We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old “teaching versus research” debate and give the familiar and honorable term “scholarship” a broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work. Surely, scholarship means engaging in original research. But the work of the scholar also means stepping back from one’s investigation, looking for connections, building bridges between theory and practice, and communicating one’s knowledge effectively to students.
—E. L. Boyer, 1990
“The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Questions and Answers from the Field”
by Barbara Cambridge.
This article investigates five central questions:
- Does scholarly teaching differ from the scholarship of teaching?
- Who does the scholarship of teaching?
- Is this scholarship disciplinary-specific or interdisciplinary?
- What role do students have in this work?
- How do campuses encourage the scholarship of teaching?
The Scholarship of Teaching
by Eileen Bender and Donald Gray
Our work as university professors for a long time has been bedeviled by two injurious ideas. The first is that the demands of teaching and research are counterforces fiercely contending for control of our time. The very metaphors we use to characterize the plight of professors reflect this idea. We are acrobats, juggling unevenly weighted "teaching loads" and programs of research; or, worse, we are scholars and scientists held hostage in classrooms, for whom ransoms must be negotiated to gain "release" for research.
In 1998, the Carnegie Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts launched a multiyear project called the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) to support the development of a scholarship of teaching and learning in academe. In the present academic environment, where teaching is still undervalued in favor of research, the initiative has begun to stimulate a change of academic culture that some feel is long overdue.
Due to the lack of a comprehensive index to the growing number of sites on the scholarship of teaching and learning, finding materials on this subject can be time consuming. This selective annotated Web guide or “Webliography” aims to facilitate access to Web-based information on the burgeoning international CASTL project.
The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?
Randy Bass ( Georgetown University)
One telling measure of how differently teaching is regarded from traditional scholarship or research within the academy is what a difference it makes to have a "problem" in one versus the other. In scholarship and research, having a "problem" is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s teaching, a "problem" is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation. Changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing investigation is precisely what the movement for a scholarship of teaching is all about. How might we make the problematization of teaching a matter of regular communal discourse? How might we think of teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated?
To suggest an addition, go to http://www.umassd.edu/catls/comments.cfm.
