• Introduction
• Don't Reinvent the Wheel
• Make Teaching Public
• Good Teaching Scholarship is Hard
• References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Roy Rosenzweig (rrosenzw@gmu.edu)   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.

Section Two:
Make Teaching Public

As Lee Shulman has rightly observed, one of the key characteristics of scholarship is that it must be "public" and hence susceptible to critical review by others within a scholarly community. A few years ago, a friend at another university who had just completed a semester of co-teaching with one of her colleagues remarked that "now that we know what goes on in the bedroom" (and this was before we knew quite as much as we know now) the "last frontier of privacy is the classroom." She suggested that we know remarkably little about what our colleagues (particularly our senior colleagues) do in the classroom, and we would be shocked in some cases to find out. Thus, I would argue that one of the simplest and most important first steps we can take toward creating a scholarship of teaching (and improving teaching) is to make our teaching more public.

Fortuitously, the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web has made that much simpler than it once was. Two summers ago, I helped run a workshop on teaching with technology. We started with an exercise in which people examined on-line syllabi for the U.S. History survey course. The point of the exercise was to raise questions and offer ideas about the use of on-line technology; yet, most people wanted to talk about the content of the syllabi—why was this person organizing his course in this or that boneheaded way. Although this wasn’t my goal, it did strike me the sudden appearance of thousands of syllabi online had opened up at least a window into classrooms around the country and the world.

Once that syllabus infrastructure is in place, we can move to a second and slightly more ambitious (and more valuable) stage--asking people to explain, justify, and reflect upon their pedagogic and curricular decisions. That is what we have done (borrowing an idea from Randy Bass's Crossroads project) on the Web Site that we have organized for teachers of the U.S. History Survey course: "History Matters" at  http://historymatters.gmu.edu.

We have begun to ask faculty from around the country (and soon the world) to post their course syllabi and then annotate them with comments on why they structure things in particular ways, give particular assignments, or how their approaches have been received. Indeed, in general, one key goal of the site has been to making teaching public, from posting successful course assignments to publishing interviews with "great history teachers."

Such publicity offers a possible answer to a question that I get repeatedly asked when I attend meetings on academic technology--"what is the reward for faculty who experiment with new technology?" It seems to me that the problem--implicit in the question's suggestion that there isn't any reward--has nothing to do with technology. The real problem is that most faculty work with technology is about teaching, and teaching is not rewarded. And, in fact, technology actually makes it more likely that teaching will be rewarded because it is teaching work that is almost intrinsically public.

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