History
The scholarship of teaching and learning, or SoTL, is ancient and new. Whenever and wherever teachers have wondered about why and how students learn, and have investigated connections between teaching and students’ learning, there was SoTL. As a more systematic and emergent attitude and practice, SoTL is relatively new.
In his inaugural address as the fifth president of the University of Chicago in 1928, Robert Maynard Hutchins said that
[A Ph.D. candidate who plans to be a teacher] “…must be in touch with the most recent and most successful movements in undergraduate education, of which he now learns officially little or nothing. How should he learn about them? Not in my opinion by doing practice teaching upon the helpless undergraduate. Rather he should learn about them through seeing experiments carried on in undergraduate work by the members of the department in which he is studying for the degree….”
The clear implication is that those in higher education who teach students should not do so based upon a latent assumption that by being scholars in their disciplines, they can effectively teach that discipline to students (undergraduate and graduate). Hutchins implies that the professorate should adopt the “do no harm” to students approach.
Over the decades those individual teachers, largely privately, who experimented and explored ways to improve the learning of their students by doing some kind of research or assessment on how certain teaching practices or assignments affected learning outcomes, were doing the basics of SoTL. However, much of it was through individual trial and error without a community context for their acquired knowledge. In addition, a tradition of the academic dualism of “teaching versus research” continued, with disciplinary research often being thought of as the higher, more intellectual road, while relegating teaching to secondary status in faculty recognition and reward systems. Yet most faculty, including those who received their terminal degrees at research universities, spend much, or most, of their professional careers teaching at colleges and universities where excellence in teaching is claimed to be highly valued.
The result of this tradition is a common story. Ph.D. students at prestigious research universities working very hard to learn their disciplines from established scholars in those disciplines, and many knowing they would go on to become college and university professors teaching their own students. Yet for many, there was little, even no, preparation to actually teach the discipline, with the outcome that these new scholars were hired and suddenly are standing in front of students without a professional preparation through mentorships, internships, apprenticeships, etc.
It became increasingly clear that this lack of professional development in how to teach meant less than optimal learning for many students, that teaching well is not an automatic consequence of being highly education in one’s field. The year 1990 is often used as the formal pivot for the beginning of SoTL’s emergence into academic awareness with the publication of Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1990) in which he said “the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions. These are: the scholarship of discovery ; the scholarship of integration ; the scholarship of application ; and the scholarship of teaching .” As Derek Bruff said, “This conceptualization of scholarship elevates the traditional role of teaching from ‘a routine function, tacked on’ (Boyer) to an essential component of a professor’s scholarly life. Boyer argued that the academy should recognize and reward all four components of scholarship, including the scholarship of teaching.”
“K. Patricia Cross and Thomas Angelo pioneered an approach to assessing conditions of learning in classrooms. Their 1993 book, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (Jossey-Bass) is a famous work of scholarship of teaching and learning. Thousands of college and university teachers use CATs in their classrooms today… and there is evidence of improved learning as a result . Angelo and Cross contributed to the current focus on learning but also hoped their book would influence faculty to go beyond application of CATs in the classroom … that it would in fact spark systematic classroom research which would in turn become a popular form of SOTL nationally …”
Boyer did not fully elaborate on the meaning of this “scholarship of teaching” and his book began a discussion, to this day, about that meaning where his phrase was expanded to the “scholarship of teaching and learning,” emphasizing that the key aspect is student learning. But one thing emerged that is vital in this recent history: teaching is seen as, in itself, scholarly and serious intellectual work.
Bruff continues: “Building on Boyer’s work, Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene I. Maeroff, in their book Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1997), identified six standards against which all scholarly work, including the scholarship of teaching, should be evaluated. Scholarly work should have
• Clear goals
• Adequate preparation
• Appropriate methods
• Significant results
• Effective presentation
• Reflective critique
Thus, by one definition, the scholarship of teaching is teaching that is done in ways that meet
these six goals.”
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching founded, in 1998, the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) which would become the main advocate for fostering and supporting SoTL nationally and internationally through resources, its Carnegie Scholars program, and programs that created collaborations among institutions working together on important SoTL agendas.
In 1999, Lee S. Shulman (the president of CASTL) wrote an article titled “Taking Learning Seriously” (Change , 31:4, July/August 1999) in which he presented another explanation of scholarship:
An act of intelligence or of artistic creation becomes scholarship when it possesses at least three attributes: it becomes public; it becomes an object of critical review and evaluation by members of one’s community; and members of one’s community begin to use, build upon, and develop those acts of mind and creation.
“Shulman argued that in order to take learning seriously as a priority of academia, a scholarship of teaching should be emphasized that meets these three qualities. Shulman’s definition of scholarship emphasized the aspects of scholarly work that are done in a community of scholars — an emphasis not present in the definition presented by Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff. The scholarship of teaching, in Shulman’s view, presents teaching as ‘community property’ in ways similar to those in which research is viewed as community property.” (Bruff)
In the first decade of the 21 st century there has been an international SoTL momentum marked by the founding of SoTL journals, conferences, academic societies (such as ISSOTL), etc. In 2009 CASTL ended and the growth of SoTL will depend upon local, regional, national initiatives with communication and collaboration across boundaries being important.
Thus, the history of SoTL, as SoTL, is still new and its value and effects are still in a relative early stage of development, but the signs are strong that there is ongoing development for SoTL being one of the best ways to improve student learning in higher education today. SoTL faces resistance to its legitimacy as scholarship that SoTL practitioners argue against from both theoretical and practical foundations. The history of SoTL is an open horizon that is being told daily as faculty re-conceive of teaching and learning through an inquiry-led, evidence-based approach to teaching and learning in which the old “teaching versus research” view is displaced by a union of teaching and research.
Last updated: 3/16/2022