Objectives
- Participate in a learning community of instructors across academic disciplines interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
- Become familiar with education literature as a resource to improve our teaching and student learning (no need to reinvent the wheel)
- Examine different forms of published literature as products of scholarly teaching to which we may contribute
Background:
Utah State University is dedicated to facilitating the enhancement of student engagement and learning. At the Uintah Basin Regional Campus, the primary role for faculty is teaching. As a component of this overarching goal, former dean Wes Holley charged faculty to “clearly define and illustrate what an excellent teacher looks like.” To address this challenge, several activities occurred in the academic year 2008-2009. During fall and spring semesters, faculty colleagues gave workshops on evaluating teaching excellence in a bi-monthly journal club. In December, Dr. Michele Shuster from New Mexico State University presented a workshop on Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. During spring semester, faculty volunteered to serve on one of three committees that continued to clarify how faculty will be evaluated from the perspectives of self, peers, and students. After much discussion, the faculty concluded that the essence of excellent teaching lies in the scholarship of teaching: the process of thinking about, executing, reflecting upon and improving our teaching and student learning over time, and sharing what we have learned with others.
What does it mean to be engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning? Let us consider the scholarship of our discipline-based research with which we are more familiar. No matter what our academic discipline, we prepare by reading literature appropriate to our research goals. We then identify problems and ask questions that are interesting to us so that we can build upon the published body of work. We select appropriate methods of inquiry and gather evidence. We make discoveries through an iterative process of reflection and reaction to new evidence. We perform our research in a community of peers with whom we share ideas and constructive criticism. Our discoveries are ultimately published, coming full circle as a contribution to a body of knowledge for others to learn from and to build upon. Likewise, the scholarship of teaching and learning is a process that begins with reading the literature. The questions we ask, the methods we use, and the evidence we collect may be less familiar than those in our disciplines, but the process remains very much the same. To truly be scholars, we must share our findings with the ultimate goal of improving student learning in our discipline, not just in our classroom, but also across our campus and beyond.
As we continue our journey to becoming scholars of teaching and learning, the Uintah Basin faculty is eager to share our excitement with a larger community. Our journey began with a local education journal club to familiarize ourselves with a new field of literature and its terminology. Since scholarship begins with the literature, we decided that a journal club would be an effective way to expand our conversation. We invite you to participate in the RCDE Teaching and Learning Journal Club community to share ideas and resources. We hope that you will make our community richer by joining the conversation.
