Over three decades ago, American educator Ernest Boyer (1990, xi) in his book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate proposed a concept of the scholarship of teaching, which is now known as the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Boyer’s starting point in the book was the renewed attention to undergraduate education in the US colleges:
At the very heart of the current debate — the single concern around which all others pivot — is the issue of faculty time. What’s really being called into question is the reward system and the key issue is this: what activities of the professoriate are most highly prized? After all, it’s futile to talk about improving the quality of teaching if, in the end, faculty are not given recognition for the time they spend with students.
Since Boyer’s statement there has been a significant transformation in university teaching. At least rhetorically, higher education institutions have moved away from behaviourist notions of teaching and adopted constructivist approaches to learning.
This transformation was spurred on and facilitated via the documentation and expression of teaching objectives as intended learning outcomes (Holmes 2019), expansion of university service provision to support teaching and learning and adoption of technology. Despite all this, Boyer’s statement strikes me as still relevant (if not more relevant) today.
In research-intensive universities, teaching is neither prioritised nor recognised. SoTL, of course, offers opportunities for recognition by turning your teaching practice into research outputs, but I wonder whether the widening gap between teaching and research can be filled with SoTL if other forms of scholarships identified by Boyer (i.e., the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application) are not present in the teaching practice. To me, the teaching and research nexus is a sustaining feature of higher education, and while using teaching and learning strategies informed by research via SoTL is great, that can’t replace researched-informed content.
What’s the technology’s role in this dynamic? Well, I guess this blog is an example of the scholarship of technology enhanced learning. According to Wickens (2006), TEL in SoTEL can help document and publicise teaching practice.
Beyond just sharing teaching tips, LMS platforms and other teaching technologies enable the sharing of teaching resources and templated materials through (for example, Canvas Commons). Of course, we can think of this as SoTEL in action and a great way to save time for time-poor academics (thinking back to Boyer’s quote), but to be provocative and considering that we live in the world where university lectures are delivered by deceased academics: isn’t it interesting that in the evolution from SoTL to SoTEL ‘technology’ replaced ‘teaching’? At least the acronym would suggest so …
References
Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Holmes, A., G. (2019). ‘Learning outcomes – a good idea yet with problems and lost opportunities.’ Educational Process: International Journal 159-169.
Kneese, T. (2021, Jan 27). ‘How a dead professor is teaching a university art history class’. Slate.
Wickens, R. (2006). ‘SoTEL: Toward a scholarship of technology enhanced learning’. Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education, 32(2), 21-41.
Hi Elena, what an excellent post! The last link there was amazing, and an interesting corollary to using technology in teaching (and a little frightening to think we can just keep the most popular lectures running ad infinitum).
I agree that the sharing aspect of technology in teaching has made it easier in many regards, but I’ve also seen departments refusing to use shared content because “we don’t do it that way” – even if ‘that way’ means a more well-thought out subject design or even just a more intuitive layout for a subject’s Canvas page.
Returning to the time-poor notion, do you think most of our (teaching) academics are still time-poor, or better or worse off than in the past? What would you encourage to improve that?
Thanks, Jairus, for engaging with my post. As formerly a teaching-only academic (and now a professional staff member), yes, teaching academics are time poor, often only able to maintain a high level of teaching quality because of all the overtime they do. My point though is also that there shouldn’t be a teaching-only category in higher education as the sustaining feature of what we do and the education we provide at universities is the nexus between teaching and research.
HAHA! What a funny and provocative post!
Indeed, academics and students seem to be very time-poor. The realisation that time is one’s biggest and the most constrained asset can help one to set priorities in their professional life… and in their professional afterlife, apparently 🙂 This reminds me a bit about an excellent book by UQ’s John Quiggin titled Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us and makes me hope that “teachers” will never replace “ideas” in the title.
A few points on SoTEL:
+ In the context you described planning to publish a paper about teaching does not seem like the best career strategy for academics in most departments as this further constrains their time for research in their field.
+ In teaching, one must find more and more time to teach the technology that will allow students to implement field-specific knowledge. Çetinkaya-Rundel & Rundel (2018) write about their proposal of spreading the process across the whole program of studies in statistics.
+ Implementation of technological solutions often leads to the economy of scale, that is, they allow one to do many things with many students relatively quickly. Still, the overhead of preparing the implementation, and then, improving and maintaining it costs a lot of time.
Çetinkaya-Rundel, M., & Rundel, C. (2018). Infrastructure and Tools for Teaching Computing Throughout the Statistical Curriculum. American Statistician, 72(1), 58–65.
Quiggin, J., (2012) Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Thanks, Tomasz, for engaging with my post. When you are a teaching-only academic, SoTL may be the only type of research that you can justify doing — at least that’s how I felt.
Hi Elena, good interrogation of the SOTL and SoTEL acronyms – I agree that Boyer’s model artificially splits research into 4 domains (DIAT) and tends to exclude Teaching research from the other 3 domains – whereas I think they are all integrated and inform one another – more like the Nexus concept. In the SoTEL acronym I think the teacher is present in the Scholarship – the research-informed design of learning experiences (rather than simply the delivery of content). Laurillard has been a proponent of conceptualising teaching (with technology) as a Design Science. Tony Bates provides good practical examples.
Bates, A. W. T. (2022). Teaching in a digital age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning (Third Edition ed.). Tony Bates Associates Ltd. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev3m/
Ferdig, R. E., Baumgartner, E., Hartshorne, R., Kaplan-Rakowski, R., & Mouza, C. (2020). Teaching, Technology, and Teacher Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Stories from the Field. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). https://www.learntechlib.org/p/216903/
Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a design science: Building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. Routledge. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415803878/
It would be good to see some more multimedia in your posts to illustrate ideas. Good to see the comments your post has generated.