Scholarship of teaching and learning comes of age
Academic administrators gather to promote the still evolving concept
by Léo Charbonneau
If, years from now, the scholarship of teaching and learning has grown to a full-fledged national movement in Canada, researchers may point to a symposium this past April as its historic launch. At that meeting, on the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, about 100 university and college administrators - including a university president - met to give form and substance to the still evolving concept.
The event was "groundbreaking" as it marked the first time that administrators had gathered to discuss these issues and show a commitment to them, said Julia Christensen Hughes, director of teaching support services at the University of Guelph and president of the Society for the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. It was her university president, Alastair Summerlee, a 3M Teaching Fellow and strong advocate for teaching, who attended. "There's no way this is going to be the last of this kind of event," she said. "This is just the beginning."
Academics may be forgiven if they're confused by the term "the scholarship of teaching and learning." After all, many university professors already devote substantial time and effort to improving their teaching methods, and teaching support offices have sprung up on nearly every campus. That's all to the good, but advocates say they want to take those efforts a big step further.
For it to be properly constituted as scholarship, the study of teaching and learning must go beyond simple tips and observations of what works for you in your own classroom, explained Richard Gale, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Stanford, California. It must be a formal, systematic process of inquiry that provides evidence of what works and why, and that evidence must be disseminated, critically reviewed and built upon, he told the symposium.
The concept was launched in 1990 in the seminal work by Carnegie Foundation president Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities for the Professoriate. In it, he challenged university administrators to embrace and promote the scholarship of teaching and learning as an important component of faculty work. Dr. Boyer saw this as essential to improving the knowledge and quality of faculty teaching and student learning.
The foundation gave impetus to the movement when it teamed with the American Association for Higher Education to create the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in 1998. The University of British Columbia, University of Waterloo and Malaspina University College are CASTL partners and were singled out at the symposium as leaders in the field.
Rebalancing needed
The growing interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning is fueled in part by the desire of many academics to see a rebalancing between the research and teaching functions at university, said Anna Kindler, associate vice-president, academic, at UBC. "The value of scholarship in teaching and learning has to be made very explicit from the top down," said Dr. Kindler. Without support from senior administrators, she said, it won't develop.
This type of scholarship can be empowering, Dr. Kindler added. "It is the best way of handing back the ownership of teaching and learning to departments, institutes, even to individual faculty members." It allows them "to identify what is important, what they want to be measured on and held accountable to." It also should be taught in graduate school to help prepare the next generation of teachers, she argued.
But many questions remain. One raised continually at the symposium was whether this work should be discipline-specific or interdisciplinary. Many participants counseled faculty to start with what they know. "Every discipline has its own questions," said Teresa Dawson, director of teaching and learning services at U of T Scarborough. "So how mathematicians define a problem, and how that problem is interrogated or assessed, is quite different from the questions that I would ask to set up a problem in geology."
Financial resources are another major issue. "One way to legitimize this is with funding, and there ain't any," commented one attendee. UBC's Dr. Kindler agreed that targeted new funds are needed, and suggested the federal government could use this as an opportunity to engage with universities "in doing something that could really make a difference to the quality of postsecondary education in Canada."
However, Neil Bouwer, director general of national learning systems at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, cautioned that "a lot of this falls squarely on the provinces. It is in provincial jurisdiction." On the other hand, he noted that the federal government has built "quite a successful platform for cooperation with universities through the research agenda" and said "this may well be the answer."
Janet Halliwell, executive vice-president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, said SSHRC is already funding several research projects on educational issues, giving as one example a study examining the impact of mandatory laptop programs on learning outcomes at some universities. "Surely that is exactly the type of insight and evidence that you need as you look at new scholarship," she said.
But SSHRC, like any granting council, tends to fund people who have a proven track record, noted Dr. Christensen Hughes later in an interview. In educational research, those "tend to be people in faculties of education. Whereas what we're trying to do is encourage faculty in all disciplines to engage in this kind of work." She suggested that Science and Engineering Research Canada could also "step up to the plate" to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the sciences.
The symposium ended with a call for attendees to reflect on what they could do at their own institutions to further the scholarship of teaching and learning. "Talk about it, model it, and fund it," said Guelph's president Dr. Summerlee.
Canada will host the annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Vancouver, Oct. 14-16.
