Subject - Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering

Global Utilities

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Language and Academic Skills

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

The Scholarship of Learning and Teaching (SoTL) is a growing research area which deals with improving Learning and Teaching through research into educational practices and outcomes. Academic staff in the Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering may be interested in researching and/or publishing in this area.

The following excerpts are taken from a paper entitled Teach & Tell: enhancing both teaching and publications through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2007) by Dr. Kate Chanock from the Humanities and Social Sciences Academic Skills Unit. This paper was presented at the La Trobe University Learning and Teaching Week, December 2007.

"While academic staff are expected to devote twice as much time to teaching as to research, until recently research was much better rewarded than teaching. With the new government emphasis on teaching (DEST, 2004), the pressure to publish is not about to ease, but it will be compounded by pressure to demonstrate commitment to teaching. This will apply at both institutional and individual levels, in decisions about funding for universities and in decisions about promotion of members of staff. Previously, when applying for promotion, we had to show competence in both teaching and research, with excellence in one of these categories (and it had better have been research); now, we will have to demonstrate excellence in both. Lecturers and academic skills advisers alike have often felt that a change in the rewards system to fully acknowledge the value of teaching is long overdue (e.g., Gaither, 1998, p. 90), but we probably envisaged some means of freeing time from research to focus on teaching. Commonly, academics experience some degree of conflict between research and teaching, as each competes with the other for scarce time and attention. However, there is a way to bring them together and to get recognition for both our research and our efforts to improve our teaching: this is to participate in the 'Scholarship of Teaching and Learning' (or 'SoTL')…

"The development of SoTL was initiated by Ernest Boyer in 1990, when he distinguished between four kinds of scholarship -- discovery, integration, application, and teaching – and called for academics to "move beyond the tired old 'teaching versus research' debate and give the familiar and honourable term 'scholarship' a broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work". SoTL is not teaching informed by scholarship, in which we are all engaged already, but rather scholarship about teaching and learning: how learning happens and what we can do to make it happen more effectively."