Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Kathleen McKinney, Kathleen McKinney

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780253007063
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) began primarily as a discipline-based movement, committed to exploring the signature pedagogical and learning styles of each discipline within higher education, with little exchange across disciplines. As the field has developed, new questions have arisen concerning cross-disciplinary comparison and learning in multidisciplinary settings This volume by a stellar group of experts provides a state-of-the-field review of recent SoTL scholarship within a range of disciplines and offers a stimulating discussion of critical issues related to interdisciplinarity in teaching, learning, and SoTL research.

PART 1 • SOTL in the Disciplines

CHAPTER 1

Difference, Privilege, and Power in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The Value of Humanities SOTL

NANCY L. CHICK

The Competing Metaphors of SOTL: The Big Tent and the Family Table

As Kathleen McKinney notes in the introduction to this volume, one path of the development of SOTL has been its expansion from primarily disciplinary inquiries toward cross-disciplinary methods and questions—as reflected in the structure of this book. While reflections on SOTL itself have appeared all along (the Carnegie publications immediately come to mind)¹ and may in fact have facilitated its development, now there is “an increased need for discussions of SOTL in and across disciplines” (McKinney, introduction to this volume). McKinney suggests that there is room for both and that they complement each other: it is not the case that discipline-specific and cross-disciplinary works compete with each other in a zero-sum game that only one can win. Indeed, rather than representing black-and-white visions of the field (disciplinary or interdisciplinary), McKinney cites Lisa Lattuca’s (2001) continuum from one to the other. In theory, then, we praise the “methodological and theoretical pluralism” (Hutchings and Huber 2008, 233) of individual projects and of the field of SOTL itself, imagining an inclusive and open “big tent” (Huber and Hutchings 2005, 30).

However, despite the call to open up the field to include a variety of disciplines and cross disciplines, there is still pressure, at least in the United States, toward a fairly narrow set of approaches in SOTL that limit the methods accepted as sound and, as a result, the kind and quality of student learning we come to understand—a problem described by others in this volume (Grauerholz and Main, Poole). While many well-known SOTL leaders come from humanities backgrounds (Pat Hutchings, Randy Bass, Barbara Cambridge, Richard Gale), the on-the-ground work largely marginalizes the practices of their disciplines.² Gale (2005) laments the characterization of humanities perspectives as “academically ‘soft’ ” in the larger context of higher education with its “tendency to ‘harden’ in order to validate, such that even the most thoughtful and rigorous of capacities can be branded as unimportant,” especially if they aren’t grounded in what’s “rational, logical, subject to precise measurement and analysis” (5). Liz Grauerholz and Eric Main’s chapter in this volume describes what they call “Fallacies of SOTL,” several of which are often the source of this skepticism: the assumptions that SOTL research must use control groups, that it should (and even can) be generalizable across settings, and that quantitative measures are superior in reliability and validity. Gary Poole’s chapter in this volume explores how some disciplines don’t understand or even accept what another discipline considers research. In the “gatekeeper” model of multidisciplinary SOTL, humanities approaches would need another discipline, most likely a social science, to legitimize the work as real research (Garner quoted in Poole, this volume).

To illustrate, in the editors’ panel at the 2009 conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), Patricia Jarvis summarized the “mistakes and pitfalls” of unpublishable work characterized by surveyed editors of a dozen SOTL journals: the methods aren’t “good science,” the research designs lack “empirical rigor,” there’s no “baseline or pre- and post-test,” and the results aren’t “easy to replicate” (Jarvis and Creasey 2009). Thus, while there is apparently an abundance of journals that publish SOTL (Weimer 2006; McKinney 2007), at least the dozen unidentified ones in Jarvis and Gary Creasey’s study appear to very narrowly define research, SOTL, and who can participate. More recently, in a special section called “IJ-SOTL Reviewers: Getting SOTL Articles Published,” Trent Maurer (2011) announces that “control groups and experimental design are preferable” (2). Even the two main books on how to do SOTL (McKinney 2007; Gurung and Schwartz 2009), while offering some encouragement and validation of the range of methods used by different disciplines, include statements in their project design descriptions that suggest that the disciplinary backgrounds equipped for SOTL are limited. McKinney’s chapter on project design defends subjectivity against expectations of objectivity, supports methodological pluralism, and briefly covers a wide range of methods; however, the chapter’s second paragraph begins, “As in any good scholarship involving empirical data, the research question guides the methodology within the constraints of practical realities and ethical guidelines” (emphasis added; 67). The italicized language comes from the scientific method, and many humanities scholars would say that they do not use “empirical data” but instead “evidence” (or some other term). Also, the research question alone shouldn’t guide methodology (there is more than one valid way to answer a question): the researcher’s disciplinary background should also come into play in SOTL, as recommended by Charles Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene Maeroff (1997) and Mick Healey (2000). Even further, Regan Gurung and Beth Schwartz’s book for SOTL beginners—despite earlier nods to the multidisciplinary nature of SOTL—devotes one of five chapters to “the main statistical analyses needed to conduct SOTL,” giving us “the tools and the know-how to assess teaching and learning” (145). The chapter is even titled “Is It Significant? Basic Statistics.” The book seems to suggest that without statistics, an SOTL project, its methods, or its conclusions won’t be considered significant. In isolation but even more so taken together, these instances suggest that SOTL doesn’t welcome the valuable ways in which many scholars—especially those in the humanities and fine arts—are trained to conduct research, make meaning, and demonstrate knowledge.

Even within my own discipline of literary studies, a closer inspection of our journals shrinks the potential outlets for literary SOTL. For instance, although the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) seems to offer obvious choices, Research in the Teaching of English publishes education research, College English publishes primarily disciplinary research and very little on pedagogy or classroom research, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College is limited to a specific type of institution. PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association (MLA), privileges disciplinary research virtually to the exclusion of pedagogy. Pedagogy is arguably the premiere SOTL journal for our discipline, yet it’s also the one Randy Bass and Sherry Lee Linkon (2008) note as lacking in examples of strong disciplinary methodologies: most of its articles present general descriptions of student learning, rather than close readings of student texts—our discipline’s methodology and evidence of learning.

Conferences are typically more receptive venues that encourage multiple perspectives, yet an analysis of the first six ISSOTL conference programs reveals that only 10 percent of all sessions (panels, papers, posters, workshops, or plenaries) were about humanities-based SOTL projects, issues, or classrooms, and less than 1 percent were literature-based ones (Chick 2009). It’s unclear if this minimal presence is due to reviewers rejecting SOTL in such areas as inadequate, submissions that are not good enough for acceptance, potential presenters shying away from such conferences, a dearth of literary teacher-scholars studying their students’ learning, or some combination. Whatever the cause, there is reason to be confused and even nervous about humanities scholars’ place at the public SOTL table—a metaphor recalling Lee Shulman’s warning that SOTL should not become a “family table,” one with “familiar faces” and conversations, one that’s too “insular” (Chick 2006, 7). This is not to suggest that the SOTL tent or table shouldn’t have standards; instead, I encourage a critical examination of what and whose standards we apply, who they mark as inferior, and on what grounds. I argue that there is an invisible norm in the field of SOTL that needs closer interrogation.

Understanding and Responding to Differences in SOTL

This criticism of SOTL scholars who identify strongly with their disciplines (especially those from the humanities and fine arts) is evocative of Peter McLaren’s (1995) four multicultural theories, or four different and progressively more complex ways of thinking about difference and diversity: conservative, liberal, left-liberal, and critical.³ Conservative multiculturalism promotes assimilation with “whiteness as [the] invisible norm” and other cultural groups as mere “ ‘add-ons’ to the dominant culture” because they lack the values necessary to being an American (McLaren 1995, 49). Liberal multiculturalism, on the other hand, assumes equality among all cultures but is subtly undergirded by the conservative’s normalized whiteness in its assertion that “we’re all the same” and that identifying differences is racist in itself. The left-liberal view focuses on differences between groups, differences resulting from singular, static, essentialist, inherent elements of “a primeval past of cultural authenticity” (51). Finally, critical multiculturalism challenges the previous three, calling attention to specific differences “between and among groups” that emerge from the complex interplay between “history, culture, power, and ideology” (McLaren’s emphasis; 53).

Concerns about the disciplines in SOTL lead me to McLaren’s theories of difference and culture for a variety of reasons. First, both are about the controversies of contested, hierarchical identities in a landscape of limited resources and rewards. After all, our disciplines are our intellectual and academic cultures: our experiences of knowing and being known, seeking and making meaning, valuing and being valued. The competitive environment in higher education in which opportunities, resources, and rewards affect groups differently, particularly men and women, is already documented for SOTL (McKinney and Chick 2010).

Translating McLaren’s perspectives to SOTL, a conservative SOTL scholar would promote a narrow definition of SOTL (including its questions, methods, evidence, and genre) as the norm, suggesting that variations lack important qualities of SOTL. A liberal SOTL scholar would claim Huber and Pat Hutchings’s “big tent” definition of the field but resist attention to any disciplinary differences on the assumption that SOTL is beyond the disciplines and such attention would create hierarchies among approaches. The left-liberal SOTL scholar would assert that good SOTL must be discipline-specific, using a narrow conception of each discipline’s approaches, which have little in common with others.’ Finally, a critical SOTL scholar would resist the tendency to normalize a few approaches to invisibly exclude, delegitimize, erase, or homogenize disciplinary identities. This SOTL scholar invokes the differing approaches between and even within many disciplines. (For instance, English encompasses the very different approaches of composition, literary studies, creative writing, and sometimes linguistics; geography includes the natural scientists in physical geography and the social scientists of cultural geography.) This view also acknowledges that differences may arise from the experiences of developing an identity within a field in specific national, regional, institutional, and even subdisciplinary or specialty contexts, rather than a simple, singular common background.

The normalized privileging of control groups, experimental designs, pre- and post-tests, and the specific language accompanying “scientific rigor” strikes a chord of the conservative and liberal approaches, as if there’s only one way to make and reflect meaning, as if there’s only one language—like an English-only nation in which those who more naturally use other languages should disappear into the proverbial melting pot. Even the universally accepted criticism of text-heavy posters and PowerPoint slides resonates with this perspective, since text is what most humanities disciplines highly value. If disciplinary perspectives are how scholars do their daily work, make meaning, think about the world, and interpret their experiences and those of others, they can’t simply deny them or change them—nor would they want to. Nor should they have to. However, much like the invisibility of the norm of whiteness described in Peggy McIntosh’s (1989) classic “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” those who practice the widely accepted SOTL methods are probably unaware of the privileging of their approaches at the expense of those with strengths and expertise in other backgrounds and those who value and speak through other methods. It’s not a matter of ill intent; it’s a matter of invisibility.

Many humanities and fine arts SOTL scholars describe their frustration as if they’re being asked to “pass” as social scientists, invoking the language of light-skinned blacks who must deny their complex racial identities to assimilate into the dominant white society. The parallel is how these scholars mimic the dominant methodologies and genres rather than freely expressing their own backgrounds and their more familiar ways of seeking, making, and articulating meaning. The danger for these SOTL scholars is that—because of their different backgrounds, strengths, and worldviews—they may not do it well. Hutchings and Huber (2008) describe the fear of “amateurs” (239) as one explanation for the resistance to SOTL research outside the narrow definition.⁴ As academics and disciplinary experts, we don’t like playing the amateur any more than others like to see the work of the amateur, especially when it’s held up to represent the quality of the field.

To return to McLaren’s framework for understanding responses to difference, while two approaches would define SOTL through a narrow, dominant perspective (explicitly for the conservatives, implicitly for the liberals), a left-liberal SOTL scholar would suggest that we should remain entrenched in our disciplinary questions, methods, and audiences. This view is guided by the essentialist assumption that we’re bound by static, simplified disciplinary backgrounds. The potential for this kind of disciplinary segregation probably explains concerns about creating “silos” or “tribes” within SOTL, groups resistant to collaborating across campus, varying approaches, or sharing findings with each other (presenting and publishing only in disciplinary venues), as if there is no common ground. The worry is that discipline-focused work (for example, decoding the disciplines [see Shopkow’s chapter in this volume], threshold concepts, or signature pedagogies) isolates and segregates, reflecting cautions against students focusing on singular disciplinary learning, which would inhibit “intellectual empathy and tolerance” (Nelson 1999, 174). When I hear such concerns at SOTL conferences when conferees gather or present by disciplinary groups, I’m reminded of Beverly Tatum’s (1997) interrogation of the question “Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” in the book by that name. She notes that the “tone of voice implied what usually remained unsaid, ‘And what can we do to solve this problem?’ ” (xvii). While the questioners may be uncomfortable with what they perceive as self-segregated “tribes,”⁵ T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to SOTL In and Across the Disciplines
• Part 1 SOTL in the Disciplines
• Part 2 SOTL Across the Disciplines
• Contributors
• Index