Week 4: Activity 1. The difference between scholarly teaching and SoTL

play.png  Watch the following ISSoTL video on the scholarship of teaching and learning vs scholarly teaching. 

As you will see from the video, the distinction between the terms ‘SOTL’ and ‘scholarly teaching’ is contested. In short, in this module the term scholarly teaching refers to a process that includes two elements:

  1. being informed by colleagues and the literature (which may be grey, e.g. not only refereed articles, but blogs, wiki, newspapers etc); and
  2. being based on that information, enquiring into your own teaching and collecting data.

The term SoTL is used in this module to include those first two elements of scholarly teaching plus a third - making that enquiry public. So when we engage in SOTL, we make our teaching practice open to discussion, and generally contribute to the literature on learning and teaching. Refer to a figure on the three elements of SoTL (which is presented later in this module).

Below are quotes from well respected researchers. As you can see, as with the four colleagues talking on the ISSoTL video, each has a slightly different view of SOTL.

"Teachers who are more likely to be engaging in scholarship of teaching … seek to understand teaching by consulting and using the literature on teaching and learning, by investigating their own teaching from the perspective of their intention in teaching while seeing it from the students’ position, and by formally communicating their ideas and practice to their peers." (Trigwell, Martin, Benjamin, & Prosser, 2000, p. 164)

" … a kind of ‘going meta’ in which faculty frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning – the conditions under which it occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it, and so forth – and to do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it." (Hutchings & Shulman, 1999, p. 12)