• Introduction
• Don't Reinvent the Wheel
• Make Teaching Public
• Good Teaching Scholarship is Hard
• References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Roy Rosenzweig (rrosenzw@gmu.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.

George Bernard Shaw's famous maxim--"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."--encapsulates the low esteem in which teaching is often held. For college faculty, there are plenty of other reminders. No other activity takes as much of our time and yet is as ill rewarded within institutions and professional disciplines. Allowing for various exceptions, few people receive tenure or raises based on their teaching. Even fewer are hired away to other jobs because of their teaching. Ask academics to name the best scholars in their discipline and you will get a long list. Ask them to name the best teachers outside their own university (as I have done), and they inevitably draw a blank.

Yet if teaching is not institutionally or professionally rewarded, there is plenty of evidence that--perhaps paradoxically--faculty care quite passionately about it. About five years ago, for example, the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal for professional historians of the United States, surveyed their readers about the practice of American history. Although the survey did not ask specifically about teaching, the importance that historians put on teaching ran through the survey--even though one would expect that readers of a scholarly journal would be biased toward scholarship. Thus, when asked  "What value or worth do you experience in doing history," about one-third mentioned teaching--more than any other activity in which historians engage. And many of the other highly regarded activities were ones that overlap with teaching (e.g., "communicating with the public"). "I am bold enough to say," wrote one of the survey's one thousand respondents, "that I believe in the importance of history and because I do I am convinced that what I do as a teacher is invaluable" (Sherry 1051).

"Teaching," offered another, "is just simply the greatest job in the world." The view of the historians parallels that of college faculty, in general, that teaching is both important and unrewarded. About ten years ago, a study by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute found that more than nine out of ten faculty thought that it was personally "essential or very important" for them to "be a good teacher." But less than one of ten reported that their institutions rewarded people for good teaching (Thelen 945).

Such responses make in themselves the case for a "scholarship of teaching." For surely if we think teaching is so important, then it is worth paying more attention to how it is done, how it works, and what good teaching looks lik--which is what I assume the scholarship of teaching is, in part, about. In addition, since reward structures are so firmly entrenched around what we call scholarship, then a "scholarship of teaching" would make it at least more likely that teaching was rewarded--whether in better pay or better job mobility.

If we can agree that a scholarship of teaching is worth pursuing or at least trying, then how do we begin? I would like in this very brief comment to offer two simple propositions and one caution about how we might proceed with the scholarship of teaching--at least in history, the discipline with which I am personally familiar. This is, of course, an enormous topic with much to be said (and by those better qualified than I am) but I offer these preliminary observations to contribute to the larger conversation.

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