Recently, Howard University Graduate School’s Preparing Future
Faculty program presented, as part of the “Teaching and Learning as
a Scholarly Activity” course, four scholars from the Washington area
in a seminar on issues relating to the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning (SoTL), including new trends and practices. Panelists
included Dr. R. Eugene Rice, American Association of Colleges and
Universities (AAC&U), who spoke on the topic of “Scholarship and
the Changing Roles of Faculty.” Dr. Jerry Gaff, also from AAC&U,
addressed the topic, “Undergraduate Curriculum Trends;” Dr. Lorraine
Fleming, Howard University, spoke on “Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning: An Engineer’s Perspective;” and Dr. Nancy S. Shapiro,
University System of Maryland, addressed “Avoiding Expensive
Mistakes: Moving Toward Learner-Centered Teaching.”
Established by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, SoTL refers
to scholars approaching teaching as a form of scholarly work --
investigating the relationship between teaching and learning;
gathering evidence, analyzing and documenting it; disseminating
results and adapting practices; and reflecting on an ongoing basis
on the processes and outcomes of teaching and learning.
Dr. Shapiro stated: “If we want to
influence what our students learn, we need to pay more
attention to how our students learn. Toward that end,
faculty and teachers should draw lessons from a variety of sources,
including studies of how people learn and how institutions build
supportive environments for new college students. All too
frequently, the students we get in our classes are not the students
we want in our classes: we're all looking for highly motivated,
deeply engaged, cognitively complex students. Our challenge is to
create the learning environments that transform the students we
have into the students we want."
Recounting his beginning experience with SoTL, Dr. Rice
stated that he was at the Carnegie Foundation when “Scholarship
Reconsidered” was written. “It was out of that effort that ‘the
scholarship of teaching and learning’ emerged as a part of a broader
definition of the scholarly work of faculty. My primary point at
the seminar was that SoTL is a part of a larger view of scholarship
that encompasses basic research (scholarship of discovery), the
scholarship of engagement (honoring the wisdom of practice and
involvement in the larger society), the scholarship of integration,
as well as the scholarship of teaching. The impact of ‘Scholarship
Reconsidered’ since its publication in 1990 has been traced in a
recent book that I prepared with Kerry Ann O’Meara titled Faculty
Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship
(2005.
For more information on SoTL at
Howard, visit
www.gs.howard.edu/sotl.
