Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, says that "viewing teaching as scholarly work is essential. Teachers have to so often 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."

SoTL is one form of authentic scholarship mentioned by Ernest Boyer in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate along with the scholarships of discovery, integration and application. SoTL is influenced by the other forms of scholarship and SoTL can influence those scholarships. The scholarship of teaching, or SoTL, begins with a research question or problem and proceeds using the research methodologies best suited to yield valid, relevant results that can be applied and further assessed in the teaching and learning process. In The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons, Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings say that

Though employed in different ways and to different degrees, the scholarship of teaching and learning entails basic but important principles… It means viewing the work of the classroom as a site for inquiry, asking and answering questions about students' learning in ways that can improve one's own classroom and also advance the larger profession of teaching.

SoTL is grounded in the academic disciplines while also having the potential to be trans-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary across all approaches and methods of teaching. For the goal of SoTL is to create collegial, critical, evidence-based communities of faculty and students where student learning goals and outcomes are central. In other words, through inquiry, research, reflection, assessment, dissemination, critique and construction of a living body of knowledge, understanding and wisdom about teaching and learning, SoTL can be the most effective way for the continuous, significant and enjoyable improvement of student learning in higher education today, as well as for the transformation of academic cultures into open cultures for teaching and learning.

Shulman has also said that teaching will not be fully realized and recognized in higher education until its status changes from “private to community property,” to becoming public. When teaching is experienced as solitary or as isolating, teachers rely on individual trial and error efforts to improve the learning experiences of their students. But what those teachers learn about teaching and learning has often been kept private or lost to others, disappearing “like dry ice” (Shulman). Thus, SoTL is a kind of reclamation project for preserving teaching experiments and knowledge before evaporation takes its toll. SoTL is an opportunity to open the real and virtual doors to and for learning.

Einstein said “never lose a holy curiosity.” SoTL is a deep curiosity about how, when, where and why people learn and how best to teach to create optimal learning opportunities. SoTL is an aspiration, a vision and the complex work of researching student learning in the disciplines and it can re-imagine and re-conceive the ancient and contemporary art and practice of teaching. “Teaching will be advanced when it is seen as intellectual work inviting careful deliberation among those who constitute the professional community and who take responsibility, as professionals in all fields must do, for improving the quality of the enterprise ( Advancement of Learning ).

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning supports the international work, growth and benefits of SoTL by supporting the understanding of SoTL expressed by the Carnegie Academy for SoTL:

The scholarship of teaching is problem posing about an issue of teaching or learning, study of the problem through methods appropriate to disciplinary epistemologies, applications of results to practice, communication of results, self-reflection, and peer review.

The goal of IJ-SoTL is to be a virtual SoTL Commons for such work.