Sarah L. Bunnell, Associate Professor of Psychology, Ohio Wesleyan University; Vice President, International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISoTL)
Contact: slbunnel@owu.edu
Academia and academic disciplines are discourse communities (Swales, 1990); we have a set of accepted goals, methods for communicating our work and receiving feedback on that work, and we have shared conventions and language that we use to understand and evaluate one another’s scholarly contributions. For most of us, the ways in which our disciplinary expectations, standards, and evaluation criteria operate in our scholarly lives are deeply ingrained and internalized. Peer-review and measures of impact (e.g., journal impact factors, number of citations that your work receives) are accepted as marks of high-level scholarship. When you leave your disciplinary space and conduct research into the scholarship of teaching and learning, however, it can be more challenging for our colleagues to understand how to evaluate the value and impact of this work. I would argue that the responsibility for helping others overcome this challenging threshold concept resides in large part with us. We need to socialize our colleagues to think about our scholarship of teaching and learning as belonging to a scholarly discourse community with similar external means of representing and evaluating said work (i.e., conference presentations, journal publications). That being said, I would also stress that engaging in SOTL is a high-impact practice with immediate applications in the classroom and at the University; as such, we may benefit from thinking creatively about alternative ways to capture the impact of our SOTL work.
It is not uncommon for a SOTL scholar to receive dismissive reviews of their work by a colleague or administrator as being “just teaching.” This view of SOTL as non-scholarly indicates that we have not yet done a good enough job helping our colleagues understand the types of and standards for scholarship of teaching and learning. As discussed by Boyer (1997), there are four types of scholarship: 1) discovery scholarship, which refers to the development of new knowledge; 2) integration scholarship, in which past research is reviewed or disciplinary knowledge is synthesized; 3) application scholarship, or the tackling of societal problems through the use of existing knowledge, and 4) teaching scholarship, also referred to as scholarly teaching, which is the reflective, iterative practice of refining teaching practices in order to improve learning outcomes. When faculty and/or administrative colleagues do not value our discovery or integration scholarship work as indeed being research scholarship, it is typically under the umbrella misunderstanding that all SOTL is scholarly teaching. In response, I provide some recommendations for delineating discovery and integration scholarship from scholarly teaching for our colleagues. If you are indeed conducting these forms of SOTL research, treat it as such or others will not.
Recommendations:
(1) Talk about your SOTL work as research, in both informal and formal contexts. Informally, engage your colleagues in conversations about the findings of your SOTL research. Present your SOTL work at departmental or University colloquies. Think about presenting this work in student-focused research venues as well, both to help you develop the skills of talking about your SOTL work to a non-expert audience and to help your colleagues think about this work as scholarship. Formally, discuss your SOTL research in the scholarly productivity section, rather than the teaching section, in annual review documents, tenure narratives, and promotion documents. Certainly this work is applied directly into the classroom and your pedagogical practices (or else, what would be the point?) but you need to frame your work as scholarship in order to have others think this way about your work as well. This requires that you are aware of past SOTL work and overarching theoretical frameworks. Spend some time positioning your work in the larger SOTL literature and thinking about how to translate this to your colleagues.
(2) Reflect on how your disciplinary research and SOTL research overlap and consider framing yourself as a scholar of that overlap. Most faculty currently doing research in SOTL were not initially trained in this field, and the SOTL questions that we care deeply about have emerged later in our academic careers. Regardless, there is likely at least one point of commonality that drew you to both disciplines. For instance, I am a developmental and cognitive psychologist who studies autobiographical memory processes that facilitate coping with stressful life events in children and adolescents, and I also conduct research into the in-class and out-of-class processes that promote metacognition and students’ views of themselves as active agents in the learning process. Thus, I describe myself as someone who researches the emotional and cognitive processes that influence development, both in childhood and adolescence as well as the higher educational context.
Can you identify the points at which your own scholarly questions overlap? What is the common thread? I guarantee that there is one. If the overlap is too difficult for you to identify, you may be too close to it to see it yourself. We become so focused on the details of the questions we ask, because those details are indeed very important, but they can occlude this process. If that is the case for you, I recommend that you talk with a colleague in another field who knows both of your areas of scholarly interest and ask them what they see as connection points. Their response will likely make the overlap apparent to you, and in describing your work to them the intersectionality will likely make itself known to you as well.
(3) Consider your publication venues. Publishing in traditional peer-reviewed venues can be an easy entry for your colleagues, as they can draw on the same standards of peer review and revision processes that apply to work that appears in our disciplinary journals and books. Options include both interdisciplinary journals, such as Teaching and Learning Inquiry, The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, and disciplinary journals that focus on research on teaching in the discipline, are all strong options. If you are publishing or considering publishing in peer-reviewed journals, make sure that your library has access to these journals if at all feasible. Teaching and Learning Inquiry and Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, for instance, are both open access; making sure that these sources are searchable in your library database can help your colleagues find and engage with your SOTL work. Finally, uploading your SOTL research into more traditional online research venues, such as ResearchGate, is another way to help expand how others think about your work and gain access to your work. Readers may come to it indirectly, via searching for an article in your disciplinary genre, but making your SOTL research equally available and included in your research profile can go a long way in shaping how others think of your scholarship. Representing the impact of your SOTL work in less traditional publication formats (i.e., peer-reviewed blogs like Improving with Metacognition) online journals or news sources like The Chronicle, or even your own scholarly blog, faces the same challenges as disciplinary work presented in these formats. Again, capturing indices of your reach is important. In many cases, going public with your scholarship in these non-traditional formats can have greater reach than traditionally published work. Look at analytics for number of reads on blog posts or number of followers on social media (if your profile is solely SOTL focused).
(4) Identify external reviewers who can speak to your SOTL research. If external review is a required or optional component to your college or university’s review practices, consider having one of your reviewers focus on your SOTL work. In many cases, it can be helpful to consider reviewers who are situated at a similar type of institution, as they will be able to talk in a nuanced way about the value and impact of your work on a similar type of learning community as well as your productivity. Often, the voice of someone outside of your local campus community that speaks to the quality of your SOTL work can be more compelling to your colleagues than an internal voice or your own narrative. Again, the legwork that you put in to thinking about how your research fits into the larger literature base can help in the identification of people who can speak to your contributions here.
(5) Be sensitive to campus climate but also recognize your role as a change agent. Campus or departmental-level climate differences exist in how individuals think about SOTL as “counting” as research or not, and having a rich understanding of this sometimes opaque local norm is critical. How do you discover the SOTL culture on your campus, especially if you are new to this campus environment? Here are some indices to explore: Are other colleagues, either within or outside of your department, publishing in SOTL journals or involved in SOTL? If they are involved, at what level? Does the faculty handbook or other review materials specify differential weighting of research on teaching, relative to disciplinary research? If there is differential weighting, keep this in mind as you allocate your scholarly time. Be sure to stay involved at a high enough level in your disciplinary field while you develop your SOTL research profile and line(s) of inquiry. Campus climate can be slow to change – frame your work as scholarship and serve as a strong exemplar of why this work is important, to your university or college and particularly beyond it. Over time, your SOTL research profile, and the work of others on your campus, may be compelling counters to that view.
It can be frustrating to conduct scholarly work that is undervalued by some individuals in your intellectual community, relative to other forms of scholarship. As I have attempted to argue, this position often results from a lack of understanding of the standards of the scholarship of teaching and learning to which we hold this work. We have an opportunity and responsibility to help our colleagues understand our SOTL research by positioning it in the larger body of literature, framing our SOTL research as an equally important thread in our larger research program, making clear the standards of publication and measures of impact for SOTL research, recruiting the expertise of others outside our local communities to communicate the impact of our work, and engaging in bottom-up actions to encourage our students and our departmental and university colleagues to value all forms of high-level scholarship, including that which explores the important work of teaching and learning.
References
Boyer, E. L. (1997). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Swales, J. (1990). The concept of discourse community. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge University Press.
