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| The
Culture We Have and the Culture We Want: A Commentary on Hugh Sockett's
Creating a Culture for the Scholarship of Teaching By Stephen Chew |
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| The
Culture We Have and the Culture We Want: A Commentary on Hugh Sockett's
Creating a Culture for the Scholarship of Teaching By Stephen Chew |
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© Copyright 2000 by Stephen Chew. The right to make additional exact
copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is
hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require
permission of the author. |
Introduction Hugh Sockett (2000) has made a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion about the scholarship of teaching and learning. His article provides an excellent synthesis of the basic ideas, and it identifies major obstacles in current academic culture that prevent broader acceptance of those ideas. Sockett describes the current academic culture and its ills as he sees it, and then describes the culture he would like to see, using the scholarship of teaching and learning to accomplish the transition. Sockett highlights several critical issues. First, he recognizes that the scholarship of teaching and learning is not about finding the single best method of teaching for all situations, it is about finding the best method for a particular discipline and a particular instructor in order to achieve a certain kind of learning among students. This is a more sophisticated model of teaching held by many in academia. A common assumption at many universities is that teaching is a set of generic skills that can be applied to any discipline, and that these generic skills are relatively easy to acquire compared to disciplinary knowledge. This assumption leads to the second-class status of teaching for professional advancement and a "one size fits all" approach to assessing teaching effectiveness. Sockett does a superb job of describing the current state of teacher evaluations, which lead to rationalizations about who gains promotions and raises (rather than a meaningful rationale) and which do not help to improve teaching.
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