The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: An Annotated Bibliography is a useful bibliography (as of 2002) coming out a movement from the “classic” report by Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate which identifies four types of scholarship from scholarship of discovery to scholarship of teaching. The bibliography works for me because it is annotated concisely and because they haven’t tried to include everything.
What’s also interesting is how “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” seems to be the catchphrase for treating an investigative approach to teaching as research – if teaching can’t beat research it should join it. Of course, a scholarly approach to teaching doesn’t mean good teaching … though it probably makes a difference.
For many in higher education, the most salient history begins with Scholarship Reconsidered, the 1990 report by Ernest Boyer, writing as president of The Carnegie Foundation. Boyer contends we must “move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader, more capacious meaning,” one that includes four distinct but interrelated dimensions: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. In thus staking a claim for the scholarship of teaching, Boyer seeks to bring greater recognition and reward to teaching, and is also suggesting that excellent teaching is marked by the same habits of mind that characterize other types of scholarly work (he does not sharply distinguish between excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching). Scholarship Reconsidered has given powerful momentum to a wave of reports and recommendations from both campuses and scholarly societies that share this agenda of bringing greater attention and recognition to teaching.
Boyer is also known for The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Bluepirnt for America’s Research Universities (1998). This report is built around ten recommendations:
- Make Research-Based Learning the Standard
- Construct an Inquiry-Based Freshman Year
- Build on the Freshman Foundation
- Remove Barriers to Interdisciplinary Education
- Link Communication Skills and Course Work
- Use Information Technology Creatively
- Culminate with a Capstone Experience
- Educate Graduate Students as Apprentice Teachers
- Change Faculty Reward Systems
- Cultivate a Sense of Community