The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is inquiry to understand or improve postsecondary student learning and the teaching approaches and practices that affect student learning. SoTL is conducted by members of educational community from across campus who gather and analyze relevant evidence from the learners in their own specific contexts. As scholarship, the results are then shared broadly to contribute to knowledge and practices in postsecondary teaching and learning.
Its formal origin in Ernest Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990) marks SoTL as one of four scholarly activities potentially practiced by all faculty, a notion with implications for the uniqueness of the field. Individual SoTL practitioners draw from their disciplinary expertise as they work with or speak to others across disciplines, resulting in a methodological pluralism that expands the range of questions asked about learning and teaching, how these questions get answered, and for whom.
Each component of the program "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" (Shulman & Hutchings, 1999, p. 10). This program is designed to equip participants with a rich and specialized knowledge and practice in SoTL. It invites participants to enhance their expertise and provides the opportunity to further develop SoTL expertise outside of their primary discipline.
By the end of this graduate program, successful students will be able to:
-
- Understand the scholarship of teaching and learning as a field, including the history of SoTL, its major thinkers and texts, its key concepts and language, and its relationship to other forms of classroom research
- Develop theoretically informed, contextually-specific SoTL approaches and practices that ask meaningful questions about students' learning and its relationship to the teaching—and answer them meaningfully
- Propose strategies to evaluate the impact of individual SoTL projects and broader SoTL initiatives
- Critically reflect upon their professional goals, strengths, interests, and achievements related to the field of SoTL
- Develop multidisciplinary, ethical SoTL behaviors and practices
For more information, please see the official program website.
