The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?

My friends Laura DeLong Frost and Don Slater and I caught up on research ideas while eating a high-carb lunch of sandwiches, pasta, potato chips, and apple pie with buttery flaky crust. By the time our keynote speaker began, we were starting to feel the effects and I just wanted to nap. So, if I missed anything critical, you will know why.

Randy Bass wrote The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: What’s the Problem? back in 1999. He mentioned from that artilcle, “the culmination of nearly a decade of discussion that began with the 1990 publication of Scholarship Reconsidered (Boyer), and then refined later in Scholarship Reassessed (Glassick, Huber, Maeroff, 1997)” and drew attention to the theme that we have “ideas worth spreading,” playing a clip from TED talks by Sir Ken Robinson. This 18-minute video provides a perspective on the purpose of education.

Randy emphasized the need for communal work in the intersection of teaching, learning, and technology, and the need for the visible knowledge of scholarship of the teaching and learning process, referencing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons, The Visible Knowledge Project, and abundant other resources available at the Gallery of Teaching & Learning.

Randy reminded us of the original value of the educational system, designed to meet the needs of industrialization, and how often students have been benignly told to take courses that will lead to a job, as “you’ll never get a job doing that” in which “that” represents what the student was really good at doing and enjoyed. He thinks our education system has “mined our minds” for a particular academic commodity, and that the paradigm shift from “providing instruction” to “producing learning” back in 1995, has made progress. The concern by both Robinson and Bass is the loss of creativity.

Barr and Tagg in their 1995 publication of From Teaching to Learning – A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education sparked a movement. Yet, looking at one example of progress since then, he pointed out that the “high impact activities” of NSSSE include activities such as internships and extra-curricular activities, leading him to wonder, “So, what are the low-impact activities?” "Would those be our courses?!" Students are learning even if we are not teaching. What progress have we really made?

The Carnegie Foundation also provides resources at Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). From this project, Randy played a clip from The Think Aloud project to illustrate the difficulty and complexity of the learning process even for basic skills (select “Think Aloud with Jay’s Commentary” to view the clip). Other sample cases on basic skills are available at Windows for Learning: Resources for Basic Skills Education.

Randy elaborated on the meaning of The Middle of Open Spaces: Generating Knowledge and Learning through Multiple Layers of Open Teaching Communities by Bass and Bernstein (or see the chapter among a list of related articles). These “middle spaces” between practice and published literature are “informal and not tied to high stakes.” In addition to the Visible Knowledge Project, Randy encouraged use of the KEEP Toolkit available for developing Web sites with visually appealing representations.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has valuable resources to support scholarly teaching and the development of scholarship at CASTL Higher Education. Another resource is Collaboration across Disciplines on a Digital Gallery. As an example of collaborative inquiry, Randy referenced the “Lesson Study Project” at the University of Wisconsin, La Cross (select Makoto video, if interested in viewing the interview about lesson study research) and focused on Lesson Study: An Experience in Collaborative Inquiry.

Randy asked “How would you change your study to ask your question collaboratively?” and “Who else is asking some version of the same question?” And, he directed us to the Faculty Inquiry Toolkit.

He next drew attention to The Gap between Ability and Sustainability by Hern who had noted “The gap between students' ability to perform and the performance they actually sustain over the semester. Chronic condition in community colleges whereby students earn passing grades on individual assignments then withdraw or fail class.”

He mentioned digital stories as an emerging “signature pedagogy” of new ways of communicating as in multimedia authoring such as student posters and digital stories of student learning like those at gnovis journal (the example shown at the keynote was of a reflection on the role of makeup in a coed’s daily routines).

Randy emphasizied that we must deal not with just the “how’s” and “what’s” but the “why’s” of what we do. And, we need to move from the “knowledgeable” to “knowledge-able,” including new models of assessment such as those described by Wesch in From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments.

Keynote speaker: Randy Bass, Georgetown University

The Praxis of SoTL

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is reflective, reflexive, and recursive.

• Reflective: SoTL requires contemplation (analysis) of context and variables.
• Reflexive: SoTL requires ethical and moral thinking – who would benefit from the study? in what ways? who would not benefit?
• Recursive: SoTL comes full circle as the context shifts (unlike controlled studies)

Discussion during and after this session focused on challenges and rigors of the qualitative method, the value of reflecting on process and publishing in journals on such processes.

Brian, who said he had been a “classical statistics” person, explained that he had shifted perspective to seeing the value in qualitative studies. He mentioned that the process and product of Einstein’s thinking would not have been considered as worthy of publication by many journals. Others are beginning to realize the importance of that type of scholarship, too.

There are standards that fit well with the study of what works in authentic contexts of teaching and learning. The group seemed to conclude that the standards of research in SoTL need to be communicated and met as we look at the evidence of what works in the teaching and learning process.

Presenter: Lorraine Gilpin, Georgia Southern University

Reference: Gilpin, L. (2007). Unearthing the scholarship of teaching and learning in self and practice. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 1(2), 125-135.

Provost's Welcome and "Sweet Iced Tea"

This morning GSU Provost Linda Bleicken told of years past in which she had paid her own way and stayed in college dorms just to be able to go to conferences on teaching and learning. While some did not understand, she knew then and now of the value of examining the evidence of what works in the classroom. On a light note, she mentioned how much Georgians like their "sweet iced tea," and at last year's conference, visitors from England explained they would prefer to drink it hot, particularly in the morning! She encouraged all to feel welcome and let the team know of what will give us comfort as we weave the thread of teaching and learning in our journey through this week's conference sessions.