The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In 1990, Ernest Boyer's seminal work, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, galvanised higher education academics into rethinking the complex relationships between conventionally highly prestigious activities, such as research and the generally less well regarded activities of teaching and learning. There was, Boyer and others argued, serious intellectual work to be done on what quickly became termed The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). It will come as no surprise that we, in the Centre for Learning, Access and Student Success (CLASS), are keen to develop, inculcate and promote the key tenets of SoTL. Members in our CLASS team use Felten’s (2013) five principles of good practices in SoTL to develop module activities, inspire conversations and produce scholarly outputs.

5 Principles of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL):

Inquiry into Good Student Learning
Grounded in Context
Methodologically Sound
Conducted in Partnership with Students
Appropriately Public

Felten, P (2013) Teaching & Learning Inquiry: The ISSOTL Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 121-125.

Our outputs represent a diverse range of learning and teaching inquiries that seek to explore decoding and troublesome knowledge within and between the disciplines, student learning experiences and support, student and staff co-created learning activities, and identity and SoTL values within a widening access and participation university, to name but a few. Our CLASS team is strategically supporting our SoTL activity which is beginning to take place through our new pan University SoTL group described under the communities of practice section of the website. This group is currently working to address the SoTL Grand Challenges: SoTL Grand Challenges