The Carnegie Foundation published the report "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate," offering a new paradigm for recognizing the full range of scholarly activity by college and university faculty. Since then, campuses across the country have been reexamining traditional ideas about scholarship against the new, more inclusive vision we proposed-one that goes beyond research or, as we prefer to call it, the scholarship of discovery, to encourage scholarship in teaching, integration and application as well (p. 5)."

MountainRise is a catalyst for such an understanding the convergence of teaching, learning and scholarship for by the very meaning of scholarship, the limitations of teaching in isolation, not learning about the teaching of others, not having others review one's own teaching, not accessing and contributing to a public body of knowing about teaching & learning that is constantly open to evaluation and revision are addressed and redressed.

Teaching and teachers benefit from this new awareness that teaching, not only disciplinary study, is a worthy subject for research in constructing a public body of knowledge that is steadily reviewed and developed. As Bender & Gray state, "More than simply a new term for traditional tasks, the scholarship of teaching describes a new concept of academic work. In the scholarly classroom, guided by reflective practitioners, students are encouraged to become speaking subjects, and teaching becomes the object of ceaseless and generative" inquiry (The Scholarship of Teaching)

What is the difference between scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching & learning? Barbara Cambridge in an AAHE Bulletin puts it this way:

Effective teaching is the goal of most college professors. Whether they teach often or infrequently, faculty members want their students to learn and want to figure out how to help them do so. Faculty who wish to explore the challenges in fostering student learning seek feedback from students through classroom assessment; guidance from local peers through reciprocal visits, joint course development activities, or faculty development workshops; and insight from disciplinary colleagues through reading literature about pedagogy in their field. They become informed teachers who benefit from the scholarship of others, and might be called "scholarly teachers".

As Pat Hutchings, Carnegie senior scholar, and Lee Shulman, Carnegie's president, point out in their article "The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments" in the September/October 1999 issue of Change, however, the scholarship of teaching is something else. They write that the scholarship of teaching is characterized by "being public, open to critique and evaluation, and in a form that others can build on. . . . It requires a kind of 'going meta,' in which faculty frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning - the conditions under which it occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it, and so forth - and do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it." In other words, faculty set out to do the scholarship of teaching and learning not only to improve the teaching and learning in their own classroom but also to improve teaching and learning beyond their local setting by adding knowledge to - and even beyond - their disciplinary field ("The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Questions and Answers from the Field").

MountainRise views teaching as serious intellectual work and seeks to make research and writing on the work public, openly discussed and carefully evaluated for the betterment of teaching, learning for all concerned.