Level 1, Part One of Campus Conversations
-- A Handout from AAHE for starting the conversation
Starting the conversation: The "Scholarship of Teaching"
As your campus begins to examine the "scholarship of
teaching," you might want to determine your purpose in
doing so, look briefly at the origin of the term, and consider
ways in which your campus environment supports or limits the
practice of that scholarship. This stocktaking will enable
you to determine which issues related to the scholarship of
teaching are most immediate, most interesting, or most pertinent
to your campus community.
Project Purpose
Campus conversations about the scholarship of teaching will
contribute to the collective work of the Carnegie Teaching
Academy. The Academy has as its goal to create a scholarship
of teaching and learning that will improve the quality of
student learning and the status of teaching. The outcomes
of your conversations will be added to those of other campuses
to create a national dialogue.
But, your purpose is certainly also local. The conversations
will reflect the context of your individual campus: the kind
of institution, characteristics of the student body, current
pedagogical practices, reward structure, availability of faculty
development, traditions of teaching talk, and many other factors
that influence the ways in which types of scholarship are
done on any one campus or set of campuses. You may be initiating
your conversations out of a felt need for change in a certain
area, or you may discover your needs as you consider how you
want to define and embody the scholarship of teaching.
History of the Term "Scholarship of Teaching"
When the Carnegie Foundation publication Scholarship Reconsidered
was issued in 1990, faculty members approached its multidimensional
definition of scholarship with both interest and skepticism.
Its category "scholarship of discovery" felt very
familiar, in concept if not in terminology -- that is, research
and performance that add to our knowledge base and the intellectual
climate of a campus. "Scholarship of integration"
draws together and interprets diverse kinds of knowledge;
and "scholarship of application" applies knowledge
to practical problems. The term "scholarship of teaching"
offers many people a new way of thinking about the intellectual
and applied work of teaching within their own field and across
disciplines and professions.
Since that report, many colleges and universities have wrestled
with defining the four terms in ways that help them better
explain faculty work.
A 1994 Carnegie Foundation survey reported that more than
two-thirds of colleges and universities were developing new
methods to evaluate teaching. Carnegie's follow-up report
Scholarship Assessed offered six criteria to apply to all
forms of scholarship, including teaching: clear goals, adequate
preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective
presentation, and reflective critique. Some institutions now
use Carnegie's multiple definitions of scholarship and its
criteria to support and affirm the variety of work done by
faculty, including their commitment to improving student learning.
In addition, faculty members have developed peer review practices,
through the AAHE Peer Review Project and other initiatives,
to improve and document their teaching more fully.
But, elements of the scholarship of teaching remain elusive.
Some faculty regard teaching as the presentation of material
for student consumption, with students responsible for their
own learning through study and hard work. It isn't that these
faculty think student learning is unimportant; it's that they
think the central professional responsibility of faculty members
is to add to the knowledge base of their discipline. Graduate
preparation signals this focus. Other faculty are willing
to learn new pedagogical strategies if old ones aren't working
or if new ones get developed, but teaching for them is functional,
not intellectual, work. Still other faculty care deeply about
student learning but face the reality of professional survival
that demands focus on the scholarship of discovery.
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