The Scholarship of Teaching: A (Very) Brief Introduction

By Randy Bass

Director, American Studies Crossroads Project, and Executive Director, Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Georgetown University

{This essay is a reprint from Acumen, a publication of Follett bookstores; reprinted by permission. For information about Acumen, write to: acumen@fheg.follett.com or visit the Follett Web site.}

What is it?

In many ways, the scholarship of teaching and learning is easier to discuss than define, because its meaning is very much evolving. Over the past five years the term has transformed from simply referring to the scholarly components of excellent teaching to any of the ways that faculty can examine their own teaching practice reflectively and systematically.

That is, the scholarship of teaching is a kind of scholarship that faculty conduct on their own teaching. "For an activity to be designated as scholarship," argues Lee Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, "it should manifest at least three key characteristics: It should be public, susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one's scholarly community." These are the core components of all forms of scholarship, and the features by which "scholarship properly communicated and critiqued serves as the building blocks for knowledge growth in a field" (5).

But in order to apply this model to one's "teaching," or to think it even possible to produce a scholarship of teaching, there first needs to be a fundamental shift in how one defines teaching as an activity and thus as an object of investigation. As Shulman puts it, "Too often teaching is identified only as the active interactions between teacher and students in a classroom setting (or even a tutorial session). I would argue that teaching, like other forms of scholarship, is an extended process that unfolds over time" (5). It includes, as Shulman describes it, a broad vision of disciplinary questions and methods; it includes the capacity to plan and design activities that implement the vision; it includes the interactions that require particular skills and result in both expected and unexpected results; it includes certain outcomes from that complex process, and those outcomes necessitate some kind of analysis.

What does it look like in Practice?

Given this perspective, what the scholarship of teaching might look like in practice would take as many forms as other kinds of scholarship. The nature of the data may be quantitative or qualitative; it may be based on interviews, formative assessment instruments, test performances, student evaluations, or peer review, or any combination. The nature of the scholarly design could vary from tracking three students of ranging abilities from the beginning of the semester to the end, to studying group dynamics in videotape of student collaborative work, to comparing and contrasting content analysis of student written work across semesters. The object of analysis may range from the acquisition of basic skills to the development of personal values or the transformation of whole knowledge paradigms.

But regardless of form, one thing is clear: it takes a deliberate act to look at teaching from the perspective of learning and through a careful process of inquiry. As Shulman and Pat Hutchings put it, "A scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching. It requires a kind of 'going meta,' in which faculty frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning - the conditions under which it occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it, and so forth - and do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it" (13).

Why does it matter?

What matters most in a scholarship of teaching is for teachers to investigate the problems that matter most to them. In this way, a scholarship of teaching does not imply a new set of elaborate accountability procedures tied onto the luggage rack of every teaching vehicle. The movement for a scholarship of teaching seeks first and foremost to legitimate a new set of questions - teaching questions - as intellectual problems. And that is likely to be pivotal for the strength and vital adaptability of higher education in the next century, especially in the context of new technologies, new demographics, and the shifting "locations" of education. However much having a knowledge-base about teaching and learning mattered in the past, generating and sharing knowledge about teaching and learning, and validating its inquiry as valid intellectual work, is going to matter a whole lot more in the future.

Works Cited:

Additional Resources on the Scholarship of Teaching: