 |
||
 |
||
    |
||
 The
Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?Randy Bass |
||
© 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. |
|
Section Six: It takes a deliberate act to look at teaching from the perspective of learning. Actually, it takes a set of acts--individually motivated and communally validated--to focus on questions and problems, gather data, interpret and share results. The range of questions may take many different forms. The nature of the data may be quantitative or qualitative; it may be based on interviews, formative assessment instruments, test performances, student evaluations, or peer review, or any combination by which the "multiples of evidence" may be obtained. The nature of the scholarly design could vary from tracking three students of ranging abilities from the beginning of the semester to the end, to studying group dynamics in videotape of student collaborative work, to comparing and contrasting content analysis of student written work across semesters. The object of analysis may range from the acquisition of basic skills to the development of personal values or the transformation of whole knowledge paradigms. As with scholarship or research, you cannot investigate everything at once. Indeed it may be that you can’t investigate more than one question at a time. What matters most is for teachers to investigate the problems that matter most to them. In this way, a scholarship of teaching does not imply a new set of elaborate accountability procedures tied onto the luggage rack of every teaching vehicle. The movement for a scholarship of teaching seeks first and foremost to legitimate a new set of questions as intellectual problems. Arriving there, the discourse surrounding the scholarship of teaching can begin to chart what is yet uncharted terrain, a landscape that will feature the convergence of disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical practice, evidence of learning, and theories of learning and cognition. Ultimately, it will be a discourse based on disciplinary protocols of investigative practice calibrated to the idioms of particular campus and institutional cultures. I agree with Diana Laurillard's claim in her book, Rethinking University Teaching, that "teaching is not a normative science" (8). It can be done effectively or ineffectively. It can always be done better. But the widely held presumption that it can be done right, or that it need only be done competently, has strangulated the development of teaching as an intellectual enterprise and analytic subject. Laurillard puts it this way: The academic system must change. It works to some extent, but not well enough. And as higher education expands we cannot always rely on human ingenuity to overcome its inadequacies. It is always possible to defend the inspirational lecturer, the importance of academic individuality, the value of pressuring students to work independently, but we cannot defend a mode of operation that actively undermines a professional approach to teaching. Teachers need to know more than just their subject. They need to know the ways it can come to be understood, the ways it can be misunderstood, what counts as understanding: they need to know how individuals experience the subject. But they are neither required nor enabled to know these things. (6) Enabling teachers not only "to know these
things" but to share them in serious ways is what a scholarship of teaching is about.
Ultimately, the measure of success for the scholarship of teaching movement will not be
the degree to which it can--by focusing on the "many layers of practice" at the
heart of teaching --discover solutions worth implementing, but the extent to which
it is successful in discovering problems worth pursuing. Next Section: References |