The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

What are the foundational moments of meaningful scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects? How do teacher-scholars collect, develop, and share useful insights about student learning? How do they work through the pinch points that frustrate, confuse, or elude many SoTL practitioners? By unpacking SoTL processes through rich narratives that illustrate what they look like, this collection offers inspiration to anyone at any stage of engagement with SoTL. This book takes discussions of SoTL to a new level. Its subtitle reflects the microscopic lenses SoTL processes can apply to student learning experiences to understand how they happen, what they look like, what they mean, and what we can do about them. Going beyond definitions, how-to, theory, and debates about methods and standards, the contributors offer a SoTL primer documenting how practitioners have intentionally thought through key moments in their work. These procedural vignettes present powerful examples of what doing SoTL looks like when done well. The authors represent a range of disciplines (the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and professions) and a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar names. Nancy Chick has selected contributions that compellingly illuminate why their authors focused on a particular critical moment, the questions they asked as they refined their approaches, and the theoretical and observational tools they employed to conduct their research. Each introduces a specific critical moment in doing SoTL, taking the reader through the author's reflections, concerns, and choices in doing meaningful SoTL work. The aim is to support potential practitioners, inform educational developers who teach new SoTL practitioners, and inspire experienced SoTL scholars to reflect on their own practice. This is a compelling collection for anyone interested in practitioner reflection, intentional design, and advancing the field of SoTL and the quality of teaching and learning.

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) began primarily as a discipline-based movement, committed to exploring the signature pedagogical and learning styles of each discipline within higher education, with little exchange across disciplines. As the field has developed, new questions have arisen concerning cross-disciplinary comparison and learning in multidisciplinary settings This volume by a stellar group of experts provides a state-of-the-field review of recent SoTL scholarship within a range of disciplines and offers a stimulating discussion of critical issues related to interdisciplinarity in teaching, learning, and SoTL research.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Ernest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered offers a new paradigm that recognizes the full range of scholarly activity by college and university faculty and questions the existence of a reward system that pushed faculty toward research and publication and away from teaching.

When the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) emerged, it often concentrated on individual faculty practice in one classroom; it is now, however, increasingly common to find work in SoTL focused more broadly. SoTL studies may engage with a cluster of courses, a program, a particular population of students, a pedagogical approach, or a field--all of which are represented in the essays collected here by authors from a diverse array of institutions and nations. This volume features examples of SoTL research conducted in, and applied to, a variety of contexts and disciplines, offering a theoretical framework for an expanded vision of SoTL--one that moves beyond the individual classroom.