Context and key terms

The term ‘scholarship of teaching’ was first coined in Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate (1990). Boyer argued that there are four scholarships in academic work, and that all have an equally important place in academia. These are the scholarships of:

• discovery (basic or ‘pure’ research, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake);
• integration (“making connections across the disciplines, placing the specialties in larger context, illuminating data in a revealing way, often educating non-specialists, too” (p. 18);
• application (applying what we know through theory as well as practice to solve complex problems); and
• teaching.

Boyer’s work sought to improve the standing of teaching in relation to research by showing that it could be a rigorous endeavour. Subsequently ‘Learning’ was added to the ‘Scholarship of Teaching’ to become the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

Before asking you to read part of Boyer’s seminal work, we’d like to differentiate between the terms ‘Scholarship of Teaching and Learning’ and ‘scholarly teaching’ as it will be helpful to you in your reading. In 2013, the International Society for the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching (ISSoTL) produced a YouTube video in which four American SoTL experts explain their understandings of the difference between the two terms (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and scholarly teaching). Watch this video in Activity 1 on the next page.

 

 

Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/teach-word-scrabble-letters-wooden-1820041/