Pat Hutchings

Placing Theory in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

As the scholarship of teaching and learning matures as a field, the place of theory has garnered growing attention. Educational research and the learning sciences can certainly contribute, but professors who view their classrooms as sites for inquiry draw from a wide range and variety of theoretical foundations. With their diverse efforts in view, we ask: Which (and whose) theories are most relevant? What is the role of theory in different (disciplinary and other) contexts? How can scholarship of teaching and learning both build on and contribute to theory that improves classroom practice and student learning? Our argument is that theoretical pluralism can help keep the scholarship of teaching and learning movement vital and open.

Building the Teaching Commons

ISSN: 0009-1383 (Print) 1939-9146 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vchn20 Building the Teaching Commons Mary Taylor Huber & Pat Hutchings To cite this article: Mary Taylor Huber & Pat Hutchings (2006) Building the Teaching Commons, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38:3, 24-31, DOI: 10.3200/CHNG.38.3.24-31 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.3200/CHNG.38.3.24-31

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: An Annotated Bibliography

We compiled this bibliography to acknowledge the work that CASTL builds on, and to locate this new effort in the longer trajectory of related developments. It has two sections. The first, a definitional one, includes significant statements about the idea of the scholarship of teaching and learning, drawn from various traditions that contribute to its evolving conception. The second section points readers to resources that may assist them in performing the scholarship of teaching and learning.

From Departmental to Disciplinary Assessment: Deepening Faculty Engagement

Change • September/October 2011 Pat Hutchings (hutchings@carnegiefoundation.org) is a senior associate with The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she previously served as vice president and senior scholar. She has written and spoken widely on student outcomes assessment, integrative learning, the peer review of teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her most recent book is The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact (2011), with co-authors Mary Taylor Huber and Anthony Ciccone. Prior to joining Carnegie, she was a senior staff member at the American Association for Higher Education. From 1978–1987 she was a faculty member and chair of the English department at Alverno College.

Designing Effective Classroom Assignments: Intellectual Work Worth Sharing.

In fall 2013, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) launched an ambitious effort to build an online library of assignments designed, used, and peer reviewed by faculty from a range of disciplines and institutional types. The design of assignments is one of the most creative and consequential tasks that faculty undertake in their work as teachers, calling on their knowledge of the field, their understanding of how students learn, and their expert judgment about the kinds of tasks that help students strengthen that learning while also providing evidence of it. But such work is often invisible and insufficiently supported.

Editorial: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the Humanities: The Place — and Problem — of Theory

What i s th e p lac e of th e ory in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)? And what does ‘theory’ mean, especially when the question concerns the humanities? This special issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education is dedicated to exploring key conceptions of theory that are emerging in work by humanists as they study their own classroom pedagogy. At stake, we suggest, are the capacity for other instructors to evaluate, learn from, and improve upon classroom-based pedagogical work in the humanities; the potential of the humanities to contribute to interdisciplinary collaborations in the scholarship of teaching and learning; and the power of pedagogical reflection in the humanities to improve the conditions in which students learn. The impetus for this collection, described in our introductory article, was a sharp rebuke to the whole SoTL movement delivered by a higher education specialist to 700 assembled participants at the 2006 annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.Audience members were accused of some combination of bad faith and shoddy practice for presuming to conduct pedagogical inquiry without sufficient knowledge of or reference to the theoretical armature of education and other learning science fields. While few in the room would have denied the value of this body of work, many scholars – perhaps especially in the humanities – have a different view of theory and its role in pedagogical inquiry and reflection. Instead of understanding theory as a ‘foundation level of “generic” education Wissenschaft’ (as AHHE editor Jan Parker has aptly called it), the scholarship of teaching and learning has always carried with it a more situated view of ‘theory,’ as emerging from, engaging with, connecting to, and underwriting wide-rangingly different disciplinary styles of inquiry and interpretation.