"For an activity to be designated as scholarship, it should manifest at least three characteristics: it should be public, susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one's scholarly community"
     Lee Schulman,
     President of the
     Carnegie Foundation

 

A Vision for the Next Two Years

The 2009-13 Strategic Plan for Buffalo State College emphasizes the importance of “quality learning experiences.” It points to benchmarks, such as level of academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, and collaborative learning.  In the next two years, the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) intends to explore how these benchmarks might be defined and measured.  We hope that the rigorous collection data will uncover significant ways to improve student learning and effectively shape institutional policy. More specifically, we plan to move forward in at least two ways. First, Buffalo State College awards three fellowships each year to support faculty work on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The program was a direct result of the college’s initial involvement with CASTL and it was enhanced through institutional policy changes shaped by our involvement in the 2003-5 CASTL cluster program.  Each of the faculty fellowships awarded in the next two years will focus on some aspect of the strategic plan (e.g., academic challenge or collaborative learning).  Second, a group of past CASTL fellows and other scholars on campus have formed a research team to study academic rigor. This work is an outgrowth of our involvement with the 2006-9 CASTL leadership group investigating the integration of scholarship of teaching and learning into institutional culture.  In that work, we partnered with Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Western Carolina University to analyze data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). The new study seeks to understand several of the NSSE's constituent elements (e.g., academic challenge). We intend to survey the existing literature, interview faculty and students, and consider the efficacy of various forms of measurement. This work will occur against the backdrop of another on-going study begun with Open University during the 2006-9 leadership group, namely the role of institutional barriers in change. We recognize, for example, that creating “quality learning experiences” may require changing institutional culture.

 

The scholarship of teaching involves integrating the experience of teaching with the scholarship of research and producing a scholarly, peer reviewed, product out of those integrative activities. It is the ongoing and cumulative intellectual inquiry, through systematic observation and longitudinal investigation by faculty, into the impact of teaching on learning.

For More Information Contact
Dr. John Draeger,
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
SW 510 | 1300 Elmwood Avenue
Buffalo, New York 14222
(716) 878-3093
draegejd@buffalostate.edu