A growing number of faculty members participate in the scholarship of teaching and learning, or SoTL. In this episode, Janice Miller-Young and Nancy Chick join us to discuss a new open educational resource designed to assist faculty interested in pursuing SoTL research.
Janice is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a past Academic Director at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta. Nancy Chick is the director of the Endeavor Foundation Center for Faculty Development at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Nancy had also served as a Professor of English within the University of Wisconsin System, where she codirected the Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program for all of the system’s 26 campuses. Janice and Nancy have both published extensively on the scholarship of teaching and learning and have each co-authored influential books on SoTL methodologies and signature pedagogies.
Show Notes
- Yeo, M., Miller-Young, J., & Manarin, K. (2023). SoTL research methodologies: A guide to conceptualizing and conducting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Taylor & Francis.
- Chick, N. L. (Ed.). (2023). SoTL in action: Illuminating critical moments of practice. Taylor & Francis.
- Haynie, A., Chick, N. L., & Gurung, R. A. (2023). Signature pedagogies in the liberal arts and beyond. In Exploring more signature pedagogies (pp. 1-11). Routledge.
- Chick, N. L., Haynie, A., & Gurung, R. (2012). Exploring more signature pedagogies: Approaches to teaching disciplinary habits of the mind.
- Miller-Young, Janice and Nancy Chick (2024). Becoming A SoTL Scholar. Elon University Center for Engaged Learning.
- Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton University Press, 3175 Princeton Pike, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648.
- Löfgreen, J. (2023). Navigating between Scylla and Charybdis: SoTL as its own kind of inquiry. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 11.
- Bunnell, S. L., Chick, N., Hamilton, M., Leoni, A. S., & Woolmer, C. (2024). Generations of SoTL scholars: Transferable lessons and new possibilities. Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal, 17(1).
- Jessie Moore
- International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
- Bernstein, D. (2013). How SoTL-active faculty members can be cosmopolitan assets to an institution. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 1(1), 35-40.
Transcript
John: A growing number of faculty members participate in the scholarship of teaching and learning, or SoTL. In this episode, we discuss a new open educational resource designed to assist faculty interested in pursuing SoTL research.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guests today are: Janice Miller-Young and Nancy Chick. Janice is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a past Academic Director at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta. Nancy Chick is the director of the Endeavor Foundation Center for Faculty Development at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Nancy had also served as a Professor of English within the University of Wisconsin System, where she codirected the Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program for all of the system’s 26 campuses. Janice and Nancy have both published extensively on the scholarship of teaching and learning and have each co-authored influential books on SoTL methodologies and signature pedagogies. Welcome Janice and welcome back, Nancy.
Janice: Thank you.
Nancy: Welcome. Thank you.
John: Today’s teas are:… Janice, are you drinking any tea?
Janice: I am. It’s my favorite flavor by Stash. It’s called licorice spice.
John: Very nice.
Rebecca: I think that might be the debut on the podcast. I don’t think we’ve had that one yet.
John: I have had it, but I haven’t had it on the podcast.
Rebecca: I think so.
John: It’s very nice. And Nancy, are you drinking tea?
Nancy: I am drinking some iced tea. I’m in Florida, so there’s no way I’m going to be drinking hot tea. So some good southern sweet tea.
John: Very nice.
Rebecca: I just have some awake tea this afternoon, John.
John: …and I have an oolong tea today.
Rebecca: We have invited here today to discuss Becoming a SoTL Scholar, your most recent co-edited book on the scholarship of teaching and learning research, which was released this summer as an open educational resource in the open access book series in Elon University Center for Engaged learning. Before we discuss the book, though, could you tell us a little bit about how you became interested in SoTL research?
Janice: So I started my post-secondary career at a teaching-focused institution, Mount Royal University, in Calgary, Canada, and I was teaching engineering courses, because I’m an engineer, and some of them were very physics based. And it so happened that at the time I started, there was already a lot of disciplinary based educational research happening in both physics and engineering. So naturally, I started reading it as I was starting to teach, and I got started presenting about my teaching shortly after that. It was, as I said, a teaching-focused institution, so that was considered quite a normal thing to do. I didn’t do any formal inquiry into my teaching and learning until a few years later, when Mount Royal started supporting the SoTL Scholars Program.
Nancy: I got started in SoTL back in the 90s, when I was a graduate student. I was at the University of Georgia, shout out Bulldogs, and I was part of a graduate student organization of Teaching Award winners. There were, I think, 30 of us from across campus, none from the same departments, and we would gather, I think it was monthly, to talk about teaching and to read about teaching. And that program really got me through graduate school and whetted my appetite for what I wanted to do as a faculty member, what I wanted to focus on. Later, when I became a faculty member in Wisconsin, I found out that what we were talking about was SoTL, and so when I was on the tenure track in Wisconsin, I tried to take every faculty development program, every SoTL program, I tried to read everything, and I just knew that that’s the research and that’s the community that I wanted to be a part of. And I’ve never left. They can’t get rid of me.
John: That’s a wonderful experience, but I don’t think that’s typical of the past that most graduate students have. Most graduate programs focus on training students to do research and not to prepare for a career in teaching, even though most faculty end up at institutions where teaching is a primary responsibility. Why don’t graduate programs provide more preparation for research related to the scholarship of teaching and learning?
Janice: That’s a tough question. [LAUGHTER] I could make a stab at it. I don’t think that’s true of all programs. I know that the program we have at the University of Alberta does touch on the scholarship of teaching and learning a little bit towards the end of the program that we have for training graduate students related to teaching and learning, I think it’s a lot to ask of a graduate student to learn all of those different things. They’re learning to be a researcher in their discipline. Hopefully they’re learning about teaching and learning a little bit, at least, through either having some teaching assistant experiences or a formal program that a university might have. I think if they’re at least exposed to the idea of scholarship of teaching and learning, that would be a great start. And I know that some are, but again, I think it’s a lot to expect of a graduate student, to learn all those different things. I don’t know. What do you think, Nancy?
Nancy: Yeah, I think historically, certainly, the focus of graduate education was on doing your disciplinary research, like you said, partially, if they’re lucky, learning more about teaching and learning, but thinking of SoTL as an area of research, as an actual field… that I think is more emerging, and so I’m not sure that it would occur to graduate programs that this is an area of research that people could do, maybe that people could read, but not necessarily that they could do. However, I will say, in our book, we’re seeing that that may be shifting gradually and in very small ways. But we have one author, for example, who started out her career, actually, as an undergraduate student, knowing that this is what she wanted to do. She got a Master’s, she just defended her dissertation, and is now in a position, I think, at the University of Rhode Island. So gradually, I think that might be opening up, especially now that we have at least one example in the US, and I suspect, more and more in other countries.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how your book came to be and maybe how you selected some of the contributors to the project?
Janice: I guess, selfishly, it was the topic that I was very interested in. I would call myself a mid-career SoTL scholar, I suppose. I have enough experience now that I feel like I can be the senior person on a project and mentor others into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. It took me a long time to get to that place, I have to say. But now that I’m here, I was interested in literature about the next stage of a SoTL career, specifically, and I didn’t really see very much in the literature about that. And so I wanted to pull together the literature that I already knew existed about the identity of SoTL scholars, and also contribute to that topic by putting out a call for others to contribute to the book.
Nancy: And I have the good fortune of being in a position where wonderful people occasionally call on me to come along for the ride. And Janice and I have worked together some in the past, and she just asked if I wanted to come play with her on this project. So I was happy to do so, but it really was Janice’s idea, a real sense of curiosity of what this would look like in different careers and career stages. So really, hat tip to Janice for the project. Janice, how did you pick the authors?
Janice: Well, we put out a call through several listservs and through our networks for people to make proposals for the book. And I think we accepted everybody that we thought fit within the vision of the book, and that was very broad. We did get some applications that we didn’t accept, and not because they weren’t good applications, it’s just they weren’t really about becoming a SoTL scholar in any way. They were maybe about supporting SoTL scholars, for example, and so anything that fit within that broad vision, we accepted and then put together the sections of the book as a result of what we received.
Nancy: And I think an interesting part that ended up playing out really well was how the proposals that really matched this vision did align with different phases of a career. We could have gotten all kind of mid- career folks, or all early folks, or all very experienced folks, and we got people all along the spectrum. I know we were hoping for more contributions from other countries, from around the world, that we kind of acknowledge in the introduction as a bit of a gap, but it’s what we had to work with. So perhaps someone else will follow up and add a more international perspective.
Rebecca: Yeah, that would be nice to see.
John: So in that introductory chapter that the two of you authored, you described the growth of SoTL work over a little more than 30 years or so since Boyer suggested the need for this type of research, and you address some of the controversies associated with that, and one of the issues that came up is the diversity of approaches that are being used in SoTL. Could you talk a little bit about the diversity, and also to what extent different disciplines have standardized on a particular methodology, and to what extent is there more diversity in some academic disciplines.
Nancy: I’d say one of the conversations, sometimes debates and controversies, in SoTL, from the very beginning, has been the nature of disciplines within the multidisciplinary field of SoTL. We don’t often work with people in other disciplines in our regular work. So when So TL brings together people from the arts, from the sciences, from the social sciences, from the humanities, from the professions, students, inevitably, there’s going to be some disagreement about what this thing is supposed to look like. Sometimes that disagreement resolves in the sense of, “Ah, it’s a diverse field,” and sometimes it ends up with some voices saying, “No, no, good SoTL, good research, looks like x, y and z, and inevitably, that kind of list excludes some of the many approaches that are in the field. Just one example, on a recent thread on a very popular listserv here in the US, there’s a conversation about the gold standard for SoTL being multiple institutions, because that’s the only way you can create generalizable findings. Now that’s a very disciplinary approach that doesn’t apply across all disciplines, and so to say that that’s a gold standard for So TL immediately knocks some of us out of the conversation. So I think there’s a constant effort to remind that in this field, there are diverse approaches. There are many approaches. Even within some of those singular approaches, there may not be consensus on what it’s supposed to look like. And importantly, in So TL, that’s not a bad thing, that diversity means we’re asking a bunch of different questions, drawing on a bunch of different kinds of evidence, artifacts, data, using many approaches to generate knowledge, but it’s a constant tending to that diversity.
Janice: Yeah, sometimes I get frustrated that we’re still having this conversation. I’m sure Nancy would agree with that. If this is a practice that is done by faculty and instructors from across higher education, then SoTL, by definition, has to be inclusive of their different ways of doing research or scholarship, whichever word you choose to use. There is a recent paper in teaching and learning inquiry by Jennifer Löfgreen, and she makes the argument that we really need to start thinking in terms of paradigms of approaches to inquiry, and move away from talking about disciplinary approaches, because for fields that are so diverse, paradigms are one way that we can communicate to each other what are our basic assumptions about the thing that we are researching, and I really like that paper.
Rebecca: So we start digging into your book a little bit. The sequence of chapters in the book is organized by career trajectory. Can you talk a little bit about each of these sections?
Janice: Well, as Nancy said earlier, we organized the book according to the trajectory of careers. So our first section is really meant to speak to both students and early career faculty who are interested in starting to pursue a SoTL career. Our next section is directed more towards people who have experience in academia, maybe have been teaching for quite a while, but they’re wanting to shift their career towards a SoTL agenda. And our third section is about starting to maintain that engagement once one has started in the field, so ways to continue or even enhance participation or one’s own scholarship. And then our final section is just a couple of chapters, and it’s exploring how we’re never really quite there. We’re always still becoming a SoTL scholar. We’re still in the process of exploring our identity and changing our identity as we do this work and learning new things.
Nancy: Well, it dovetails with a project that I was part of a little later in the book project, this was led by Sarah Bonnell, who’s now at Elon, but she led a project of a group of us thinking about SoTL generations. And in the resulting article, we break it down into… oh gosh, I forget, three or four generations, but starting with the people early on who were kind of well- established faculty members, and then turned to SoTL. But over time, people have entered SoTL earlier and earlier in their careers, and so now we’re at a stage where there are multiple generations, and where, even in this moment, people across those generations are coming to SoTL for the first time. So that idea of the trajectory of the career phase and the particular moment when we enter, I think, will always be relevant, because for many it’s not where we start. And so that idea of coming early, coming mid- course, coming later, I think, will always be relevant, which is one of the strengths, I think, of the structure of the book.
John: In addition to the sequential structure over the course of a career, you also provide alternative organization schemas to allow readers to choose different ways of navigating the book. Could you briefly describe these alternative classification schemes?
Janice: Those came about through… it was sort of my idea, but also prompted by Jesse Moore, who suggested that we could kind of make this book into a choose your own adventure, in a way, because it does speak to people across different stages of a career trajectory. And so, I guess that got me thinking in terms of the diversity of types of scholarship of teaching and learning that exist, and how that can also be confusing for folks who are new to the field. And so I wanted a way to communicate that. And I think because of my own sort of positivistic disciplinary background, I like to categorize things, so I thought that might be useful for others as well. And so we came up with three broad categories in which we label each of the chapters. So we label them by what they’re about. Some are specifically a SoTL inquiry, but some are more definitions of the field and that sort of thing, so that was one of the categories. We labeled them according to the context that they are about. Some are written about universities, and some are about polytechnics, for example, and some are about scholars from different disciplines. So that’s the second category. And the third category, which I like the most, actually, is different genres of SoTL. And again, the first genre would be a report on a research project, but that was one of six different categories that we came up with, actually. We had conceptual articles, scholarly essays, reflective essays, narrative essays, and one graphical essay…
Nancy: ….which was one of your chapters.
Janice: Yes.
Nancy: …very visual, kind of getting us a glimpse into how you think about SoTL, but represented visually, a real innovative chapter. Recently, someone reached out to me because he’s going to be leading a faculty book group using Becoming a SoTL Scholar, and acknowledged that maybe some of the faculty didn’t have time to read the whole book, and so was just looking for a little guidance on what we might say to a faculty member who wants to talk about the book but just really only has time to read a handful or so of chapters. What might that guidance look like? And so I just suggested, and this is just one way to think about it, I suggested maybe pick a couple of chapters that resonate with you because they’re from your disciplinary identity, or your career stage, or a familiar genre, and then pick a couple that seem very unfamiliar for the same reasons, and that kind of takes us back to that earlier point about the diversity of the field. The sooner we can get folks to engage with that diversity and recognize it and see across it, I think the stronger the field will come. So I’m hoping that that book group follows that idea and circles back to see how it went.
Janice: That’s a great suggestion. I like that.
Rebecca: One of the things that often comes up in conversations about the scholarship of teaching and learning is that it’s not necessarily always valued across all institutions or even within all departments inside of the same institution. So what advice would you give to faculty who are interested in starting a SoTL career, but trying to navigate these differences within their own institution, or as they’re maybe thinking about pursuing a career and finding an institution to land at?
Janice: I think I would have two pieces of advice. And one would be, start small, try a small project to begin with, get your feet wet. There’s always something you didn’t expect when you’re collecting and analyzing data. I know that’s one particular approach to SoTL inquiry. I sound very researchy when I say that, and I don’t want to exclude other disciplines where maybe collecting data isn’t really quite the right term, but anyhow, I think start small. Do a small project, you’d have to start reading the literature as a result of doing a project, because if you’re going to disseminate, you want to place your findings within an existing scholarly conversation. My second piece of advice would be to also think about kinds of research questions that would have an impact beyond your own practice. I think if you want to do this kind of work as a scholarly career, then investigating questions within your own practice is certainly important for improving your own teaching. But there are other questions that might be beyond your own practice that could result in a greater impact on your colleagues, for example, or even on the field itself. And so thinking in terms of where you want to make an impact and how is also important.
Nancy: And I think that piece of advice also connects with one way to think about the value of doing SoTL and the safety of doing SoTL, depending on where you are in your career. If there are particular initiatives or issues that your institution is wrestling with or promoting, prioritizing, that might be one way to get a little more support on your campus if you’re connecting with something that’s important to your institution. The piece of advice that I would give, in addition to Janice’s points, is to find someone to connect with beyond your institution. I got involved with this work originally because of the people I was interacting with, and how that enriched me and made me a better everything. And I think for those who want to get involved with SoTL and are at institutions that may not value it, or may not know enough about it, may not know how to count it towards tenure and promotion, connecting with someone who’s been doing this work for a while can help enormously. Because, as you mentioned, this conversation has always been happening because it’s not disciplinary research. So we’re always trying to figure out how to help SoTL scholars convey what the work is, what its value is, why it should be counted, and there are so many of us out here who love to connect with newer scholars. I was going to say younger, but that’s not true, because it could be any part of the career. But there are lots of people out here who have been through it, or who have helped others go through it, connecting with the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. That’s the professional organization devoted to this kind of work. And members, board members, committee members, interest group members, lots of people within that organization can offer help.
John: Pretty much all academic disciplines have some people who are working in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and most national meetings or international meetings will have some sessions on that which might be a good place. And then, as you mentioned, all these interdisciplinary groups or conferences could also work quite nicely in forming those connections as well as listservs. So yeah, that could be helpful in providing this sort of support network, which might not always be available on the campus.
Nancy: And just to agree, SoTL is indeed a field. SoTL is indeed a practice. SoTL is also a community, or communities, so kind of keeping that in mind and tapping into the one or ones that are most accessible to you or interesting or you already have a connection, definitely.
Rebecca: So we talked a little bit about where we can make connections if we’re interested in doing SoTL, especially beyond our campus, in terms of conferences, etc. And we talked a little bit about navigating some of those things and maybe building a little bit of administrative support for some SoTL research, but maybe we can push on that just a little bit further. You talked about picking up on some topics that are already being discussed on campus as potential topics to do some sort of research on. Are there other strategies that we might be able to encourage our colleagues to use to build administrative support for SoTL research on our campuses, if it’s not something that there’s a culture of already on our campus,
Nancy: One thing that comes to mind for me is a 2013 article by Dan Bernstein in the inaugural issue of Teaching and Learning Inquiry. I forget the full name, but I think it’s something like SoTL active faculty as institutional assets. And his whole argument in that article is that many faculty on their campuses are focused on the campus. They’re teaching what he calls local topics, whereas SoTL-active faculty are connected to their classes, their campuses, but as Janice alluded to earlier, t hey’re also connected to the literature on teaching and learning and to broader communities, and so they can act as conduits or liaisons between the evidence-based research, between what’s happening at other institutions and their own campuses. So that kind of asset can be helpful, but that’s just, I think, one kind of example.
John: In many disciplines, for centuries, faculty were teaching in pretty much the same way, without really much regard to what we’ve learned about teaching and learning. But during the pandemic, those things stopped being feasible, and faculty were suddenly exposed to evidence-based teaching practices that came out of SoTL research. I know there’s been some backsliding since we’ve moved out of the pandemic, into moving back to some of those old practices, but do you think faculty are more willing to take into account SoTL research, and perhaps, might that lead to more recognition of the value of that research on campuses?
Janice: That’s an Interesting question. I know in my discipline, faculty tend to listen to or be influenced by educational research that’s happening in their own context, like in their own discipline. So certainly there is an awareness of that research, and, like I said, a willingness to listen to it, if it is from a similar context. And I guess that’s another important reason why we need the diversity of the scholarship of teaching and learning. I don’t know if you could say that about all disciplines, but certainly in engineering, that’s the case.
Nancy: And I think after the pandemic, and of course, we always have to qualify after… [LAUGHTER] When will we be able to stop having to qualify after the pandemic? In the wake of the pandemic, I think faculty everywhere have been shaken by what they learned about students, what they learned about teaching, what they learned about technology, everything, and I think that sense of everything familiar is no longer familiar, and students, especially the generation or generations coming out of the pandemic, are so dramatically different in important ways, that I think many faculty are grasping for help for: “What do I do? How do I teach these students that are so different from the students that I had before the pandemic?” Now, those faculty will reach to different places, their teaching and learning centers, their colleagues, nowhere. Some will reach out to the SoTL literature, or colleagues who know SoTL, because they’ll make that connection to how much they value research-based knowledge. It’s always going to be a challenge, but I do think right now, there’s so much grasping for “what do I do? How do I do this better? How do I do this?” …that it’s a real, I don’t want to say opportunity, but it’s a real moment where I think SoTL is having a more recognized value among faculty who otherwise would never consider even looking to any of those kinds of publications.
Rebecca: Feels like a really good tee up to the question we always wrap up with, which is: “What’s next?”
Janice: Well, one thing is, I’m interested in understanding the Canadian context a little bit, so I’ve been proposing, with a couple of colleagues, a project looking at the different institutions and the kinds of support they have for SoTL across Canada. You said, for example, that most graduate programs don’t have SoTL built into them. I don’t know if that’s entirely true anymore or not. I’d like to get some evidence of that. I’m interested in the transformation that occurs when someone starts to do and continues to do the scholarship of teaching and learning. I’m interested in what is the process of learning, what is effectively another discipline, or learning to do research in a new field. As I said, I think there’s been a lot of literature about getting started in SoTL, and not as much on the more experienced faculty members. So I’m hoping to do some research in that area as well.
Rebecca: Sounds exciting.
Nancy: And what’s next for me? Yes, I have to go shortly have dinner with our President. But one thing I’ve been talking about a lot, and then I’m deeply interested in, and that I just want to put out there so that if anyone else is interested, they connect with me. I’m very interested in how, again, in the wake of the pandemic, the struggle, the difficulty, the challenges of learning that are necessary to learning may have become pathologized in some ways that make it even harder for faculty to teach difficulty, to encourage and support students to stick with the struggles, the challenges of learning and doing hard things in classes. I’m hearing a lot of faculty talk about this phenomenon, and I think we need to figure out what to do about it, because we know that that kind of struggle, that kind of this doesn’t feel good, or this is frustrating, is a necessary part of learning that we don’t want written out or smoothed out. So that’s where I’m going next.
Janice: Interesting.
John: Those are things we hear about all the time from faculty here, too, and I just came from a class where I had that sort of conversation with students about learning is work, and there are shortcuts you can use, but they’re not going to be very helpful for you once you get past the end of the term. And it was a productive conversation, but we’ll see what sort of impact it has. But that’s a good topic for some SoTL research. Thank you very much for joining us, and thank you for providing this wonderful resource, and we’ll include links to this and anything you mentioned in the show notes as well.
Nancy: Wonderful. Thank you for having us.
Janice: Thank you.
Nancy: It’s good to see you.
Janice: It’s good to see you, too.
Rebecca: Thank you so much.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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