EMERGING ISSUES

Project Themes Emerge from Summer Institute

By John Rakestraw

One of the highlights of the Summer Institute was the opportunity for primary researchers to discuss their course projects and to learn about the projects being developed by other participants. While some of this discussion took place informally, much of it happened in the working groups, which met three times over the course of the Institute.

As in the past, the working groups provided time each day for work on two participants' projects. Efforts were focused on individual projects, but groups were asked also to identify common themes between projects that emerged in the discussions. On the last day of the Summer Institute each group spent some time reporting out these commonalities. As one might expect, a wide variety of suggestions emerged - roughly twice as many as there were participants. Despite this diversity, there were clusters of shared questions and issues. We won't review all the overlapping concerns here, but a quick survey provides an overview of VKP to date and also anticipates next steps for many of the individual projects and the Project in general.

• Research questions (common themes)
• Methods and questions about doing the scholarship of teaching and learning
• Value, obstacles and challenges

Research questions (common themes)

First, while the research questions being addressed by VKP participants vary depending upon discipline, type of institution, and other factors, there are themes in these questions. Several groups identified general questions about how to cultivate and evaluate different modes of student work. How, for example, do our teaching practices help students develop their critical and creative thinking, and are some practices better suited to cultivating one form of thinking than another? And how do we as teachers evaluate these different types of thinking?

Others are looking more specifically at how the use of new technologies changes teaching and learning. For example, some investigators are considering how the use of online discussion environments enhances student collaboration. In these environments, "students see one another's work and comment on it and all can see one another's comments and have a record of their collaboration and the 'value' they add to one another's work." Others are considering the role of multi-media projects. How might such projects be included among student assignments, and how do we evaluate them?

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Methods and questions about doing the scholarship of teaching and learning

Different projects are also similar in raising questions about the scholarship of teaching and learning. Here the question asked most often is that of how to identify a research question that is small enough to be manageable. "Having huge questions to ask can be paralyzing; the scholarship of teaching becomes much less intimidating when we have small, specific, manageable, focused questions to research." A second challenge here is that of developing meaningful and efficient assessment protocols. "What is evidence in the Humanities? What is qualitative evidence? How do we value qualitative evidence? How do we guarantee that we are collecting good data?" Or, from another group, "We wrestled with the relationship between measurement of learning and authentic assessment, and how to design opportunities for authentic performance. Underlying this theme is a sense that students may show learning in many different ways. What levels of questions do we need to ask? What constitutive evidence will help us understand and document student performance?"

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Value, challenges and obstacles

Finally, there are common themes emerging concerning the value of doing this work, as well as the obstacles and challenges we face in doing it. Faculty at many different sorts of school are struggling to place this work in the context of the other work they do, such as disciplinary research or broader efforts to develop a curriculum. What is the most effective way to "go public" with this sort of research? This "is a subversion of traditional academic process, and we don't know yet what the protocols are, what the final product should look like when we're conducting the scholarship of teaching."

How do we work effectively with new technologies when the technologies are changing so quickly? Others noted that changing technology is not the only variable here: "How do we navigate research on student learning amidst so many variables-differences in what we're doing, different courses, technology AND changing course content, etc.?"

Finally, one significant theme that emerged not only from the workgroups but also from Institute presentations and informal discussions: it's important that we find more ways to do this work collaboratively. A question addressed in several different ways at the end of the Institute put the challenge this way: What can we accomplish by doing this work together that we cannot accomplish by doing it alone?

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September 2002

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