{"id":9247,"date":"2012-02-29t09:42:12","date_gmt":"2012-02-29t15:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=9247"},"modified":"2013-03-29t09:27:45","modified_gmt":"2013-03-29t14:27:45","slug":"sotl-spotlight-bringing-a-scholarly-approach-to-vanderbilts-classrooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2012\/02\/sotl-spotlight-bringing-a-scholarly-approach-to-vanderbilts-classrooms\/","title":{"rendered":"sotl spotlight: bringing a scholarly approach to vanderbilt’s classrooms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sotl <\/strong><\/p>\n

by nancy chick, cft assistant director<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

nancy <\/a>is the\u00a0author<\/a><\/em> <\/em>of a variety of sotl articles and book chapters, as well as\u00a0co-editor<\/a><\/em> <\/em>of two books on signature pedagogies and co-editor of <\/em>teaching & learning inquiry<\/a>, the official journal of the international society for the scholarship<\/em> <\/em>of teaching and learning (issotl<\/a>).<\/em> “sotl spotlight” is her ongoing feature on the cft website. this is the first entry.<\/em><\/p>\n

harvard university has been making the news this month for its efforts to be \u201con the cutting edge of great change in teaching and learning,\u201d according to the benefactor supporting the university\u2019s new multi-million dollar initiative for teaching and learning (hauser qtd. in walsh). the initiative is the campus\u2019s response to increasing knowledge about how students learn (and don\u2019t), a student body with changing needs, and \u201ca growing concern at even the most elite institutions that the classroom experience is not all it could be\u201d (berrett). first came a daylong conference showcasing the innovations of harvard faculty and bringing in big-name scholars who\u2019ve done research on teaching and learning in their own fields.\u00a0 next is a grant program to support evidence-based pedagogical innovations across campus.<\/span><\/p>\n

despite the headlines, this work is far from new.\u00a0 even before 1990 when ernest boyer publicly expanded the notions of scholarship and research beyond the traditional “scholarship of discovery” to include a \u201cscholarship of teaching\u201d conducted by disciplinary experts in their own classrooms, many in higher education challenged the assumption that faculty highly trained in their disciplines can transmit that knowledge to students without intentionally understanding if, what, and how their students are learning.<\/p>\n

almost 15 years ago in \u201cwhat\u2019s the problem?: the scholarship of teaching,\u201d randy bass of georgetown university (now the president of the international society for the scholarship of teaching and learning<\/a> [issotl]) reflected on this assumption and the accompanying divide between the work we do as scholars and researchers, and what we do as teachers.\u00a0 he articulated a fundamental difference:<\/p>\n

in scholarship and research, having a \u201cproblem\u201d 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\u2019s teaching, a \u201cproblem\u201d is something you don\u2019t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. asking a colleague about a problem<\/em> in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one\u2019s teaching would probably seem like an accusation.\u00a0 (bass 1999)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

the consequences of this difference include a culture of \u201chabits and hunches\u201d in how we think about our students\u2019 learning (berrett) and another culture of curiosity, inquiry, and systematic exploration, construction, and dissemination of knowledge within our disciplines. \u00a0this internal culture war is what the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl), as it\u2019s now called, aims to resolve by bringing the habits of mind, values, and practices we use in our disciplinary work into our classroom work.<\/p>\n

i think of the thrill of potential discovery as i read a novel: moments that raise questions, that take me\"\"<\/a> through the words on the page to explore the contexts in which they were written, that pull me to a dozen other novels and scholars in conversation with this passage, that stop me mid-page and slow my reading to a crawl. these moments of coming to my knees as i read are the \u201cproblems\u201d that made me fall in love with literature\u2014and more precisely, literary study. these moments make me want to jump up, rush to my peers, show them what i\u2019ve found, and ask them what they see. \u00a0in these moments, halted in my reading, feeling around in the nooks and crannies as i feel out the new layers of meaning, conversing with texts and peers, i am doing the work of a literary scholar. \u00a0i\u2019ll never forget when my groping around on all fours in graduate school helped me notice a pattern that ultimately became my dissertation.\u00a0 these are the moments of labor, investigation, discovery, and creation in my field.<\/p>\n

imagine my disappointment when my literature students come across such a passage, and some cite\u00a0it as a source of frustration and a reason to dislike literature classes, while\u00a0others simply quit reading.\u00a0 at one point in my career, these responses might\u2019ve been a bitter pill.\u00a0 this was not the conversation i wanted to have with my students.\u00a0 this was not what it meant to teach literature.\u00a0 my solutions might, at one time, have included immediately telling the students what those difficult passages meant, controlling discussion to prevent comments about their experience of reading, steering attention away from such passages, assigning less challenging texts, and other workarounds.<\/p>\n

early in my teaching days, however, i was invited into a future faculty program for graduate students<\/a> and met the work of randy bass, who challenged me to think of my classroom \u201cproblems\u201d differently; ernest boyer, who expanded what i\u2019d learned about potential areas of research to include teaching; and lee shulman, who encouraged me to make my teaching \u201ccommunity property\u201d by opening it up to investigation, conversation, peer review, and knowledge construction.\u00a0 with a couple of dozen other graduate students from across the university, we explored teaching and learning with the same sense of discipline and interest we brought to our home departments.\u00a0 i\u2019ve thought about my students\u2019 responses to literature very differently as a result, and i\u2019ve done much to help my students and others\u2019 approach texts in ways that more closely resemble the approaches of literary scholars.<\/p>\n

unlike my experience, most graduate student education perpetuates the distance between research and teaching\u2014and how we view \u201cproblems\u201d in each\u2014by focusing solely on disciplinary training. \u00a0i\u2019ve now been at vanderbilt for almost two months, and i see that things are a little different here. \u00a0graduate students can participate in a teaching certificate program<\/a> sponsored by the graduate school and the 2022年世界杯中国小组赛积分.\u00a0 they can also become teaching affiliates<\/a>, and a few can become graduate teaching fellows<\/a> and\u00a0teaching-as-research fellows<\/a>. these programs are designed to help future faculty observe, practice, study, and share teaching practices that are supported by research and evidence. those completing the teaching certificate and the teaching-as-research fellowship complete their own sotl, or teaching-as-research, projects.<\/p>\n

i\u2019ve been listening to some of them describe their projects and what’s motivated them.\u00a0 in each conversation, i hear them framing teaching and learning \u201cproblems\u201d in ways that reflect some of the curiosity and inquiry of disciplinary work:<\/p>\n