INTRODUCTION TO THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
Judith Wegner
Professor of Law, University of North Carolina
Senior Scholar, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

1. What is “the scholarship of teaching and where did it come from?”

• Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Princeton, N.J., The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) (see also, Boyer, Ernest, Scholarship Reconsidered, ssues in Accounting Education, spring 92, vol. 7, issue 1, p. 87 et seq.)
  • There are several types of scholarship: of discovery, of integration, of application, of teaching.

• Lee Shulman, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University, and President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (www.carnegiefoundation.org):

  • Teaching is an enactment of an understanding of disciplinary or professional field and what it means to know it deeply. “Scholarly teachers” benefit from the scholarship of others. “The scholarship of teaching” is something else. It is characterized by “being public, open to critique and evaluation, and in a form that others can build on… 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 [including beyond their disciplinary field]. The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments, by Pat Hutchings & Lee Shulman, Change Magazine, September 1999 (pp. 11- 15).

2. How does one begin to pursue this form of scholarship?

• Open a line of inquiry about a significant issue (genesis of and shape of question) (pragmatic concern but deeper personal motivation, reframing)
  • Taxonomy of questions includes: “what works,” “what is” (“what it looks like”), “visions of the possible”, “formulating a new conceptual framework for shaping thought about practice”

• Think about methods (many approaches, variations by discipline and background)
  • Examples: course portfolios, collection and analysis of student work, videotape, focus groups, ethnographic interviews, classroom observation, large-scale longitudinal tracking, questionnaires, surveys

See Pat Hutchings, ed. Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2000) (available from Amazon.com and others). (includes chapter by today’s speaker, Dennis Jacobs, of Notre Dame)

3. How do I find out more?

There are a growing number of resources and scholarly publications addressing the “scholarship of teaching and learning.” Here are a few that may interest those who would like to learn more:

• Hutchings, Pat and Bjork, Chris, An Annotated Bibliography of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (1999), available from the website of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/elibrary/index.html. The website also includes major articles by Shulman and Hutchings).

• Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (http://www.iusb.edu/~josotl/) (includes many articles)

• Bass, Randy, The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem? Inventio (February 1999, vol. 1, no. 1) (available on-line at http://www.doiit.gmu.edu/Archives/fed98/rbass.htm)

• Websites of note:

  • Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/CASTL/index.htm) and Knowledge Media Lab (KML) (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/KML/index.htm) (includes work by Dennis Jacobs)
  • Center for New Designs in Teaching and Scholarship Professor Randy Bass, George Washington University (http://cndls.georgetown.edu/resources/index.htm)
  • American Association for Higher Education, Campus Programs (http://aahe.ital.utexas.edu/)

• Outstanding listserv on teaching, scholarship, faculty development: “Tomorrow’s Professor” operated by Rick Reis, Stanford University Learning Laboratory (http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/postings.html); free subscription by sending the following message (subscribe tomorrows-professor) to Majordomo@lists.stanford.edu

4. What are some examples of the scholarship of teaching in legal education?

There are a multitude of examples and resources. For work by today’s speakers, see:

Jane Aiken: Provocateurs for Justice, 7 Clinical L. Rev. 287 (2001)

Rachel Moran: Diversity and Its Discontents: The End of Affirmative Action at Berkeley¸ 88 Calif. L. Rev. 2241 (2000)

Carol Parker: Writing Throughout the Curriculum: What Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve it, 76 Neb. L. Eve. 561 (1997)