adapted from a position paper prepared for the conference planning committee by Ronald Smith

(Click here for a related HKU paper)

he scholarship of teaching and learning is an idea that grows out of the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and their 1990 report Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate and the 1997 follow-up publication Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate. Teaching as scholarly work and the scholarship of teaching were proposed as part of a challenge to current conceptions about research: the suggestion was that we should replace the research/teaching dichotomy with a fourfold classification of scholarship (scholarship of discovery, of integration, of application, and of teaching).

In 1998, the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning was launched as a multi-year project to support the development of a scholarship of teaching and learning that would:

• foster significant long-lasting learning for students,
• enhance the practice and profession of teaching, and
• bring to faculty members' work as teachers the recognition and reward afforded other forms of scholarly work in higher education.

good teaching, scholarly teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning

Good teaching — engages students and fosters significant long lasting learning. While learning can occur without the benefit of teaching, teaching has no other purpose than to enable learning. All faculty members have the obligation to teach well. Good teaching is clearly necessary, worthwhile and valuable in its own right. It needs to be developed, recognized and rewarded.

Scholarly teaching — requires teachers and their teaching to be informed not only by the latest ideas in their field, but also by the latest ideas about student learning and teaching in their field. Scholarly teachers are aware of teaching alternatives and able to choose appropriately for the students in their classes. They engage in classroom assessment and evidence gathering, and are critical and reflective of their own practice.

“Teaching is not simply a matter of method and technique but of selecting, organizing, and transforming one's field so that it can be engaged and understood at a deep level by students. [These] are acts of intellectual invention. [Our teaching] enacts the way we think about and pursue our fields of study.” (Shulman, 1998)

The scholarship of teaching and learning — adds to the above the three central features of being public (“community property”), open to critique and evaluation, and in a form that others can build upon.

“A scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching. Fully done, it requires faculty to 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 to do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it.” (Hutchings and Shulman, 1999)

“[All forms of scholarship] are acts of mind or spirit that have been made public in some manner, have been subjected to peer review by members of one's intellectual or professional community, and can be cited, refuted, built upon, and shared among members of that community [and provide] the building block[s] for knowledge growth in a field. Through the scholarship of teaching, therefore, we seek to render teaching public, subject to critical evaluation, and useable by others in the same community.” (Shulman, 1998)

Accordingly, Faculty need to inquire into their practice as teachers and:

• “to go public with their findings,
• to receive the kind of peer review that interrogates their methods and conclusions, and
• to change their teaching and their scholarly investigations of teaching based on that review.”
  (Cambridge, 2000)

Purpose of teaching:

To foster deep and lasting learning

Purpose of scholarly teaching:

To improve the quality of learning that our teaching makes possible both inside and outside the classroom

Purpose of the scholarship of teaching:

To enhance the practice and profession
To bring scholarly recognition & reward

The key ideas in the Carnegie approach to the scholarship of teaching and learning include:

• That there is good teaching, innovation and experimentation happening in higher education, but because we have tended to make teaching a “private? matter, there are too few opportunities for colleagues to learn from each other.
• That we need to develop ways to make teaching more public in ways that allow it to be reviewed and critiqued and available to be used and built upon by others.

objectives of the conference

• sharing the work that is going on — making it public, subject to review and available to be built upon, and
• discussing the implications and implementation of the scholarship of teaching and learning in Hong Kong

It is more than just a celebration of all the good work that is happening in Hong Kong. It is an opportunity for the higher education community to discuss how to move forward in this area, to identify what we do well and what we need to do better.

The conference will focus on these areas:

• Providing opportunities for colleagues to share their teaching innovations, experiments and inquiry projects with each other. This would include TDG and QEF project work, together with case studies/demonstrations by teachers and their students of innovations in teaching and learning in Hong Kong.
• Opportunities for teachers and students to identify areas that need further attention.
• Opportunities for all conference participants to participate in a conversation about the scholarship of teaching and learning in Hong Kong by addressing such issues as: What is it? What encourages/discourages it? How might we move forward?

campus conversations

In Hong Kong we have seen significant funding of teaching development work of many kinds, as well as teaching and learning conferences.

Are these contributing to the creation of a community of scholars whose work will advance the profession of teaching and deepen student learning?

Let's begin a conversation within the higher education community in Hong Kong and on each of our campuses with a view to:

• Developing a community of scholars whose work will:
  • deepen the learning of our students, and
  • advance the profession of teaching.

To what extent do our campuses cultivate the conditions that enable the kind of inquiry and action that support the scholarship of teaching and learning? In what ways? What needs to change?

The scholarship of teaching entails:

• problem-posing about an issue of teaching or learning,
• study of the problem through methods appropriate to the disciplinary epistemologies,
• application of the results to practice,
• communication of the results,
• self-reflection, and
• peer review
  (Carnegie's working definition)

Some questions for academics in Hong Kong to consider:

• Does our campus have a pervasive question about the quality and character of teaching and learning that could be addressed through the scholarship of teaching and learning?
• Does our campus have a generally agreed upon definition that helps faculty form and characterize their work?
• What are the differences between excellence in teaching, scholarly teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning?
• In what ways can the scholarship of teaching draw on the methods in a field and in what ways can it be made accessible across disciplines?
• How are the outcomes of this scholarship communicated? Locally? Beyond our campus?
• Where on our campus is the scholarship of teaching currently done? In what departments? By whom? How extensively?
• Do hiring and orienting practices locate and support faculty members committed to the scholarship of teaching and learning? How?
• Are faculty members rewarded for doing the scholarship of teaching? Why or why not? How?
• How does our campus culture affirm the scholarship of teaching and learning? What specific steps could be taken to sustain these conditions?
• How does our campus culture discourage the scholarship of teaching and learning? What specific steps could be taken to improve these conditions?