Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Defined

Decorative Bar

"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 Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation
http://carnegiefoundation.org/about/sub.asp?key=10&subkey=289

There are a number of electronic resources that provide access to resources documenting the history of the scholarship of teaching and learning, and current thinking in this field.

The following ideas of Lee Shulman are reproduced, with permission, from page 1 of the AAHE produced application for The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:
Three Broad Rationales for Advocating a Serious Investment

As more individual faculty and their institutions become engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning, we often find ourselves discussing the history of the phenomenon, the precise definitions of "scholarship," "teaching," and "learning," and some of the methodological and technical standards for conducting such research. Periodically, it is worthwhile to step back and ask: Why are we doing this? What are the reasons we are committed to such work? I'd like to suggest that there are three broad rationales for advocating a serious investment in the scholarship of teaching and learning: Professionalism, Pragmatism, and Policy.

By professionalism I mean the inherent obligations and opportunities associated with becoming a professional scholar/educator, and especially with the responsibilities to one's discipline symbolized by the Ph.D. Each of us in higher education is a member of at least two professions: that of our discipline, interdiscipline or professional field (e.g., history, women's studies, accounting) and that of our profession as educator. One of the ways we fulfill our obligations as members of our dual professions is by approaching our teaching and our students' learning with the same spirit and habits of disciplined inquiry with which we approach other aspects of our scholarly work. The scholarship of teaching is thus one of the ways we fulfill our responsibilities to our professional peers to "pass on" what we experience, discover and discern in working with our students.

The pragmatic rationale for the scholarship of teaching and learning is that such work helps guide our efforts in the design and adaptation of teaching to meet the needs of learners; it's one of the ways we continuously seek to improve what we do as teachers. Moreover, by engaging in purposive reflection, documentation, assessment and analysis of teaching and learning---and by doing so in a more public and accessible manner---we support not only the improvement of our own teaching. We also raise the likelihood that our work will be built on by colleagues who design and instruct many of the same students in the same or related programs

Policy, the third rationale, refers to the capacity to respond to the legitimate questions of legislatures and boards and to the increasingly robust demands of a developing market for higher education. Our institutions are enmeshed in webs of national, state and local policy; accountability and assessment have become central themes of the emerging movements toward reform in higher education. These are not bad ideas. They only become problems when the wrong indicators are used to assess the quality of our efforts, or when the metrics employed are chosen because of convenience or economy of use, rather than because they serve as authentic proxies for the learning and development we seek to foster. I believe that a vigorous scholarship of teaching and learning engaged by discipline and field-specific scholars of teaching, and supported by institutions, can and must respond to policy needs and issues.

These three rationales guide the work of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, through which we will, over time, learn more about the impact and benefits of this important work.

Lee S. Shulman, President,
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching