Scholarly Teaching and Scholarship

What do you value in art? Is it realism? impressionistic that you prefer? and does this align with your discipline? There is Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters and Picasso’s cubism. These topics flavored our lunchtime conversation before Laurie Richlin’s keynote presentation.

Laurie began by asking who is Charles Drew? He invented a system for saving blood plasma (blood bank) The Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, a teaching-based hospital and medical university, was named in his honor. In addition to her work at the university, Laurie is executive editor of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching. She invites strong evidence-based articles about the scholarly approach to teaching and learning and the advancement of scholarship in this field. She mentioned the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching as another community of learning.



Some key points:

- learning outcomes (LOs) are "the center of all good"
- knowing “what is learning?” is a foundation for what we do
- scholarly teaching is not the same as scholarship of teaching and learning
- what are the answers to: What is evidence? Why don’t faculty use it? Why don’t faculty produce it? What are the qualities of evidence?

Teaching without learning is just talk. We may “teach” without anyone learning what we teach. Learning is a physical change; it establishes pathways and connections. In the past teachers talked too often about what they did and not what the students did. (Steadman and Svinicki provide a summary of how Angelo’s and Cross’s classroom assessment techniques, 1993, provide a “Gateway to Better Learning”).

The “scholarly approach” is the investigation of the literature which then directs evidence-based course design and teaching, while “scholarship” is the development of such evidence. Such scholarship requires a systematic evaluation, and ideally it will be placed into the context of the whole knowledge base (not just a pebble on the ground).

Keynote speaker: Laurie Richlin

Community, Voices, and Portals of Engagement

Our luncheon keynote speaker probably was thinking globally, while a biochemist Margie Paz, originally from the Phillipines, and now at Griffin, Georgia, talked with me, and we discovered that we both had attended Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. And, we shared some stories about Ames, Des Moines, Griffin, and the Phillipines.

Our conversation was good prep for Dr. T’s fresh perspective on Yo Yo Ma’s “Silk Road Ensemble” and the dimensions of learning in that project. I was struck by the concept that a body of knowledge is unknowingly privileged by particular voices. Dr. T. showed us how threads of perception of the same event in historical images provide different knowledge about that event, and how students can be engaged in discovering, in a digital community, these different types of knowledge. She showed us the project “Perry Visits Japan.”

Dr. T focused on the hybrid of cognitive and sensory frameworks to transform comprehensive and critical analysis, and how these come to define “signature” pedagogies, such as “grand rounds” in medical teaching.

As I write these notes a day later, two teachers across the hallway are discussing spiritual understanding and personality in the teaching process. This is not unlike the concept that Dr. T. mentioned of designing “open-room for debate and interpretations” into the assignments that we create for students. She reflected on the challenge for many teachers of planning inquiry with open-ended studies and absence of conclusions into a study process.

In this context, layering communities and voices into portals of engagement led to the creation of “research teams” whose members came from different countries, who were provided with real data about a pervasive real-world health problem, and were invited to decide what to do with the data. This approach was much less prescriptive than many learning assignments. The teams had to
decide what was important to them in their personal lives, what they care about most, and then could proceed with deciding what to do about the data.

Dr. T. described the distance learning design-studio concept. She added questions about what to visualize from what perspective? What to scaffold? How to develop productive habits of mind? Reflection on McLuhan’s (1961) The Gutenberg Galaxy notion of extending our senses outside of us with the social world, and how this is like what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And what biases do we bring to the curriculum?

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Kathy Takayama

SoTL Commons Conference Reception

Today was the kickoff for The SoTL Commons: A Conference for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning. The welcome came with warm hugs from Patricia Hendrix and Steve Bonham (former colleagues at GSU), Stacy Kluge (conference coordinator), and Alan Altany (creative scholar and spirit of this event). Way to go!

Folks are here from Australia, Canada, China, Ecuador, Jamaica, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States. Two of the people from South Africa joined us at our table with global energy that would be hard to imagine. They were vibrant and enthusiastic with lots of questions even after 20 hours of flying time. And, they were beautiful!

It was great seeing some of my old friends, Linda Mullen and Trent Maurer, both teachers at GSU (Trent is now a happy newlywed!), Lugenia Dixon, who's a writer and teacher from Bainbridge who'll be reporting on research about the effects of self-talk on success (I'll find out more on Thursday), and my friend Don Slater, from GSU who's presenting with me in a session tomorrow about the influence of self-perception on performance.

At this evening's reception, we had exquisite musicians (Jean-Paul and Dominique Carton, and David Posner), fine food, warm collegiality, and international flair! We were all taking photos and I'll share some later.

For this week, we have a 72-page program and the next three days start at 7:30 AM, the first two going until 7:30 PM. Some choices will be difficult and wonderful!