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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)
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Section One: Definitions Two related challenges are implicit in this transformation. When Ball and Lampert ask above, "how could the many complex layers of practice be represented?" they are really asking two broad questions: what are some of the ways that we can investigate and analyze the complexities of teaching and learning? And, what are some of the ways that our investigations and analyses can be represented, communicated, and brought forward into professional conversation? These questions are at the core of the Carnegie project on the scholarship of teaching, and the culmination of nearly a decade of discussion that began with the 1990 publication of Scholarship Reconsidered (Boyer), and then refined later in Scholarship Reassessed (Glassick, Huber, Maeroff, 1997). Over this time, a "scholarship of teaching" has come to imply not merely the existence of a scholarly component in teaching, but a particular kind of activity, in which faculty engage, separate from the act of teaching, that can be considered scholarship itself. "For an activity to be designated as scholarship," argues Lee Shulman, the President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, "it should manifest at least three key characteristics: It should be public, susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one’s scholarly community." These are the core components of all forms of scholarship, and the features by which "scholarship properly communicated and critiqued serves as the building blocks for knowledge growth in a field" (5). But in order to apply this model to one’s
"teaching," or to think it even possible to produce a scholarship of teaching,
there first needs to be a fundamental shift in how one defines teaching as an activity and
thus as an object of investigation. As Shulman puts it, "Too often teaching is
identified only as the active interactions between teacher and students in a classroom
setting (or even a tutorial session). I would argue that teaching, like other forms of
scholarship, is an extended process that unfolds over time" (5). Shulman describes
that process as embodied by at least five elements: vision, design, interactions,
outcomes, and analysis. With these elements, the extended act of teaching becomes like the
extended act of traditional scholarship or research. It includes a broad vision of
disciplinary questions and methods; it includes the capacity to plan and design activities
that implement the vision; it includes the interactions that require particular skills and
result in both expected and unexpected results; it includes certain outcomes from that
complex process, and those outcomes necessitate some kind of analysis. Like scholarship,
teaching also involves what Daniel Bernstein calls a "transactional relation"
between teaching practice and student performance. "Indeed such a transactional
relation [between scholarly activity and the results of that activity] is a benchmark of
excellence in scholarly practice" (77). There is then a tight connection between the
shift to seeing teaching as an activity over time and a belief in the visibility and
viability of teaching problems that can be investigated as scholarship, and not
merely for the purpose of "fixing" them. Previous Section: Introduction |