Wednesday, May 12, 2010

SoTL?

I am wondering if anyone know anything about something called "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)," what it is and how it relates or has been related to the teaching of philosophy. Thanks!

2 comments:

  1. I was for AY 2008-9 a graduate assistant at Northwestern University's Searle Center for Teaching Excellence; we produced annotated bibliographies of SoTL for public consumption. Several such topic-specific (but not discipline-specific) bibliographies are available on the Searle Center website: http://www.northwestern.edu/searle/resources/literature-on-teaching-and-learning.html#tab1

    The SoTL is exactly what it sounds like; research and theory of effective pedagogy. It can range from a thorough guide to planning and executing a course, to a paper reporting someone's success or failure in attempting a particular pedagogical technique, to an argument for or against co-teaching -- it's a wide umbrella.

    I found the literature I reviewed to be very helpful to me in planning and implementing my own (philosophy) courses. For me personally, I derive the most value from those pieces which describe innovative sorts of assignments, projects and assessment techniques. When troubleshooting a course (my students are not doing the reading, not engaged, etc) I find consulting general course planning guides to be helpful.

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  2. Having faculty spend some time on scholarship of teaching and learning was one of the chief recommendations of Ernest Boyer's 1990 work _Scholarship Reconsidered_.


    You might find some of these sources useful to get a sense of how some Universities describe and define this sort of scholarship:

    http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/cet/sotl_info.htm

    http://fod.msu.edu/OIR/Sotl/sotl.asp

    http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/cet/sotl.htm

    http://www.fctl.ucf.edu/researchandscholarship/sotl/

    A list of SoTL journals is here:

    http://www.fctl.ucf.edu/researchandscholarship/sotl/journals/index.php


    Finally, the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning's website is here:

    http://www.issotl.org/index.html

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