Scholarship of Teaching Working Group

During the 1998-99 academic year, a handful of faculty explored, amongst other things, the structures, policies, and practices on Xavier's campus that support or inhibit the scholarship of teaching. Concomitant with these discussions were efforts by an ad hoc university committee to review and recommend criteria for promotion and tenure. The faculty approved the final draft of the committee's recommendations in spring 2000. The following is an excerpt from the recommendations:

Scholarship

Scholarship is here defined as a process that generally includes, in various modes according to disciplines, the definition of a problem, the formulation of a hypothesis, and the choice of a methodology, its end the creation of a product that advances evaluation and review to "publication," or making one's knowledge. This progression from discovery through peer scholarship public, takes many forms, including: traditional research (where articles and conference papers "make public" the results of inquiry); the creative output of the fine arts (where performance, art work, and text "make public" outcomes of different forms of investigation); and the Scholarship of Teaching, here defined as making public, in conference presentation or pedagogical journal, for example, results from studying a problem about an issue of teaching or learning through methods consistent with disciplinary epistemologies, with the end of enhancing student learning.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of the discussion in 1998-99 was recognition of the need to provide an infrastructure for the scholarship of teaching that, in principle, models the infrastructure provided for traditional scholarship. The faculty group identified the following as necessary components of this infrastructure:

models for designing and conducting classroom research;
a community of faculty meeting regularly to discuss the scholarly work they are doing;
release time or stipends for those faculty who wish to conduct research on teaching and learning;
information on teaching journals and their publication guidelines; and
information on opportunities to give papers on teaching at conferences and symposia.

The Center for the Advancement of Teaching invites all university faculty members to participate in the Scholarship of Teaching Working Group (SOTWG) whose aim is to implement the above mentioned recommendations. Stipends ($500 per semester) and release time (for spring 2001) for the 2000-2001 academic year are available to faculty.

Dr. Barbara Green, Assistant Professor of Biology and a member of the 1998-99 faculty discussion group, will coordinate the efforts of the SOTWG during the 2000-2001 academic year.

If you are interested in participating in this project, please contact Dr. Todd Stanislav via e-mail or ext. 7512.

Funded faculty must submit progress and final reports that will be posted on the Center's website.

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