In September 2004, Randy Bass helped us to begin to frame and discuss what the Scholarship of Teaching of Learning means to our faculty and staff. We explored such questions as: How can we begin and maintain communal dialogue about the scholarship of teaching? How might we connect UMD’s faculty to larger national debates about teaching and learning? What are the resources UMD faculty need to assess and further develop their teaching?

Dr. Randy Bass

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?

From The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?

Click here to see clips from Bass’ presentation.