International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Volume 2, Number 1, January 2008
Return to current issues pageInvited Essays
Excerpt
Recognition and Acceptance of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
The acceptance of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) by the academic community has made considerable progress over the past few years, but it is still everywhere a minority interest in a climate that puts disciplinary research above all other academic activities. Furthermore, this situation is strengthened everywhere by features of marketisation which have increased the importance of management and finance in academia, to the detriment of the really important work of academics with which SoTL is concerned – teaching and research. In England – more than in Scotland, and it is important to appreciate that as an outcome of devolution, the two countries are increasingly diverging in their academic concerns – SoTL has had to cope with, on the one hand, management styles which have devalued academics from colleagues to employees, and on the other with the disastrous effects of the Research Selectivity Exercise (RAE), a primarily self-inflicted ‘own goal’ of academia, which has biased research towards short-termism, and has introduced terms such as ‘research inactive’ to label academic staff who, while engaged in both research and teaching could not satisfy the narrow research definitions of the RAE and came as a result to be labelled ‘research inactive’.
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Lewis Elton
University of Manchester
Manchester, England
l.elton@pcps.ucl.ac.uk
I am Visiting Professor of Higher Education, University of Manchester, Honorary Professor of Higher Education, University College London, Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Visiting Distinguished Scholar, University of Surrey, Fellow of the American Institute of Physics and of the Society for Research into Higher Education. I hold Doctorates (honoris causa) from the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Gloucestershire, have been presented with a Festschrift by my former students [P. Ashwin (ed), Changing Higher Education: The Development of Learning and Teaching, Routledge Education], and received the Times Higher Lifetime Achievement Award, 2005. In recent years I have developed a Postgraduate course, through distance learning, on Research and Development in Higher Education for experienced academic teachers and have been the External Examiner for similar courses at the Universities of Oxford, Hong Kong, and at the Dublin Institute of Technology. My most recent work has been concerned with the scholarship of teaching and learning, including the research/teaching nexus in higher education, and the balance between collegial and top down management in universities.