Visible Knowledge Project || July 2004 Newsletter

EMERGING ISSUES

VKP in Progress: Challenges and Innovation
by Mark Sample

In the June newsletter we outlined some of the general themes gleaned from the VKP in Progress faculty interviews we conducted last fall. We saw that involvement with a teaching and learning project impacted VKP participants in five main ways. Through their research projects faculty are:

rethinking technology and its contexts;
restructuring their professional practices;
redefining their scholarly practices;
building knowledge through collaboration; and finally,
negotiating the costs of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

In preparation for the upcoming summer institute, we’d like to highlight more findings from the dozen interviews that illustrate the ways faculty meet the challenges of integrating innovation into their teaching practices. In a few instances we will couple these anecdotal findings with supporting data from the VKP faculty survey, taken by over fifty VKP participants last fall.

It will not surprise any practitioner of SoTL to hear that one of the greatest challenges to scholarly teaching is a lack of time. For already overburdened faculty members, time is one of the most precious resources. Our interviewees were unanimous in declaring time to be a logistical hurdle to overcome in making progress on their research projects. The VKP faculty survey confirms this trend—nearly a third of faculty respondents indicated that they had difficulty balancing the scholarship of teaching with their other responsibilities as a college or university professor. The problem is compounded because few college or universities recognize how time-consuming teaching and learning projects can be. Over 80% of the faculty surveyed said that their institutions do not offer adequate release time for SoTL projects.

While the issue of time is a difficult one, it has certainly not stopped VKP faculty from pursuing their teaching and learning projects. The most effective solution seems to be building the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning directly into daily practice. Indeed, over 70% of our VKP survey respondents said that SoTL has become “a regular part” of their professional lives.

Consider the case of Amy Holzgang at Cerritos College. With five classes a semester and sixty students in each class, Amy has few opportunities to conduct in-depth research in her field. Yet Amy sees SoTL as an effective way to bring her disciplinary research skills as a social scientist to bear on her own teaching. Amy’s VKP project enables her to do the things she’s doing anyway—thinking about student learning—but to do so in a more systematic fashion. Amy’s work with VKP ultimately led her to reformulate a key assignment in her Sociology of Marriages and Family class, in which students had previously had difficulty connecting sociological concepts and theoretical course readings to the oral history interviews they conduct with older family members. After adding an intermediate step, requiring students to write a guided personal reflection about the interview, Amy found that students became more reflective and consequently their follow-up interviews were often more detailed and informed by larger sociological concepts.

We’ve heard similar comments about time management from other faculty. Mills Kelly (George Mason University) likewise finds that SoTL allows him to be what he calls a “whole educator”—uniting in his classroom practices the roles of both teacher and scholar. Scholarship of teaching projects are an “incredible amount” of work, Mills says, but the time factor becomes much more manageable once we realize that it’s simply a new approach to something we already do: thinking about how our students learn or don’t learn.

As daunting as the time commitment may be, there are often more intimidating obstacles to overcome. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning entails putting yourself on the line both privately and publicly. Privately—because a successful research project often begins by confronting a troublesome issue or questioning one’s teaching habits. Publicly—because as Sharona Levy (Borough of Manhattan Community College) related in her interview, it is far more difficult to go public with your teaching than it is with your scholarship. Professors—especially junior faculty—run the risk of alienating their colleagues who are not interested in teaching as a research problem. The flip side is that a public conversation about teaching can be quite valuable. Sharona recognized that being “pushed” by faculty who question her methodology or findings often clarifies her thinking and contributes to a better understanding about student learning for everyone involved.

Cecelia O'Leary and Gail Green Anderson discuss the future of VKP at the 2003 VKP leader's meeting.

Our interviewees were quite vocal about the dismal state of dialogue around teaching and learning at their respective institutions. Teresa Goddu (Vanderbilt University) summarized the overall tenor on her campus regarding teaching and learning: “We just don’t talk about teaching in a regular way here at Vanderbilt.” Teresa feels a “huge split” between wanting to do the scholarship of teaching and, at the same time, knowing full well that at research institutions like hers she’ll never receive credit or recognition for what she does. Nonetheless Teresa values the scholarship of teaching as means to reconnect with her students and her teaching.

When she first joined the Visible Knowledge Project, Teresa was in the midst of what she calls a “post-tenure slump.” Suddenly Teresa discovered a supportive environment in which she was encouraged to question her assumptions about teaching. Now Teresa no longer organizes her American Studies methods course around the “book-of-the-week” model; instead she focuses more on what skills and habits she wants her students to master and then selects the content that will help them master those skills. Her syllabus is now designed around an incremental and sequential process of skill-building. Teresa has also instituted a web project in her class—the collaborative creation of an online exhibit about the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897.

Although it required great effort on both her and her students’ part, the web project was particularly valuable, because the public nature of the website underscored many of the conventions of traditional essays that she’s undervalued in the past, for example, the question of audience. Teresa found that the concept of “audience” comes alive for students on a website in ways that it doesn’t in a normal term paper. As a result, Teresa now talks much more to her students about audience, asking them to think about their interlocutor and how to write for that person. In short, she’s begun to teach them that “writing means different things in different spaces.”

At the May 2003 VKP Leader's Meeting, campus coordinators, staff, and senior project advisors planned strategy for the remaining two years of the Project.

As these stories of transformation illustrate, the challenges of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning are not insurmountable. Visible Knowledge Project participants have risen to the occasion again and again, and we encourage you to share your own stories with your colleagues and others in your field. Whether it’s at local campus workshops, meetings of national organizations, on public websites, or in scholarly journals, taking your teaching stories public is ultimately the most important step in an SoTL project. “It’s ridiculous,” Teresa Goddu remarked in her interview, “how we’re all off in our own little classrooms, and we never know what others are doing.” The interviews bear witness to faculty willing to change this situation, and we applaud the efforts of everyone participating in a teaching and learning project.

July 2004

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