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 The
Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?
Randy Bass (Georgetown University) |
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© Copyright 1998-99 by Randy Bass (bassr@gusun.georgetown.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. |
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We realized that if we could represent practice, then the possibilities for investigating and communicating about teaching and learning–by different communities–would be enhanced. Although others wanted to highlight our practice, what we needed to draw on was our knowledge of investigative practice, not our own evolving knowledge of practice itself. We understood this as a problem of representation and communication. How could the many complex layers of practice be represented? And how could practice be engaged and discussed by a wider range of people concerned with teaching and learning? ---Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Magdalene Lampert 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? Next Section: Definitions |