I. Introduction: SOTL, SOITL, Site (Developed)
Faculty engaged in SOTL or the scholarship of teaching and learning “examine their own classroom practice, document what works, and share lessons learned in ways that others can build on.” We quote from the website of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, long deeply involved in SOTL initiatives, where one-time president Lee Shulman proffered a particularly well-known definition of this sort of scholarship as entailing “a public account 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.”
Most faculty doing scholarship of this sort are teaching in the discipline in which they received their degree, and their research into “their own classroom practice” is informed by the thinking of that discipline on questions worthy of consideration and methods of investigation which might yield reliable answers to those questions. Their SOTL work has what’s come to be called a “disciplinary style,” which is just as well, since that’s more likely to win respect from others in the discipline, especially others doing scholarship more traditionally defined who might still be among those (the thankfully declining number of those) who have reservations about the value of SOTL work of any kind.
Now that so many colleges and universities are offering students interdisciplinary courses and indeed whole interdisciplinary programs leading to interdisciplinary degrees (including advanced degrees) there’s a need for SOTL to include more SOITL, more of the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching and learning—not least because most faculty teaching in such courses, such programs, are not themselves the product of interdisciplinary training. Moreover, as Pauline Gagnon, member of the AIS Board of Directors (and former president) explains in the Introduction to the Peer-Reviewed Syllabi section of this AIS website, such faculty often “find themselves inventing their [interdisciplinary] courses in isolation,” “unaware of effective models of how to integrate insights from multiple disciplines in their course design, assessments, and pedagogy.” And this when integrating insights from multiple disciplines is at the very heart of interdisciplinary studies as it is at the very heart of much of the work that must be done in the real world once students have left their studies behind.
As Pauline Gagnon says, “the more [those of us involved in interdisciplinary studies] share ideas, the more we can build interdisciplinary practice that is informed by theory and interdisciplinary theory informed by practice.” And the better we can bring our growing understanding of interdisciplinarity to bear not just on our teaching but on our research into our teaching (and our students’ learning). We can be more intentional about our work and its integrative aims, and more effective in assessing and analyzing success and failure so we might have more success the next time around—as might those with whom we are sharing the “public account” of the work which is necessary if the work is to qualify as truly scholarly, as SOTL, and, more specifically, SOITL. It’s no wonder other members of the AIS Board have gone on record as agreeing that what’s needed is a “teaching commons,” defined by former member of the Board of Directors (and former president) Don Stowe as “a conceptual space where interdisciplinarians can exchange ideas about teaching and learning” as theorized and practiced in their courses and programs (“SOTL, Interdisciplinarity, and Assessment,” AIS conference presentation, Springfield, Illinois, 2008).
Of course, we should note that AIS has been providing just such a “teaching commons” for interdisciplinarians ever since it was founded in 1979, long before the scholarship of teaching and learning was identified as such (and christened SOTL-for-short). In the thirty-plus years since its founding, through its conferences, publications, and website, it has offered its members a “productive forum for the exchange of ideas concerning interdisciplinary and integrative issues.” The mission statement of the Association now specifically states its dedication to “the scholarship of interdisciplinary and integrative teaching and learning.” There’s been a concerted effort to include more SOITL presentations in conference programs, much enabled by the fact more and more members are proposing presentations of this sort. The Association journal, Issues in Integrative Studies, has always been a rich source of work that can be so characterized, and, again, at present, more and more such work is finding its way into the journal and into the Association newsletter, Integrative Pathways, as well. Still, it may be this website that has done, is doing, the most to help AIS create the community of interdisciplinary teacher/scholars Don Stowe has called for, the “teaching commons” of interdisciplinarians.
The section of the website devoted to Peer-reviewed Syllabi is itself a center for SOITL work, containing, as it does, not only “A Collection of Interdisciplinary Syllabi” and links to other sites established by those who’ve submitted the syllabi but also links to “Useful Resources on Course Design,” with full-text tutorials provided by AIS members with expertise in interdisciplinarity. The separate Resources section of the website is also full of information useful to those pursuing SOITL work, particularly the bibliography of “AIS-Connected Publications on Interdisciplinary Studies” and the set of links to sites devoted to interdisciplinary studies at universities and other centers of academic activity here in the states and abroad. The INTERDIS listserv has long allowed for “free exchange of ideas and information about topics of interest to interdisciplinary researchers, teachers, and students.” And the Facebook option now allows for “discussions” as well. Clearly, then, even before the creation of this section of the website specifically dedicated to all-things-SOTL-and-SOITL, the AIS site has provided a virtual “commons” for people doing scholarly work of this special sort.
Now, however, in this site-within-the-site, AIS can offer even more support to those involved in the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching and learning—and those who might like to be so—beginning with discussions of different aspects of this kind of scholarship (in its more general guise, as SOTL, and its more particular guise, as SOITL) and ending with lists of resource sites and resource materials (for both kinds of work), including links to the sites, of course, and to as many full-text versions of the bibliographical materials as possible. Though we have provided separate sections for sites and materials that do deal specifically with SOITL, we would urge interdisciplinarians to browse the SOTL sites and materials, as well, since they offer much that’s easily applicable to interdisciplinary work or, indeed, actually identified as such.
At any time, you may jump from the material in the fully developed discursive sections of the site (like that in this introduction) to the material in the more succinct or summarizing versions of those sections. The latter material offers an overview of points explained at greater length in the former, which also offers more references to relevant websites and electronic and print publications (and more links to those when possible). The Table of Contents will help you move through the material of the site in both its developed and succinct versions. You may also jump to the alternative version of any section you have read by clicking at the end of the section. Note, though, that the resource sections are available in full in both versions of this SOTL/SOITL site; there are no alternative versions of them.
II. SOTL Defined: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Developed)
In one of the best known and most succinct definitions of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, known as SOTL, Lee Shulman, long-time president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, now retired, said such scholarship
will entail a public account 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.
The Carnegie Foundation website in which this definition is recorded (www.carnegiefoundation.org) develops the concept further:
Most faculty care deeply about their teaching and their students’ learning; many today are trying new classroom approaches in the hopes of strengthening the learning of students from increasingly diverse backgrounds and levels of preparation. But much of this work is lost to the larger academic community because it is private, undocumented, and untested. To build useful, shared understandings about teaching, growing numbers of faculty are now bringing their knowledge, skills, and commitments as scholars to their classroom work.
The scholarship of teaching and learning invites faculty to examine their own classroom practice, document what works, and share lessons learned in ways that others can build on. Many campuses are now recognizing and rewarding such work, which is characterized by:
bulletA clear focus on student learning. The scholarship of teaching and learning is driven by questions about how to help all students develop deeper understandings, flexible abilities, and habits of mind and action needed in today’s world.
bulletA strong disciplinary foundation. Different fields bring different goals, methods, and questions to their work on teaching and learning. Many have redefined scholarship to include serious work on pedagogy and have long-standing communities that engage in such work.
bulletMultiple methods, both qualitative and quantitative. Scholars of teaching and learning employ interviews with students, comparative analysis of alternative sections of a course, questionnaires, “think aloud” protocols, close reading of student work, and other approaches suited to the purpose and discipline.
bulletPeer review. The scholarship of teaching and learning, like other kinds of scholarly work, will deliver on its promises only if critically reviewed by peers. Thus, it is important to make work on teaching and learning public and available for review in an array of scholarly forums and formats.
bulletSharing work across disciplines. The scholarship of teaching and learning is strengthened by exchange across disciplinary boundaries; . . . collaborative, cross-disciplinary work on teaching and learning is especially valuable in promoting the goals of undergraduate education.
In 1998, under the leadership of then-President Lee Shulman, who secured significant funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Carnegie Foundation joined with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) to create the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). As explained on the Foundation website, CASTL’s purpose was “to promote scholarly approaches to teaching and learning that 1) improve the learning of all students; 2) advance the profession and practice of teaching; and 3) bring to teaching the recognition and rewards afforded to other forms of scholarly work in higher education.”
To support faculty interested in scholarly approaches to teaching and learning, CASTL created three initiatives reflecting “the three ways in which faculty enter their professional world: as individuals, as members of a campus community, and as members of disciplinary groups.” The Pew Scholar Program offered fellowships to individuals “committed to inventing and sharing new conceptual models for undertaking and documenting teaching as a form of scholarly work.” The Campus Program recruited institutions which were themselves committed to a similar endeavor, assisting them with work on their own campuses and then with work in collaboration with other campuses. The Scholarly Society Program involved outreach to the various professional societies “that so powerfully shape faculty and academic life,” providing venues of many sorts for the presentation and critique of scholarly work, most often scholarly work of a traditional sort, based on research in one’s discipline, and not research in teaching one’s discipline, a situation the CASTL initiative hoped to address (and did).
III. Some SOTL History: Seminal Texts (Developed)
In 1990, Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching from 1979 until his death in 1995, published Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, a ground-breaking study of the state of academe based upon work the Foundation had done in the ’80s, confirming that “most professors spent most of their time teaching while believing they worked in an environment that valued research more highly.” What was ground-breaking was not that information, of course, but Boyer’s suggestion for addressing the situation by redefining scholarship to include work other than research meant to yield discovery in one’s discipline.
Boyer famously identified four kinds of scholarship deserving of recognition and reward: scholarships of discovery, integration, application, and teaching. He insisted that academics and their institutions needn’t choose between commitments to research and teaching since research into teaching could itself be seen (and valued) as “an intellectual act that contributed to the transformation of knowledge.” Those aware that “most professors spent most of their time teaching,” and aware, too, that most professors were doing that teaching without any expertise in teaching beyond that accumulated by trial and error, welcomed Boyer’s support for teaching and the scholarship of teaching. “Boyer’s reconceptualization had been brilliant; it offered a constructive way to think about teaching to institutions [and individuals] reluctant to diminish their research agendas. Politically astute in understanding higher education’s ethos, Boyer provided a window through which the learning reformers could climb.” (For an excellent discussion of Boyer and other “reformers” working to advance “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 1980-2000” see the article of that name from which we’ve quoted here; written by Marvin Lazerson, Ursula Wagener, and Nichole Shumanis and published in Change, Vol.32, No. 3, in 2000; it is available online.)
In 1997, as Lee Shulman assumed the presidency of the Carnegie Foundation, three Carnegie scholars published a follow-up to Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered, Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate. In it, Charles Glassick, Mary Huber, and Eugene Maeroff argued that all four of the forms of scholarship Boyer identified should and could meet the criteria long-since established as necessary for the scholarship of discovery (i.e., scholarship traditionally defined). Thus, they explained, the scholarship of teaching, properly done, would involve clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective critique (we are quoting). They also offered a more fully developed and carefully nuanced definition of the scholarship of teaching, including a helpful clarification of the difference between scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching.
Though their statements on that subject (like the whole of the study) are not available online, a Carnegie-sponsored essay on the same subject is (“The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments,” by Pat Hutchings and Lee Shulman, 1999). In a significant set of passages much quoted in the SOTL literature since, the authors begin with the obvious point that “all faculty have an obligation to teach well, to engage students, and to foster important forms of student learning.” They add that when such teaching “entails [as it now usually does entail] certain practices of classroom assessment and evidence gathering, when it is informed not only by the latest ideas in the field but by current ideas about teaching the field, when it invites peer collaboration and review, then that teaching might rightly be called scholarly.” But, as explained (in the definition of the scholarship of teaching we quoted earlier), “A scholarship of teaching will entail a public account of the full act of [scholarly] teaching . . . 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.” In short,
A scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching. It requires a kind of “going meta,” in which faculty frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning—the conditions under which it occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it, and so forth—and do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it . . . . It is the mechanism through which the profession of teaching itself advances, through which teaching can be something other than a seat-of-the-pants operation, with each of us out there making it up as we go. As such, the scholarship of teaching has the potential to serve all teachers—and students.
IV. A SOTL Commons: Teaching as Community Property (Developed)
By the time Lee Shulman became president of the Carnegie Foundation, he had already been addressing the need to improve teaching at all levels for many years, often making the point that those teaching at higher levels, in colleges and universities, were least likely to see their teaching as needing improvement and, should they somehow do so, most likely to seek improvement in unscholarly ways. Faculty with degrees in “the disciplines” tended to be unaware of the huge body of research into learning theory and pedagogical practice that had long since emerged from schools of education—or, if aware, uninterested, rather snobbishly convinced it couldn’t have much to offer them. And with the Centers for Teaching that have now appeared on most campuses not even a twinkle in most administrators’ eyes at that point, those who were concerned about their classroom performance (and that of their students) had little recourse but a colleague down the hall, if they could get past their shame about “having a problem” to approach a colleague at all.
No wonder such faculty (and indeed all those concerned about teaching and learning in higher education) were so taken with an article Shulman published in 1993, an article which has since been reprinted in a 2004 collection of his work bearing the same name, “Teaching as Community Property: Putting an End to Pedagogical Solitude.” In this foundational piece Shulman deplored that “’the way we treat teaching removes it from the community of scholars’” and called for “teaching’s reconnection to the disciplinary and professional communities in which faculty pursue their scholarly work—a change that would require faculty to document their pedagogical work and make it available to their peers.” “We must change the status of teaching from private to community property.” (We are quoting from a chapter called “Surveying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” in a 2005 Carnegie publication by Senior Scholars Mary Huber and Pat Hutchings, The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons. Though the book is not available online, the chapter is, in the Carnegie e-library, and we would recommend it highly.)
As must be apparent from the earlier description of the CASTL program Shulman created when he took over as president of the Carnegie Foundation, he was determined to devote his energies and expertise (and those of his colleagues) to creating just such a “community of scholars” as he had called for in 1993, scholars of teaching and learning who might work together to create the “teaching commons” Huber and Hutchings describe as “an emergent conceptual space for exchange . . . among faculty, students, administrators, and all others committed to learning as an essential activity of life in contemporary democratic society.” Other sorts of scholars have always enjoyed such a commons, and Huber and Hutchings argue that scholars doing research in teaching and learning should be able to do the same, for “without a functioning commons, it is hard for pedagogical knowledge to circulate, deepen through debate and critique, and inform the kinds of innovations so important in higher education today.”
One of the first participants in the community of scholars created by the CASTL program —and one of the most influential then (as ever since)—was Randy Bass. His work as a Pew Scholar yielded one of the best known articles on the scholarship of teaching and learning, published in 1999 in Inventio, a journal devoted to SOTL, published online. The first paragraph of “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem” has probably been quoted more often than any other passage in SOTL literature, perhaps because it so successfully shifts the perspective on “problems” in one’s teaching from subject for shame (suffered in “pedagogical solitude”) to opportunity for research (that might become valuable “community property”):
One telling measure of how differently teaching is regarded from traditional scholarship or research within the academy is what a difference it makes to have a “problem” in one versus the other. In scholarship and research, having a “problem” is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s teaching, a “problem” is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation. Changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing investigation is precisely what the movement for a scholarship of teaching is all about. How might we make the problematization of teaching a matter of regular communal discourse? How might we think of teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated?
Unsurprisingly, Bass quotes another of Shulman’s statements about the characteristics required to make such work on teaching as truly scholarly as other sorts of scholarship: “it should be public, susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one’s scholarly community,” by other members of the “teaching commons.”
V. SOTL Today: Achievements and Challenges (Developed)
Even in 2005, when Huber and Hutchings offered their survey of the SOTL scene in the aforementioned first chapter of The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons, “Surveying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” that commons had become enough of a reality to justify their assertion that “college teaching is beginning to look more like other professional fields, with a literature and communities that study and advance critical aspects of practice,” a change due in part to “a host of related developments [which] gave further momentum and substance to the [SOTL] concept. (We continue to quote from the Huber/Hutchings piece.)
Scholars of teaching and learning were able [and, finally, not only willing but eager] to draw on a long-standing literature on teacher knowledge . . . and on more recent research into the character of learning itself . . . . The assessment movement, and especially the phenomenon of classroom assessment, sharpened higher education’s focus on student learning and provided tools for faculty seeking to investigate the impact of their course designs and pedagogies on student learning . . . . An interest in course and teaching portfolios and other strategies for the peer review of teaching expanded the audience for teaching to include colleagues as well as students . . . . and . . . . on many campuses, [teaching and learning centers] provided programming and support for faculty reflecting on and sharing their teaching practice . . . .[often] explicitly embrac[ing] the agenda and language of the scholarship of teaching and learning, as [did] many of the scholarly and professional societies.
What was true in 2005 is even more true today, and it does seem as though work in SOTL has at last evolved sufficiently to enable some significant change in higher education itself, so long “distorted” by the “dominance of the research ethos” (with “research” defined in very traditional terms). In their article on “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 1980-2000,” cited earlier, Lazerson, Wagener, and Shumanis had come to the sad conclusion that all the efforts of reformers trying to improve teaching and learning had led to “precious little deeper reform,” since “teaching changes [had] not been tied to higher education’s incentive and reward system” and since “Research [again, traditionally defined] remain[ed] the primary avenue to individual and institutional prestige.” Given their further conclusion that “Changing this culture will be extraordinarily tough,” they didn’t feel they could predict “a genuine teaching-learning revolution” anytime soon. Changes in the culture have occurred, however, though in more evolutionary than revolutionary ways. And Huber and Hutchings must be pleased to observe that more and more individuals, institutions, and organizations are fulfilling the dream, accepting “that the scholarship of teaching and learning is an imperative for higher education today,” and one that offers challenges as “intellectually engaging, generative, and potentially consequential” as those of any other kind of scholarship could be.
True, Huber and Hutchings (and their colleague Anthony Ciccone) have recently reported the results of a survey of the extent to which SOTL initiatives might be considered deeply integrated into most of our academic institutions, a survey confirming we’ve got a ways to go before that is the case. But they’re able to cite plenty of evidence suggesting that we’ll “get there” in the end. (See their article “Getting There” in the January issue of the International Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl. And see a much expanded discussion of the subject in the book from Jossey-Bass which will be available in the fall of 2011, The Scholarship of Teaching Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact.)
Among the reasons for their optimism? The fact that support for those who would pursue the scholarship of teaching and learning already abounds. Splendid work has been done already—and splendid bibliographies of the articles and books that have made that work public have also been done already. Whole journals are now devoted to SOTL (done in this country and done elsewhere in the world, as well). Conferences devoted to SOTL abound, too, with more and more of those that aren’t nonetheless welcoming presentations in this burgeoning scholarly field. Moreover, much of this work is available in the virtual commons of the Internet so that it is, in that way too, as Shulman long ago suggested it should be if it were to be proper scholarship, “susceptible to critical review by [a] teacher’s professional peers, and amenable to productive employment in future work by members of [his or her] community.”
VI. SOITL Defined: The Scholarship of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning (Developed)
Unfortunately, relatively little of the SOTL work that has been done involves interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Some books have addressed the subject, certainly, like the 2002 collection of essays called Innovations in Interdisciplinary Teaching, edited by Carolyn Haynes in response to a proposal by the AIS Board of Directors (which she was serving as president) that she “ask noted experts in various innovative pedagogies . . . to integrate their current theories and practices with those advanced in interdisciplinary education” such that each chapter might combine “insights from each pedagogical approach and from the interdisciplinary scholarly literature.” The result was pioneering SOITL. And, of course, SOITL work has found its way into books, journals, and conferences devoted to SOTL-in-general or willing to welcome work of this sort, with some of the best to be found in other AIS-sponsored books, in the AIS journal, Issues in Integrative Studies, and in the presentations offered at the Association conferences over the many years.
Major thinkers and doers on the interdisciplinary scene and the AIS scene in particular—scholars like William Newell and Julie Thompson Klein—began doing SOTL work on interdisciplinary teaching and learning before the acronym and the buzz-phrase it represents had even come into being. It should come as no surprise that they’re doing such work still. The 2010 Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, which Klein helped to edit, contains a chapter on “Undergraduate General Education” (and the role of interdisciplinarity therein) written by Newell; it also contains a particularly informative chapter on “Interdisciplinary Pedagogies in Higher Education” by Deborah DeZure, a former member (and president) of the AIS Board of Directors with special expertise in SOITL.
Carnegie has promoted much SOITL work, through the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) and otherwise, earlier in collaboration with AAHE (the American Association for Higher Education) and later in collaboration with AAC&U (the American Association of Colleges and Universities), and a browse through the Carnegie-sponsored publications listed on the Foundation website—as available for purchase or, often, available for downloading—will reveal titles that clearly belong in the SOITL category. Browsing through the titles available in such series of monographs as The Academy in Transition (from AAC&U) and To Improve the Academy (from Jossey-Bass) will also reveal scholars reporting on interdisciplinary teaching and learning and attendant theory and practice. Of particular interest to interdisciplinarians (and perhaps especially those in the AIS constituency) is the substantial amount of work that has been done on so-called integrative learning and the kind of teaching that can yield this kind of learning, which most involved in higher education (and indeed all levels of education) now agree to be essential to the educational endeavor.
VII. Integrative Learning and SOITL (Developed)
In the public report that issued from the Integrative Learning Project, a three-year collaboration of the Carnegie Foundation and the AAC&U which began in 2004 and concluded in 2007, those involved asserted that “Breadth and depth of learning remain hallmarks of a quality liberal education,” but also asserted that “there’s a growing consensus that breadth and depth are not enough.” There is, they maintained, a crying need for something more: “Fostering students’ abilities to integrate learning—over time, across courses, and between academic, personal, and community life—is one of the most important goals and challenges of higher education.” And they cited a much quoted earlier statement by Carol Geary Schneider, president of the AAC&U, explaining that educators are “taking seriously the fragmentation of knowledge, not just in [their] courses, but through the knowledge explosion in the world around us” and adding that “Many of the most interesting educational innovations clearly are intended to teach students what we might call the new liberal art of integration.” (We are quoting from the report Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect, available in its entirety, along with excellent discussions of relevant work on curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and faculty development, on the Carnegie website, in their downloadable e-library material.) Interim reports by Pew Scholars who worked on integrative learning are available online, too, in the dedicated issue of Peer Review which came out in the spring of 2005.
It should be noted that the Integrative Learning Project did not focus attention on interdisciplinary means to the end of integrative learning though they did acknowledge that “interdisciplinary study is perhaps the most familiar” of the many means to that end. However, another major project on integrative learning, undertaken by faculty from the Harvard Graduate School of Education under the aegis of co-investigators Veronica Boix Mansilla and Howard Gardner in 2000 and ongoing a decade later, has focused on interdisciplinary studies and skills and understanding. Called the Interdisciplinary Studies Project, in fact, it has been examining “the intellectual, organizational, and pedagogical qualities of interdisciplinary work as it takes place in exemplary expert institutions, collegiate and pre-collegiate educational programs.” (We are quoting from the website.) The years of work with educators nationwide have enabled them to “establish preliminary parameters for a pedagogy of interdisciplinarity” and for effective means of assessing the results of such pedagogy. They have succeeded in doing what the best SOTL work—and the best SOITL work—should do, making the results of their scholarly efforts available as “usable knowledge about how to teach for interdisciplinary understanding, assess student outcomes, and support professional development.”
As this photo from the 2010 AIS Conference in San Diego suggests, the annual conferences of the Association provide a splendid opportunity for interdisciplinarians “to exchange ideas about teaching and learning” in a “commons” experience that is more than merely virtual; there’s nothing like face-to-face conversation for sharing best theory and best practice in the burgeoning field of SOITL scholarship.
VIII. A SOITL Commons: Sharing Pedagogical Work (Developed)
Wonderful and useful as the SOITL work we’ve mentioned earlier on this site has been (as has work we haven’t mentioned, including some exciting work that’s being done abroad) interdisciplinarians still can’t lay claim to a robust commons for scholars doing research on teaching and learning in this field in particular. Even as recently as two years ago, in the very year when AIS Board member Allen Repko published Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, one of the best examples of a SOITL text there’s ever been, Don Stowe, another member (and former president) of the Board of Directors, felt he had to devote his conference presentation to a plea for a full-fledged teaching commons, “a conceptual space where interdisciplinarians can exchange ideas about teaching and learning” (“SOTL, Interdisciplinarity, and Assessment,” AIS conference presentation, Springfield, Illinois, 2008). He suggested AIS publications and conferences might do more to create such a SOITL commons. And he suggested such a commons might take virtual form with the help of the AIS website, too.
We have heard Don’s plea, and we are beginning to act upon it (as multiple members of the Board of Directors have in fact been desirous of doing for many years). For one thing, we have committed to a regular column on all things SOITL in Integrative Pathways, the AIS newsletter, a column for which Board member Gretchen Schulz will sometimes provide, sometimes solicit contributions. And we should also mention that AIS member Lorraine Marshall has agreed to handle a column on IDS initiatives in her native Australia and elsewhere abroad (the first of which she wrote for the October 2010 issue). Gretchen Schulz was also able to organize a panel devoted to SOITL for the October 2010 San Diego conference, (wo)manned by scholars supremely well qualified to address the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching and learning: Mary Huber, Senior Scholar Emerita of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Veronica Boix Mansilla, Principal Investigator of the Interdisciplinary Studies Project at Harvard University; and Colleen Tremonte of Michigan State University, an expert in interdisciplinary theory and pedagogy who is currently directing a new initiative in SOTL and graduate education: the Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Teaching Fellowship Program. We plan to offer panels devoted to SOITL at future conferences, as well.
The section of the AIS Website devoted to Peer-reviewed Syllabi is itself a center for SOITL work, containing, as it does, not only “A Collection of Interdisciplinary Syllabi” and links to other sites established by those who’ve submitted the syllabi but also links to “Useful Resources on Course Design,” with full-text tutorials provided by AIS members with expertise in interdisciplinarity. The separate Resources section of the website is also full of information useful to those pursuing SOITL work, particularly the bibliography of “AIS-Connected Publications on Interdisciplinary Studies” and the set of links to sites devoted to interdisciplinary studies at universities and other centers of academic activity here in the states and abroad. The INTERDIS listserv has long allowed for “free exchange of ideas and information about topics of interest to interdisciplinary researchers, teachers, and students.” And the Facebook option allows for “discussions” as well.
In these ways, even before the creation of this section of the website specifically dedicated to all-things-SOTL-and-SOITL, the AIS site has provided a virtual commons for people doing scholarly work of this special sort. Now, with this site-within-the-site, we intend to offer still more support to those involved in the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching and learning—and those who might like to be so. Here you will find not only discussion of different aspects of this kind of scholarship (in its more general guise, as SOTL, and its more particular guise, as SOITL) provided in both succinct, summarized versions and longer, developed versions, but also lists of resource sites and resource materials (for both kinds of work), including links to the sites, of course, and to as many full-text versions of the bibliographical materials as possible. Though we have provided separate sections for sites and materials that deal specifically with SOITL, we would urge interdisciplinarians to browse the SOTL sites and materials as well since they offer much that’s easily applicable to interdisciplinary work or, indeed, actually identified as such.
Those who would offer suggestions on the material we’re making available through this SOITL site should contact its editor, Gretchen Schulz, at [email protected]. And we would note, too, and again, that those wishing to discuss SOITL-related subjects may do so through our INTERDIS and Facebook options for discussion, thereby helping to create the commons for academics involved in the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching and learning that AIS sees as necessary to the thriving of our mutual endeavor.
IX. SOTL Resources: Websites and Publications
Click SOTL Resources to access the section, which is the same for both the succinct and developed versions.
X. SOITL Resources: Websites and Publications
Click SOITL Resources to access the section, which is the same for both the succinct and developed versions.
XI. Contact Information
The editor of this site on SOTL and SOITL is Gretchen Schulz, Professor of English at Oxford College of Emory University and Director of Organizational Development on the AIS Board of Directors. Those with questions, comments, and suggestions about the site may contact her at [email protected].
