© 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.

The Scholarship of Teaching

More recently Hutchings and Shulman (1999) have elaborated on developments arising from their summer 1999 work with visiting scholars in CASTL. First, they press a distinction between excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching. Unlike excellent teaching, and like research in general, scholarship has the three features of:

a) being public "community property"
b) being open to critique and evaluation
c) in a form others can build on

The public account delivered, unnecessary for excellent teaching, will be "of some or all of the full act of teaching -- vision, design, enactment, outcomes and analysis -- in a manner susceptible to critical review by the teacher's professional peers and amenable to productive employment in future work by members of that same community…focusing especially on the character and depth of student learning" (p. 13).

Not all faculty will engage in this scholarship, but all can learn from it. It is long-haul and high-risk in terms of conventional norms. It faces problems of credibility, they conclude, and a need to be open to different methods of inquiry, including investigating the process of inquiry itself. It is capable of representation in multiple genres, not merely published papers. Finally, it faces problems of sustainability through a culture and an infrastructure needed to foster it.

Next Section: "The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching"

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Creating a Culture for the Scholarship of Teaching By Hugh Sockett