Teaching is such an important and consuming activity that many academics find themselves drawn to research the triumphs and challenges they encounter. The systematic examination of higher education is referred to as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and the practitioners of SoTL come from all of the different research traditions.
Studies of people engaging in SoTL reveal they experience “ontological and epistemological transformations”, finding themselves to be novices in the field of the SoTL, encountering “scholarship” and “engaging effectively with education theory” as threshold concepts, and forming a new identity as a SoTL practitioner through incremental change and reflection (Webb and Tierney, 2020).
A project sponsored by the Council of Australasian University Leaders in Learning and Teaching (CAULLT) is examining the experiences of academic educators to determine the commonalities and distinctions in the experience of transition to SoTL and to capture (personal and institutional) factors that prevent the transition from occurring. The goal is to identify institutional responses to support the transition and enable academic staff to engage in quality SoTL that supports the education and research mandate.
If you have participated in SoTL please share your experiences with the team through a brief survey.
For more information about what participation entails, visit the survey information page.
May 2022
Kim Blackmore, Associate Professor, School of Cybernetics
References:
Andrea S. Webb & Anne M. Tierney (2020) Investigating support for scholarship of teaching and learning; We need SoTL educational leaders, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 57:5, 613-624, DOI: 10.1080/14703297.2019.1635905