Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Are you interested in Inquiry and Research into Teaching and Learning? CTL is facilitating faculty participation in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Are you interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?
For more specific information, to contribute ideas and leadership, and participate in SoTL activities, please contact Dennis Gilbert (gilbertd@lanecc.edu) the current facilitator of the SoTL program component of the CTL. (A SoTL blog presence on the CTL site will be created for more rich communication.)
Announcements
(October activity announcements being scheduled)
Areas of support for faculty include the following (Details in Announcements):
Two 6-week seminars meeting once a week at times suiting participants
Seminar-1 “What is SoTL?” - Focus is on the development of inquiry topics of interest, incorporating SoTL into one’s teaching identity, several promising frameworks for inquiry to improve teaching and learning.
Seminar-2 “Early SoTL Work” - (Prerequisite Seminar-1 or equivalent) – Focus is on literature review skills and citation management software (Zotero), SoTL collaboration skills and resources, and refinement of inquiry topics of interest.
SoTL colloquia
Opportunity to share “work in progress” or finished work and to connect with the work of colleagues at and beyond Lane.
Facilitation and support for funding for specific projects; including:
Term-long inquiry and reform development focused on specific general questions. (Recommended preparation: Seminar-1 and 2 or equivalent).
Term-long reform implementation effort. (Recommended preparation: Seminar-1 and 2 or equivalent)
Year-long Communities of Practice of a common faculty cohort participating in the seminars and one or both of the above. This structure has proven to be effective at LCC and COCC and is suggested for inclusion in grant-funded efforts.
For the future
Writing/presentation support groups. An opportunity to get and give colleagues feedback on public presentations, including conference talks, posters, and articles.
Grant proposal support group. An opportunity to leverage and build SoTL infrastructure in preparing grants for inquiry and sustainably implementing education reform.
And what we decide as needed to support needed scholarship of teaching and learning.
Brief overview of SoTL history at and beyond Lane
Scholarly inquiry into teaching and learning (SoTL) achieved solid recognition in higher education only relatively recently. Commentators often refer to the year 1990, because that is the year of Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1990). Within ensuing rich discourse in 1999, Randy Bass shared the expansive and transformational perspective that “The movement for a scholarship of teaching seeks first and foremost to legitimate a new set of questions as intellectual problems. Arriving there, the discourse surrounding the scholarship of teaching can begin to chart what is yet uncharted terrain, a landscape that will feature the convergence of disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical practice, evidence of learning, and theories of learning and cognition.”
By today, SoTL has demonstrated potential in (1) providing powerful faculty professional development, individually and collectively raising the level of pedagogical understanding and expanding capacity for education study and reform projects; (2) accelerating and sustaining implementation of proven, evidence-based practices and pedagogies; (3) aligning and building pathways of success between institutions; (4) reducing and eliminating gaps in student success and educational opportunity; and (5) in the process, establishing infrastructure that will continue to address and improve education far beyond what is otherwise feasible.
Achieving support for SoTL within the community college is not a straightforward challenge, as was recognized in "The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the Two-Year College: Promise and Peril" Howard Tinberg, Donna Killian Duffy and Jack Mino in the July-August 2007 Change magazine (excepts follow):
“The emergence of the scholarship of teaching and learning (commonly shortened to SoTL) as a viable alternative to traditional scholarship should come as no surprise to readers of Change. In recent years the magazine has featured the work of Lee Shulman, Pat Hutchings, Mary Huber, Eileen Bender, and others who have traced the trajectory of this movement...
None of these scholars, however, has any illusions as to the obstacles facing those who wish to pursue such scholarship...
Such obstacles have persisted despite the very strong case that has been made for teaching as a legitimate object of scholarly inquiry...
While logic would suggest that teaching-centered institutions such as two-year colleges would welcome any national movement that paid serious attention to classroom instruction, the reality is otherwise. Where the fight at research-centered universities and colleges is to valorize teaching as a legitimate subject of scholarship and research, the struggle at two-year colleges is to convince faculty and administrators that intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange are activities appropriate to the mission of the institutions...”
Amore optimistic view of this “struggle to convince faculty and administrators” has emerged at Lane and Oregon community colleges generally, after a Lane faculty member (Gilbert) returned from a 2015 spring term FPD-sponsored sabbatical titled: “Building a vision of support for the scholarship of teaching and learning by community college faculty-- an investigation through personal experience, analysis of current practices, and understanding strategic opportunities for collaboration.” There was immediate strong positive response that has continued for four years.
In the summer after hearing a positive summary of the sabbatical, nine faculty colleagues begin forming a SoTL Initiative Organizing Committee, and an ad hoc Teaching and Learning room open Mondays was established. A colloquium by Gilbert at Lane in the fall was positively greeted by faculty and administrators. (Comparable interest was developed at COCC, where Gilbert spoke.)By the end of the year the college established a permanent Teaching and Learning Center room, and scholarly inquiry into teaching and learning by faculty was implicitly recognized in the college’s newly developed Strategic Plan.
Over the next several years, specific elements of infrastructure building involved significant faculty participation, received funding from a variety of sources, including year-long State-funded Community of Practice at LCC and COCC, in which the two seminars developed and tested at Lane formed the skeleton of the work in the first two terms with more focused inquiry in the third. In addition, faculty colleagues have been engaging in elements of SoTL and recent faculty colleagues have brought positive experiences of SoTL work to Lane.
The former administration commitment to a Center for Teaching and Learning faltered. However, continued faculty advocacy has drawn support from the current administration. The CTL being created has a wide spectrum of explicit components for supporting faculty in improving education, including through faculty Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.