International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 2007) ISSN 1931-4744 © Georgia Southern University What‘s it really all about? The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as an Authentic Practice Carolin Kreber University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, Scotland [email protected] For this inaugural issue of International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, Alan Altany asked me to contribute a short essay on ‘some aspect of, or approach to, SoTL that is significant internationally today’. This assignment invites numerous possible responses given that significant issues in relation to higher education pedagogy abound. For starters, it is widely acknowledged that the challenges of the twenty-first century require higher education institutions to prepare not only discipline specialists but independent thinkers, productive citizens, and future leaders (e.g., Baxter Magolda and Terenzini, 1999). In this context Baxter Magolda (1999) argues that students need to develop a certain intellectual (as well as intra- and inter-personal) maturity to deal adequately with the various challenges of our times and suggests that higher education pedagogies should be designed such that they promote what she calls student “self-authorship”. The change from elite to mass higher education (to universal access) in many countries has direct implications for SoTL. Widening participation agendas, though welcomed by many, bring with it multiple challenges with regards to pedagogy. Higher education ‘for all’ involves changing traditional approaches to teaching and assessment practices so that not only ‘all’ get admitted into our programs but ‘all’ also have a fair chance to succeed. These days most countries witness heightened pressures with regards to quality assurance and there is no reason to believe that these will diminish in the years to come. Robust internal quality assurance mechanisms may be needed to promote public confidence in our work without abdicating institutional autonomy. SoTL could play a vital role in this regard. For all of these and other reasons, Huber and Hutchings (2005) remarked recently that SoTL is an imperative today and not a choice. Although there is a tendency, at least in some quarters, to view SoTL exclusively as discipline-specific pedagogical inquiry into how students learn, it is increasingly recognized that it is equally important that SoTL engage with broader agendas and consider questions relating to the larger learning experience of students (e.g, Kreber, 2005). As well, Huber and Hutchings (2005) proposed that it might be more appropriate to espouse a “big tent” conceptualization of SoTL, one that recognizes next to pedagogical research within particular disciplines or programs also much more modest or small-scale efforts aimed at reflecting on one’s own classroom teaching and sharing what was learned as a way of engaging with this kind of work. Underlying the above considerations is an engagement with the question of “what is it -- namely the student learning experience in higher education --, and SoTL -- the scholarship whose goal is to enhance it --, really all about?” My intent in this short essay is to explore this somewhat further and in doing so introduce the notion ofInternational Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 2007) ISSN 1931-4744 © Georgia Southern University 2SoTL as an ‘authentic practice’. In one of the most insightful books on higher education pedagogy published within this decade, Parker Palmer (1998) argues that learning is enhanced and supported by teachers who have the capacity to generate community between themselves and their ‘subject’, between themselves and students, and eventually between students and the ‘subject’. The key to good university teaching, he proposes, is not that it is ‘student-centered’ but that it is ‘subject-centered’. In a subject-centered classroom, teachers succeed in conveying to students not only their enthusiasm for the subject but also how and why the subject matters. Importantly, Palmer puts forward the idea that teachers who succeed in building this vital connection between the subject matter and students, are those who have found their “integrity”. By the latter he means “that I discern what is integral to my selfhood, what fits and what does not,…. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am” (p. 13). Elsewhere in the book he suggests “No matter how technical my subject may be, the things I teach are things I care about—and what I care about helps define my selfhood” (p. 17). My sense is that Palmer’s language has too much of a ‘soft touch’ for many academics to be read widely. Yet, few would deny that their personal life is inextricably linked to their academic one and that they partially define themselves by their academic interests or subject matter. This does not mean that there is no private life outside of academe, but rather that the subject matter, which often is the field we carry out research in, matters to us also beyond the walls of the university, and when we teach it we, therefore, share parts of ourselves with students. An alternative term for what Palmer means may be “authenticity”. In exploring the notion of authenticity, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1991) suggested that authentic identities can be constructed only against a background of issues that matter crucially. For Taylor, the demands of nature, the needs of our fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship are all examples of issues that could qualify as a horizon of significance. Clearly, the horizon of significance has to be something substantial, something that deeply matters not just for oneself but for society as a whole. When applying the concept of a horizon of significance to our work as college and university teachers, we may ask ‘what is this thing, this issue, which matters crucially’? Most readers would likely respond that what matters crucially is that students, while attending our institutions, have a learning experience that is worthwhile and promotes their learning and development. Ensuring that this happens could be conceived of as a horizon of significance within which to define ourselves as