Perspectives column by Randy Bass: The scholarship of teaching: What's the problem?
One telling measure of how differently teaching is regarded from traditional scholarship or research within the academy is what a difference it makes to have a “problem” in one versus the other. 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 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?
Definitions
Two related challenges are implicit in this transformation. … [First,] what are some of the ways that we can investigate and analyze the complexities of teaching and learning? And, what are some ways that our investigations and analyses can be represented, communicated, and brought forward into professional conversation?
These questions are at the core of the Carnegie project on the scholarship of teaching … Over time, “scholarship of teaching” has come to imply not merely the existence of a scholarly component in teaching, but a particular kind of activity, in which faculty engage, separate from the act of teaching, that can be considered scholarship itself. “For an activity to be designated as scholarship,” argues Lee Shulman, the President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “it should manifest at least three key characteristics: It should be public, susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one’s scholarly community.” These are core components of scholarship, and the features by which “scholarship properly communicated and critiqued serves as the building blocks for knowledge growth in a field” (5).
To apply this model to teaching, or to think it even possible to produce a scholarship of teaching, there first needs to be a fundamental shift in how one defines teaching as activity and object of investigation. As Shulman puts it, “Too often teaching is identified only as the active interactions between teacher and students in a classroom setting (or even a tutorial session). I would argue that teaching, like other forms of scholarship, is an extended process that unfolds over time” (5). Shulman describes that process as embodied vision, design, interactions, outcomes, and analysis. With these elements, the extended act of teaching becomes like the extended act of traditional scholarship or research. It includes a broad vision of disciplinary questions and methods; it includes the capacity to plan and design activities that implement the vision; it includes the interactions that require particular skills and result in both expected and unexpected results; it includes certain outcomes from that complex process, and those outcomes necessitate some kind of analysis. Like scholarship, teaching also involves what Daniel Bernstein calls a “transactional relation” between teaching practice and student performance. “Indeed such a transactional relation [between scholarly activity and the results of that activity] is a benchmark of excellence in scholarly practice” (77). There is then a tight connection between the shift to seeing teaching as an activity over time and a belief in the visibility and viability of teaching problems that can be investigated as scholarship, not merely for the purpose of “fixing” them.
A Problem I Could Live With
My own engagement with the scholarship of teaching followed a similar trajectory from seeing my teaching as a problem (or failure) to seeing in my teaching a set of problems worth pursuing as an ongoing intellectual focus. As with many people, my heightened attention to teaching was occasioned by a crisis. Three years ago, after introducing a number of experimental electronic literacy components into my courses, my teaching evaluations plummeted. I now know that this is not too uncommon when teachers significantly revise their teaching, especially involving educational technology. As little solace as that fact is now, it probably would have meant even less to me at the time, occurring as it did the year prior to tenure. This was particularly perilous in my case, as I had dedicated my whole career to new technologies in the humanities, including the subject of technology and pedagogy. A failed semester proposed to deconstruct my entire portfolio. I felt an acute pressure to reconstruct my courses and teaching methods one element at a time, and to justify, track, and evaluate each component of that reconstruction.
Over the next year and a half I revised some courses and created others from the ground up … In this process of reflection and redesign, I resolved to make every course component intentional. I tried to articulate for myself the reasoning behind every aspect of the course, especially the connections between technology and discipline-based pedagogy. In doing so, I found myself asking questions about student learning I had never asked before. For a decade I had had good success as a teacher: positive feedback, strong evaluations, evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) that students learned something in my courses.
Yet, I now realized I knew very little about why certain students did better than others. Or, more generally, I knew very little about how students came to know the material I was teaching. Ever since graduate school I had taught mostly the way I had been taught, and tended to replicate the pedagogies that worked best—quite frankly—on me (or slight variations of me). Now that I was trying to change my teaching radically, those naturalized teaching methods and the assumptions behind them were exposed to be without any clear scaffolding or support by the evidence of learning, however sound or useful some of the approaches were. …
My journey that had begun with a crisis had progressed to a problem, in fact a set of problems. The ending had become a new beginning where the broad set of questions that had been raised in the process of rethinking my courses were now coming into focus as clear lines of inquiry that I wanted to investigate over the next several years. My objectives in this investigation do not replace my interest in teaching well (and better), and to make each semester’s experience for students worthwhile; but I also want to look at a set of questions over time, both for my own professional development and as a contribution to the scholarship of teaching in my field.
Against the Grain
It takes a deliberate act to look at teaching from the perspective of learning. Actually, it takes a set of acts—individually motivated and communally validated—to focus on questions and problems, gather data, interpret and share results. The range of questions may take many different forms. Data may be quantitative or qualitative, based on interviews, formative assessment instruments, test performances, student evaluations, peer review, or any combination … The scholarly design could vary from tracking three students of ranging abilities from the beginning of the semester to the end, to studying group dynamics in videotape of student collaborative work, to comparing and contrasting content analysis of student written work across semesters. The object of analysis may range from acquisition of basic skills to development of personal values or transformation of whole knowledge paradigms. …
Ultimately, the measure of success for the scholarship of teaching will not be the degree to which it can … discover solutions worth implementing, but the extent to which it discovers problems worth pursuing.
—Excerpt from Inventio, Feb. 1999
Bernstein, Daniel. “Putting the Focus on Student Learning.” The Course Portfolio: How Faculty Can Examine Their Teaching to Advance Practice and Improve Student Learning. 77-83.
Shulman, Lee. “Course Anatomy: The Dissection and Analysis of Knowledge Through Teaching.” The Course Portfolio: How Faculty Can Examine Their Teaching to Advance Practice and Improve Student Learning. 5-12.
