Defending Our Life: How the
Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning Can Help Rescue an
Academy Under Siege
Jeffrey L. Bernstein
Department of Political Science
Eastern Michigan University
Keynote Address for the SOTL Academy Conference
Findlay, Ohio
May 18, 2015
The Academy Under Siege
• Increasing concerns about student
academic performance and engagement
• Liberal learning vs. vocational training
• Cost-to-value concerns about higher
education
• Research vs. teaching divide
• Future of the tenure track
SOTL as a Solution
We must make teaching:
• A pursuit of excellence
• An act of scholarship
• A relevant force for change
Why Should We Do
this Kind of Work?
The best reason to do this kind of
work is so that we can feed our
investigations of student learning
back into our teaching practices,
and into our students’ learning.
E-mail from a Student
IF POSSIBLE I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW THE
RESULTS OF THE ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT SIMULATION…
WAS IT BETTER TO HAVE THE PANEL
PICKED OR RANDOMLY SELECTED?
PLEASE E-MAIL ME BACK BEFORE 3 PM
E-mail from a Student
Dr. B, I’m writing my post-simulation paper
and I missed the last day. Can you tell
me if school prayer should be allowed?
Thanks.
Teaching vs. Learning
Lee Shulman on Scholarship
“For an activity to be designated as
scholarship, it should manifest at least
three characteristics: it should be
public, susceptible to critical review and
evaluation, and accessible for exchange
and use by other members of one’s
own scholarly community.”
Shulman 2000
Scholarship Reconsidered
Ernest Boyer (1990)
• The result of examining what faculty do
• The four scholarships:
– Discovery
– Integration
– Application
– Teaching
Scholarship Assessed
Glassick, Huber and Maeroff (1997)
• All forms of scholarship (including
teaching and learning) require:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Clear goals
Adequate preparation
Appropriate methods
Significant results
Effective presentation
Reflective critique
The Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning Starts with a Problem
In scholarship and research, having a "problem" is at the heart of the
investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions
around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s
teaching, a "problem" is something you don’t want to have, and if you
have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem
in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s
teaching would probably seem like an accusation. Changing the status of
the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing
investigation is precisely what the movement for a scholarship of teaching
is all about. How might we make the problematization of teaching a
matter of regular communal discourse? How might we think of teaching
practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be
investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated?
Bass (1998, p. 1, italics in original)
How Do We Make Our Teaching
More Inquiry-Based?
• Observation: Begin with what you see …
questions unanswered, problems perceived.
What’s going on?
• Inquiry and Evidence: Construct an
investigation into student learning. Look for
artifacts and examples of student learning.
How can you make sense of what you see?
• Go Public: Figure out how you want to share
what you have learned with the broader
community.
Beginning from a
Teaching Problem
What is a teaching problem (in Randy Bass’
sense) with which you are struggling?
• What works? What works better?
• What is it? What does it look like?
• A vision of the possible – what can be
done?
Adapted from Hutchings (2000)
Designing Your Inquiry
What types of evidence can you find?
• Student work – exams, papers
• Student journals or reflection papers
• The instructor’s own reflection – blogging?
• Videotaping or audio taping of class
activity
• Talking to and working with your students
A Progression of Teaching
Good teaching
Scholarly teaching
Scholarship of teaching and learning
McKinney (2004)
An Integrated Model
Stage 3:
Growth in
Scholarship of
Teaching
Stage 1:
Growth in Own
Teaching
Scholarship
of Teaching
&
Good
Teaching
Learning
Scholarly
Teaching
Stage 2:
Dialogue About Teaching & Learning
Why Should We Do
this Kind of Work?
I’ll repeat: The best reason to do this
kind of work is so that we can feed
our investigations of student
learning back into our teaching
practices, and into our students’
learning.
Unpacking the Reasons to be
Inquiry-Based Teachers
1. Disciplinary reasons
2. Institutional reasons
3. Personal reasons
SOTL in the Disciplines
“At the core of the entire project of a scholarship
of teaching and learning is the belief that
disciplinary thinking is crucial to learning.
Therefore, a central goal of this work is to define
as clearly as possible the kinds of thinking that
students typically have to do in each academic
field and to devise strategies for introducing
students to these mental operations as
effectively as possible.”
Pace 2004
SOTL in the Disciplines
“[B]y making visible the ‘invisible’ cognitive
work of historians, scholarship in historyspecific cognition creates a richer, more
nuanced picture of cognition than linear
lists of skills or general taxonomies of
thought.”
Bain 2000, p. 333
Bottlenecks
“places where significant numbers of
students are unable to grasp basic
concepts or successfully complete
important tasks.”
Díaz, Middendorf, Pace and Shopkow
(2008, p. 1211)
The Puzzle
• What does expert thinking look like?
• What does novice thinking look like?
• What can we learn from the way experts
approach the task (the bottlenecks) that can
inform how we teach our undergraduates?
The Think-Aloud Method
• Hearing thoughts as they occur
• Pull back the curtain – better view of
student work
• Valuable tool for understanding learning
and informing our teaching
Wineburg’s Think-Alouds
National Merit Scholars and history profs
No knowledge differences, but….
Dramatically different ways that experts and
novices approach the task:
Ordering
Sourcing
Arguing
A Typology of Bottlenecks
General Bottlenecks
•
•
Biases in sources
Links between sources
Issue-Specific Bottlenecks
•
•
•
Politics as a contact sport
Efficiency as the holy grail
Majority rules/minority rights
Unpacking the Reasons to be
Inquiry-Based Teachers
1. Disciplinary reasons
2. Institutional reasons
3. Personal reasons
Attaching Our Work
to Campus Conversations
Where do conversations about teaching and
learning take place on campus?
Assessment/Accreditation
General Education
Program Review
Recruitment/Retention
Tenure/Promotion
Commoditization of Higher Ed
How do we avoid our courses,
and our universities, being seen
merely as commodities?
- Craig Nelson
Unpacking the Reasons to be
Inquiry-Based Teachers
1. Disciplinary reasons
2. Institutional reasons
3. Personal reasons
Wisdom from Parker Palmer
“We teach who we are.”
So who am I? And what does that mean for my
teaching?
SOTL as a Lobbying Force
Lobbying:
• Getting people to change their minds
• Getting people to change what they value
We must become lobbyists for
teaching in higher education!
Why Should We Do
this Kind of Work?
One more time: The best reason to do
this kind of work is so that we can
feed our investigations of student
learning back into our teaching
practices, and into our students’
learning.
References
Arum, Richard and Josipa Roksa. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning
on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bain, Robert B. 2000. “Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape
History Instruction.” In Stearns, Peter N., Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg,
(editors). Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and
International Perspectives. New York: New York University Press.
Bass, Randy. 1999. “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?
Inventio, Volume 1, Number 1.
http://www.doit.gmu.edu/archives/feb98/randybass.htm
Bernstein, Jeffrey L. and Sarah M. Ginsberg. “Toward an Integrated Model of
the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and Faculty Development.”
Journal for Centers for Teaching and Learning 1: 57-72.
Bok, Derek. 2006. Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much
Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Boyer, Ernest L. 1990. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the
Professoriate. Princeton: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching.
More References
Díaz, Arlene, Joan Middendorf, David Pace and Leah Shopkow. 2008. “The
History Learning Project: A Department ‘Decodes’ Its Students.” The
Journal of American History 94 (4): 1211-1224.
Glassick, Charles E., Mary Taylor Huber and Gene I. Maeroff. 1997.
Scholarship Assessed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Huber, Mary Taylor and Pat Hutchings. 2005. The Advancement of Learning:
Building the Teaching Commons. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hacker, Andrew and Claudia Dreifus. 2010. Higher Education? How Colleges
Are Wasting Out Money and Failing Our Kids – and What We Can Do About
It. New York: St. Martin’s.
Hersh, Richard H. and John Merrow, eds. 2005. Declining by DegreesL Higher
Education at Risk: New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hutchings, Pat. 2000. “Introduction: Approaching the Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning.” In Hutchings, Pat (ed.) Opening Lines: Approaches to the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Menlo Park, CA: Carnegie
Publications.
More References
McKinney, Kathleen. 2004. “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Past
Lessons, Current Challenges, and Future Visions.” To Improve the Academy
22: 3-19.
Nathan, Rebekah. 2005. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by
Becoming a Student. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Pace, David. 2004. “The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” American Historical Review 109
(October): 1171-1192.
Shulman, Lee S. 2000. “From Minsk to Pinsk: Why a Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning.” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 1:4852.
Shulman, Lee S. 1993. “Teaching as Community Property: Putting an End to
Pedagogical Solitude.” Change 25: 6-7.
Smith, Michael B., Rebecca S. Nowacek and Jeffrey L. Bernstein, eds. 2010.
Citizenship Across the Curriculum. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wineburg, Sam. 2001. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting
the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Thank You!
Questions/comments/criticisms?
Jeffrey L. Bernstein
Department of Political Science
Eastern Michigan University
734-487-6970
jeffrey.bernstein@emich.edu