Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

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I should know about this, but I don’t. I should be well practiced in this, but I’m not. I’m an imposter in this field of scholarship, but I’m not an imposter in teaching and learning. So why is this feeling of inferiority resident in one area, but not the other?

I’m an educator by profession – I’ve been trained to teach, through my Faculty of Education experience and the multitude of courses I’ve take since then. When I taught in K-12 spaces, it was enough for me to be proficient in teaching and learning. Now that I teach and learn in a higher education context, there’s this other side of the coin that emphasized writing about and researching into the practice of teaching and learning. It’s not enough to do teaching and learning, but I also need to examine, reflect, and write about my teaching and learning.

For me, it’s a challenge, since the writing isn’t just a reflection – teachers do that all the time. It’s about deeper reflective practice and ‘double loop learning’ as explained by Donald Schon: Learning, Reflection and Change. It’s essential for me to engage in the reflective practice within this my teaching practice as a means of moving myself forward, at intermittent parts of a course, and deeper analysis after the project concludes. It’s about writing it down and sharing it out. In, on, and of are all part of the loops of learning, the mobius iterations of the work of teaching and learning.

In order to understand what I’m attempting to write, I’ve done a bit more research into SoTL work. I’ve located two recent references that are helping to shape my understanding, but also providing a frame of reference I may be able to use in my own SoTL writing.

As I continue to look at the design of my SoTL work, I’m not sure all the elements are in the right place or in the right sequence. I’ve shifted my thinking since there are so many element of my teaching that could become the focus for SoTL writing. It’s important to make the whole thing run smoothly from beginning to end. Course design is all about prototyping and iterating as it goes. My own course design depends on student feedback and comments -both formal in a feedback survey, and informal through comments in D2L and Slack.

To read more about my Scholarship of Teaching and Learning – it’s on my Extend Blog.

References

Leggett, Jason M.; Wen, Jay; and Chatman, Anthony (2018) “Emancipatory Learning, Open Educational Resources, Open Education, and Digital Critical Participatory Action Research,” Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Innovative Pedagogy: Vol. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/sotl_ip/vol1/iss1/4

Marquis, E., Holmes, T., Apostolou, K., Centea, D., Cockcroft, R., Knorr, K., Maclachlan, J. C., Monteiro, S. D., & Karamanis, T. (2017). SoTL Research Fellows: Collaborative Pathfinding through Uncertain Terrain.The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 8 (3). https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2017.3.9