inventio
creative thinking about learning and teaching
February 2000, Issue 1, Volume 2 In this IssuePast IssuesAbout inventioEditorial Board
 
Creating a Culture for the Scholarship of Teaching
By Hugh Sockett

 

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@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.

 Introduction
We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old "teaching versus research" debate and give the familiar and honorable term "scholarship" a broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work. Surely, scholarship means engaging in original research. But the work of the scholar also means stepping back from one's investigation, looking for connections, building bridges between theory and practice, and communicating one's knowledge effectively to students (Boyer, p. 16). 
I address in this paper connected obstacles in the "culture and infrastructure" to the productive ideas coming from the literature on the scholarship of teaching. These are: 
a) the context of public discourse on teaching 
b) the gap between student expectations and faculty ideals 
c) the development of a language of the scholarship of teaching. 
It is important, first, however, to outline these ideas and the contemporary initiatives being taken. Throughout the paper, I am taking George Mason University (GMU), a state university in Northern Virginia, as my reference point.

The scholarship of teaching was initially defined as communicating one's knowledge effectively to students. It took its place in the 1990 Carnegie Special Report Scholarship Reconsidered alongside the scholarship(s) of discovery, integration and application as defining the priorities of the professoriate. "When defined as scholarship," the Report says briefly, "…teaching both educates and entices future scholars for...Teaching is the highest form of understanding" (Boyer, p.23). Five main characteristics are then identified, which cover three central themes: how teachers create a common ground of intellectual commitment, what teachers do as learners transforming and extending scholarship, and how they deliver honest and intelligible accounts of new knowledge.