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Personal Examples: Creative Scholarship
I, along with colleagues, have been involved in several creative activities related to the scholarship of teaching over the past five years. These creative teaching activities included a distance education course, a classroom visitation project, grants to enhance teaching effectiveness/ dissemination, and extensive use of the arts and humanities in the teaching of nursing.
Distance education course
In 1994, Dr. Sorrell (GMU nursing faculty) and I conceptualized the idea for the first distance education nursing course at GMU. In 1995, we were fortunate to be awarded $4,500 from the GMU Instructional Development Office to pursue this endeavor. Dr. Choi (GMU nursing faculty) also joined our team, along with staff from GMU's television studio, staff from Shenandoah University (the distance education site in Winchester, Virginia), and several guest speakers. The course offered via distance education was a 3-credit, 14-week, live and videotaped graduate course entitled "Seminar in the Ethics of Health Care." Of the 20 students in the course, 15 of them participated in the course in GMU's television studio and 5 of them participated via distance education in a properly equipped classroom at Shenandoah University.
Regarding the scholarship of teaching, the students and faculty involved had to learn new ways of preparing and teaching that were appropriate for the visual medium of television. Although the course was not without its occasional snags, several important positive outcomes related to the scholarship of teaching occurred: (a) Students and faculty found that, overall, the quality of instruction was better than in a non-televised course (due to well-preparedness and visuals); (b) students felt they had learned a valuable workforce skill by appearing on television and addressing not only their classmates but a regional cable audience; (c) the taped videos could be reviewed for evaluation of and reflection on one's teaching style; and (d) a publication on distance education teaching resulted from the course (Silva, Choi, & Sorrell, 1995).
Classroom visitation project
This scholarship of teaching opportunity funded by GMU's Zero Based Curriculum Project was spearheaded by Dr. Ehrlich (GMU physics and astronomy faculty). Its goal was to invite several good and highly experienced teachers from various disciplines within GMU to engage in peer evaluation of each other's teaching through classroom visitation. We then met as a group to assess and reflect upon each other's teaching. Each faculty's class was videotaped for those peer evaluators who could not attend every session, as well as for personal reflection.
I became a part of the project in 1995, along with six other colleagues who represented the disciplines of physics/astronomy, sociology, anthropology, history, chemistry, and social and organizational learning. Each of us took notes on the strengths and areas for improvement of the person teaching the class. (Of course, an explanation had to be given to students as to why six strangers suddenly appeared in their classroom!) An abbreviated example of notes I took during one classroom visitation follows:
Positives included a well-constructed syllabus, using a microphone (it was a large class), using handouts to highlight important points, asking thought-provoking questions, clarifying difficult theoretical material through use of two classroom experiments, and demonstrating a sense of humor.
Areas for improvement included lack of any feedback to students who gave incorrect responses to questions, too much material for time allowed, and not placing limits on late arriving students who disrupted the class by their lateness.
In the group discussions that followed, the group members were always respectful of the peer-reviewed person as they engaged with him or her about that persons teaching. The peer-reviewed person was genuinely appreciative of the feedback, especially when that person was unaware of a behavior. (For example, one member of the group tended to speak to only the left side of the classroom.) Invariably, the group discussions left peer-evaluation and took the form of reflection on pedagogy in general. The underlying assumption of this project was that "you can teach 'old dogs' new tricks" and both the assumption and the scholarship of teaching were upheld.
Grants to enhance teaching effectiveness/ dissemination
Doris Goldstein (who is Director of the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University) and I were co-principal investigators on two Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area grants (1995-1996 and 1997-1998) that focused primarily on cooperative curriculum planning in nursing ethics between George Mason University (GMU) and Georgetown University (GTU). These two grants exemplified the scholarship of teaching through interdisciplinary collaboration between two universities.
The 1995-1996 grant accomplished the following: (a) obtaining, indexing, and disseminating a current ethics syllabus collection for nurse educators in baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs throughout the United States, (b) conducting a content analysis of all syllabi received to discern national trends in the content included and the methods used to teach nursing ethics, (c) offering a live televised and videotaped conference about the syllabi collection and about the content analysis results, and (d) publishing the results of the project (Silva & Goldstein, 1997).
The 1997-1998 grant built upon and expanded the 1995-1996 grant by cooperatively constructing a web site that linked information about the Office of Health Care Ethics, Center for Health Policy and Ethics at GMU with information about the National Reference Center, Kennedy Institute of Ethics at GTU. Detailed information about this web site can be found at: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/chp/ethics.htm. The web site is a part of all nursing ethics course syllabi at GMU so that students can access it and learn from it. It has helped bring the scholarship of teaching into cyberspace and the 21st century.
Use of the arts and humanities in teaching
For most of my teaching career I have incorporated the arts and humanities into my teaching. I see this approach contributing to the scholarship of teaching by introducing or reintroducing a broad-based liberal arts focus into nursing. To illustrate how I have accomplished this goal, I will discuss the seminar course I taught during the fall semester of 1998, "Philosophical Bases of Inquiry." One of the textbooks used for the course is a philosophy book, and the first few seminars, which I teach, focus on the general nature of philosophy and how philosophy relates to nursing inquiry.
After these seminars are finished, the student seminars begin and are organized around the following philosophical topics: linguistics, epistemology, ontology, ethicalness/spirituality, and aesthetics. In linking nursing inquiry to the arts and humanities, students are encouraged to be creative and to think "out of the box." During the course, the students and I attended two Theater of the First Amendment Plays--Mating Cries by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller and Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. After attending the plays, we then made linkages to the course content.
We had three non-nursing guest speakers--a philosopher, an artistic director, and a Stanford-educated "true blue" scientist. The goal was for the students to "see" how professionals from other disciplines think and for the students to engage in dialogue with them about interdisciplinary inquiry. To enliven the seminars and enhance learning, students used a variety of readings from outside of nursing, including poetry by Shel Silverstein, books by Dr. Seuss, and articles in such journals and magazines as Science-Fiction Studies, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art, Philosophy Today, Architectural Record, Art Journal, and Newsweek.
The students also included video clips (e.g., The First World) and reproductions of art by Kollwitz, Buresova, Morisot, Picasso, Marisol (Beckerman, 1994), and Van Gogh. Those of us who had visited the National Gallery of Art's "Van Gogh's Van Goghs Exhibit" added additional insights to the discussions. The students and I also visited the GMU Johnson Center's art gallery where the dioramas of D. S. Baker and the painted wood carvings of G. Kachadourian were displayed under the title of "Theater of Dreams."
The arts and humanities were not studied in isolation but within the context of nursing and health care today. They were used to unburden nursing and nursing inquiry from its own routinized ontologies and epistemologies. In so doing, the students felt their intellectual and creative energies invigorated and expanded to new horizons. I submit that these internal changes in the students were an integral part of the scholarship of teaching.
Lesley
Smith, Managing Editor of
inventio Robert
Bernard, Assistant Editor
of inventio