Scholarship is a conversation in which one participates only by knowing what is now being discussed and what others in the past have said. We talk of successful scholarship as “contributing to the field.” If a project does not speak to current issues of theory, fact, interpretation, or method, it is unlikely that anyone would say that a contribution has been made. This is fairly uncontroversial with respect to established fields of scholarship. The catch with a “new” or “emerging” area, like the scholarship of teaching, is that–as my father used to say–“you can’t jump if you ain’t got no place to stood.” One of the major challenges in supporting the scholarship of teaching on campus or in the disciplines, is to encourage not just those individuals who are interested in pursuing such work, but to help develop the “field” itself. The scholarship of teaching can flourish only with the development of communities of scholars who share, critique, and build upon each other’s work.
Something like this is the thinking behind a project we’re undertaking and I call it the “cultures of teaching” project, because it aims–ultimately–to explore the ways in which the scholarship of teaching might become positioned within the more general discourse and practice in teaching and learning. The hope, of course, is that as the scholarship of teaching is developed, it will become attractive to a larger number of faculty, and that the enterprise will ultimately raise the level of reflection about teaching and learning for all academics–teachers, administrators, and students. (We can’t forget the role of students in shaping a culture of teaching and learning on campus. Their expectations about what a proper course should be can be a powerful conservative force).
This larger project on the “cultures of teaching” will involve collaborative field work on a few selected campuses, and will necessitate a focus on probably not more than four disciplines or fields. However, it will be informed by what we hear from the many individuals, campuses, and disciplinary or professional fields in the larger program. And it will be informed by what we’re learning right now about the forums in which the exchange of information and ideas about teaching and learning in higher education currently take place. What has been surprising to us is not only how many forums there are right now for this exchange, but how surprised people seem to be to find this out. In other words, what we are finding appears to be at odds with the prevailing stereotype that there has been little investment of intellectual interest and energy in teaching and learning in higher education. Perhaps in comparison to traditional research this is so, but the field of teaching and learning in higher education is far more active (if not very evenly distributed) than many might think.
Before moving into the material, let me say just a little more about what we’ve been learning about the structure of this discourse field.
When you start filling with examples of forums for the discussion of teaching and learning, the first thing you may notice is that they are by no means solely or even primarily campus-based. This is surely all to the good. After all, one needs national or regional meetings for sharing new work and meeting people, and as we will see there is a rather rich range of other types of forums that serve the purpose at a national level: there are quite a respectable number of journals, newsletters, funders, associations, programs, awards, and workshops–actually, a great many workshops. Many are available for faculty or projects without regard to disciplinary affiliations and there is a separate array of such forums available for many particular disciplinary groups. It is even possible to find a few of these national forums for specific groups of disciplines as well.
In part because these forums are national (and even international) in scope, they are fairly easy to find out about. You can find advertisements for them on the internet. In fact, many of these forums are advertised on their sponsor’s website or have a website of their own. We are only beginning our research, but already we have found over a hundred entries for each of the national/general and national/disciplinary cells. Understandably it’s harder for an outsider to find out about forums that are aimed at specific clusters of campuses–grouped, for example, by state or region, or by institutional type. And, of course, you really have to be on campus or talk to people there to find out about campus-wide forums designed for their faculty only. Needless to say, the hardest depths to plumb from the outside are the conversations and forums that are specific to individual departments themselves.
Still, we have tried to get a sense of what these forums look like. Most of the examples we have found of national forums for groups or clusters of disciplines are from the science, math, engineering, and technology fields, in part because science education has enjoyed such generous support from the National Science Foundation. However, it is the case that on occasion our colleagues in the sciences share their wealth. The Mathematical Association of America, for example, has announced a series of Interdisciplinary Workshops for Faculty, including one that has already taken place on Art, Humanities, and Mathematics, and three upcoming events, one of which is for Business, Economics, Finance and Mathematics. We’ve also included The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as one of national scope for clusters of disciplines, and of course this program includes faculty not only from the sciences, but also from several arts, humanities, and professional fields.
Surely the largest set of forums will turn out to be in those with a national scope but a disciplinary focus. These forums are also fairly easy to find on association websites, or if you talk with colleagues who are involved in the teaching and learning communities that form within virtually every discipline. Many of our examples come from recent applications for fellowships, because most of those interested in applying have already been involved in the variety of programs, commissions, conferences, awards, journals, and Association sections that keep these groups alive. But two cautions: these worlds can be quite marginalized within the discipline and they can be quite divided within themselves.
The area of management is a case in point. Colleagues in this field tell us (informally) that The National Business Education Association has long served as something of a “counterculture” organization in the larger field. It publishes its own journal, and is the organizational base for faculty who favor management as a component of general education for all undergraduates. Now, a new journal is being launched by the Academy of Management that will have better visibility, higher circulation, and a more mainstream reputation. But this is not all. There is a whole distinct field of educators who contribute to refereed journals for case studies and case research in professional education in management and business administration.
The other thing worth saying here is that it’s really misleading to put all this activity in one small list because there is not too much communication sometimes between these disciplinary teaching and learning groups. At a recent meeting of disciplinary society representatives held in conjunction with this colloquium I described an interesting service our group can provide: we can produce something worthwhile – lists of books and articles gleaned from the generic literature on teaching and learning and other materials for the teaching of sociology. But we seldom have the time to scan work coming out of other disciplines on teaching and learning. Indeed, several disciplinary association representatives at my table were surprised to learn about what the others were doing and suggested that they ought at least link to the relevant parts of each others’ web sites.
Let me run quickly through some examples of forums organized for faculty from groups of campuses and from single campuses alone. Forums for groups or clusters of campuses aimed at faculty across the discipline are often organized by collaborations of member campuses. Another example comes from the teams which organizes system-wide events and which also sponsors an annual award for a Distinguished Professor for Teaching and Learning. For faculty from clusters of campuses in a single field there are sessions at meetings sponsored by regional sections of national disciplinary associations. One might also mention forums sponsored by state branches of national organizations like The Kentucky Council of Teachers of English. We have not yet found examples of forums organized for faculty from clusters of campuses, in clusters of disciplines, but surely we will.
On the campus level, a lot is going on–especially for faculty from across the fields of study. Teaching and Learning Centers sponsor a variety of campus-wide events and virtually every campus offers teaching awards–just to name a few. We’ve found several forums for colleagues from groups of disciplines organized on a school or college level. Indeed, one activity that may be valuable for campuses embarking on campus conversations is to locate where such discussions are taking place. Vigorous conversations about teaching and learning are currently underway at the department level across the university, as faculty work on the criteria for nominations for a set of newly funded teaching awards.
In fact, instead of starting a new campus conversation we are trying to “infuse” ideas about the scholarship of teaching and learning into these conversations that are already going on.
That’s the outline I wanted to share with you today. Of course, it mentions only a bit about structure and touches neither these forums’ content, quality, or “centrality” to the larger enterprise in the department, Colleges and Universities, or discipline.
Nor have I talked yet about some of the very interesting questions relate to flow between forums. In this regard, journals, conferences, and workshops are surely important among campuses; and certainly, the teaching and learning centers contribute to flow within a campus itself. And we can’t forget the travelers, nor can we forget the many faculty developers and regular faculty who travel to workshops and sessions on campuses and at meetings around the country.
Many questions arise. How does this infrastructure for conversations about teaching and learning compare with others in scholarly life? Is it as rich, as diverse, as serious? Do its participants treat the enterprise with the same gravitas? Can one characterize these groups of scholars that form around teaching and learning as discourse communities? What would we need to do to foster broader participation in these conversations, or to foster new discourse communities among a broader range of college and university teachers?
I close with a definition of discourse communities by John Swayles, author of Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Swayles proposes six defining characteristics that he finds necessary and sufficient to identify a discourse community. Let me run them by you as ideas to keep in mind as one surveys the forums and conversations on teaching and learning that already are or may someday be taking place in academe:
– Swayles makes the point that it is the goal that must be shared, not just the object of study–as he says “students of the Vatican in history departments, the Kremlin, dioceses, birth control agencies and liberation theology seminaries” may share a common object of study, but are not a discourse community”.
– For example, faculty members who teach anthropology are not members of a discourse community in respect to their teaching unless they actually share their “discursive practice” and “admit or recognize that such a community exists”.
– Swayles means that members take part in forums the community sponsors. If you simply send in a check to support an organization’s cause, but don’t open its journal or attend its meetings, you are not participating in a discourse community.
– Keep in mind for emerging groups like those faculty who are just experimenting with the scholarship of teaching, seeking ways in which to make public their inquiries, analyses, and reflection about teaching. As Swayles says: “One of the purposes of this criterion is to question discourse community status for new or newly-emergent groupings. Such groupings need, as it were, to settle down and work out their communicative proceedings and practices before they can be recognized as discourse communities.
– The criterion refers to those special terms, names, and acronyms that make communication between professionals efficient and distinguish the different conversational communities to which we belong. For people who think teaching and learning is or should be “transparent,” the lexis that has developed around teaching and learning can be quite off-putting. Still, according to Swayles, “It is hard to conceive, at least in the contemporary English-speaking world, of a group of well-established members of a discourse community communicating among themselves on topics relevant to the goals of the community and not using lexical items puzzling to outsiders”.
– Swayles is talking about here about a reasonable ratio between novices and experts, whatever the flux in community membership (471-473).
Clearly, building discourse communities around the scholarship of teaching and learning is a task that has many challenges but also much to build upon. As our survey of forums shows, there are already many places where faculty meet to discuss teaching and learning–generically, in their own and related fields, and at their own and other institutions. Many of these discussions may already be squarely within the scope of what we are calling the “scholarship of teaching and learning,” some will be open to “infusion” by such ideas as inquiry, a literature, documentation, or peer review. Others will be closed. Some faculty will be intrigued to learn how much good work is going on. Others will be dismissive–finding that the conversation lacks the requisite level of intellectual energy and exchange. The idea of the “scholarship of teaching and learning,” aims to enrich these conversations, expand their scope, and make them attractive to faculty with the highest expectations.
Megan Wilson is a teacher, life strategist, successful entrepreneur, inspirational keynote speaker and founder of https://Ebookscheaper.com. Megan champions a radical rethink of our school systems; she calls on educators to teach both intuition and logic to cultivate creativity and create bold thinkers.