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The Evolution of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

by Jessie L. Moore

As Lee Shulman notes in the video below, one exciting characteristic of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is that it has evolved. It has a rich history sparked by a core group of scholars and extended by an international community.

Where did SoTL start? Briefly…

Ernest Boyer gave a name to the practice in his 1990 publication, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, but SoTL’s founding scholars already were actively engaged in this type of research. Russ Edgerton’s, Pat Hutchings’, and Lee Shulman’s names are prominent, for example, in 1980s issues of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) Bulletin.

Many of these scholars continued their work under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the 1990s (where Mary Taylor Huber and Ernest Boyer, among others, were already active), and the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning launched in 1998. The Carnegie Foundation continues to be a nexus for SoTL publications within the United States.

Each geographic context for SoTL has its own historical evolution, and many global regions have their own professional organizations devoted to SoTL. With the launch of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in 2004, SoTL scholars made a conscientious choice to build connections among these international pockets of teaching and learning research.

Want to learn more about SoTL’s past? View the video embedded below to hear Dan Bernstein (University of Kansas), Mary Taylor Huber (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), Pat Hutchings (Gonzaga University), Gary Poole (University of British Columbia), and Joanna Renc-Roe (Central European University, Budapest) discuss the history of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

 

Jessie L. Moore (@jessielmoore) is the Associate Director of the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University and associate professor of Professional Writing & Rhetoric in the Department of English.

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