Recent and Next Events 1
Invitation to a Workshop 1
"Why the Scholarship of Teaching?" Warren Rosenberg 1-2
Join Us for Breakfast on Monday 2
"Liberal Education and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," Richard Gale 3
Spring '04 Brown Bag Lunch Series-An Experimental Approach 3-4
Opinion Page- Excerpts from the Chronicle 4-5
Recent and Next Events
Peer Review of Ernie Pascarella's Findings on Liberal Arts Emphasis February 19-20
"A Dialogue with Citizens"—Colloquy hosted by Ed Lorenz, Visiting Sabbatical Scholar from Alma College (Fall 2003), and Mark Brouwer February 26-29
College Advisor Meeting March 8-10
Reviewers' Workshop—Developing the "Assessment Toolkit" March 11-14
Carnegie CASTL meeting March 18-20
"Learning to Manage"—Colloquy hosted by Fred Ohles on Distinctive Blends of Liberal Arts and Business Studies March 25-27
This issue of the Newsletter focuses on the "scholarship of teaching" with an essay by Warren Rosenberg, who is guiding the CASTL Fellows program at Wabash, and an essay by Richard Gale of the Carnegie Foundation, reprinted from LiberalArtsOnline.
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Using the Scholarship of Teaching in Our Classes - Invitation to a Workshop for Wabash Faculty
On Thursday, March 18, Richard Gale of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will offer a workshop for Wabash faculty, "Using the Scholarship of Teaching in Our Classes." To sign up, please contact Warren Rosenberg by phone at 6275 or by email at rosenbew@wabash.edu. The workshop will run from 4:15 until 5:30 in the Videoconference Room, Trippet Hall 123. There will be a reception and dinner for workshop participants afterward.
Why the Scholarship of Teaching?
by Warren Rosenberg, Professor of English, Wabash College
Why in our incredibly busy schedules of teaching, disciplinary scholarship, departmental activities, committee meetings and, oh yes, home lives, should we make room for the scholarship of teaching and learning or SOTL? There are a number of good reasons, some of them with institutional implications. By Scholarship of Teaching and Learning I am referring to a structured inquiry into questions about how students really learn, which includes the public sharing of results. Even at small liberal arts colleges we teach in isolation, yet the one thing we all have in common is our teaching. Sharing our inquiries into teaching can unify a faculty and help us overcome our feelings of working alone.
The primary reason for practicing the scholarship of teaching and learning, however, is to make us better teachers, and so the question arises—does it really do that? What initially drew me to SOTL was my own wondering about what my students were learning as a result of class discussion. It bothered me that after a stimulating and apparently involving discussion of a text I did not know what knowledge students took away. Did they have a deeper understanding of the text, of the author, of the period, of literature in general than they would have gained had I lectured? What learning occurred as they listened to their classmates interpret the text or respond to my questions? Were the quiet ones learning as much or more than the frequent talkers? Are there different ways of conducting class discussion that could deepen student learning? Once I started to ask these kinds of questions they proliferated and I felt frustrated with the efficacy of the traditional means of assessment I had at my disposal.
Of course, as good professionals we are constantly assessing what we do. We make modifications during a class when we "sense" that our students are not "getting it." We look at papers, exam results, and study mid and end of semester evaluations to gain some insight into whether we are realizing our teaching goals. Yet none of these methods seemed adequate to answer the broader questions I had begun to ask. It became clear to me that only through stepping back and designing inquiries that self-consciously studied the effects of what I was doing in the classroom over time, by, in effect, practicing scholarship, could I gain meaningful answers to my questions. As I struggled to design such an inquiry I wondered whether colleagues were already engaged in such scholarship. I discovered a small but reassuring number of articles and books reflecting the current scholarship on the pedagogy of discussion. Only by seeing how others have dealt with similar questions and by comparing my results with theirs could my broader questions ever be satisfactorily answered. This is the way knowledge is created, as part of a communal process.
Yet does bringing to our teaching what Randy Bass calls the "meta-reflective dimension"* improve student learning? Are we merely treating our students like lab subjects? Further, are we losing some of the spontaneity that makes teaching an art and not a science? My experiences with SOTL so far indicate that the process itself has immediate and positive results. Doing this kind of research necessitates making our intentions clearer to ourselves and to our students. When students are asked to reflect on their classroom roles they actually become more active participants in their own learning. A questionnaire that a colleague in the speech department, David Timmerman, two students, and I have been developing asks our students to reflect on how class discussion has affected their initial reactions to a text. We have just begun to analyze their responses, but it seems that as we proceed, student awareness increases and learning actually intensifies. The reflection time we take at the beginning and end of classes, and the degree of student self-consciousness that results from anticipating those analytical moves, may reduce some of the mystery and excitement of open discussion. But the energy and sense of intellectual discovery that accompanies student-centered learning magnify, and our desire as teachers to match goals and outcomes seems, with additional information about what is actually happening inside our students, more attainable.
It remains now for institutions to help foster an environment where the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning can flourish, for it is in the best interests of their educational missions. This may be achieved by valuing SOTL in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions, providing release time and summer funding to interested faculty, or by establishing teaching academies that can bring colleagues together from across and between campuses. Most importantly, faculty must encourage each other to step outside of the safe but isolating classroom to engage more effectively in their common pursuit of enhanced student learning.
*Randy Bass. The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?, Inventio: Creative Thinking About Learning and Teaching http://www.doiiit.gmu.edu/Archives/feb98/randybass.htm.
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Join Us for Breakfast on Monday
Each Monday during the semester, there is a complementary breakfast for Wabash College faculty and staff in the Trippet Hall dining room from 7:00 until 8:30 a.m. Please join us for fine food and collegial conversation as your schedule allows.
Liberal Education and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
by Richard Gale, Senior Scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Reprinted from LiberalArtsOnline, Vol. 2, No. 8, October 4, 2002.
Liberal learning facilitates critical perception, it helps us work consciously and conscientiously for the world we believe in, the world we want for ourselves and for our children. But such aspirations are sometimes hard for students to recognize, and even harder for faculty to assess. We know how to determine whether or not a lawyer has learned a precedent, we have no trouble testing a geologist’s knowledge of plate tectonics. But how do to you assess something like aesthetic appreciation, civic awareness, global preparedness, or social empowerment? Is it enough that students have exposure to these concepts, do they need to engage with them on a deeper level, or should they enact this knowledge through personal and social change? We tend to configure our sense of value, our use of the landscape of liberal learning in ways that are not measurable in specifically instrumental terms. Or are they?
Inherent within claims about liberal learning is the fact that so much is anecdotal: "After taking theatre history my students see the world in a new light." And if not anecdotal, evidence tends to be associative: "Everyone’s getting As and Bs, so they know how to use the material." While anecdote and association are fine in and of themselves, they only go so far and they do nothing to really inform our practice or the practice of others. What we need is another way to discover and communicate just how meaningful a liberal education can be; what we need to do is study it, make it an object of inquiry, approach it as a scholarly investigation of teaching and learning. This is, in fact, what we do at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and what we help faculty do through the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Imagine an English professor trying to understand what happens when students encounter moments of difficulty, or a professor of religious ethics investigating the impact of social action on students’ commitment to social justice. How does intellectual community contribute to student learning in a great books seminar, what counts as documentation of interdisciplinary visual literacy, what are the political consequences of taking a course in local or regional history? These are only a few of the questions asked by Carnegie Scholars over the last five years … and many more will be asked by faculty in the next cohort of Carnegie Scholars – a cohort which will focus its investigation on the subject of liberal learning.
We all believe that liberal learning matters, that classroom experience transfers to life skills and enhanced understanding. But how do we know? The job of scholarship, any scholarship in any field, is to answer that question. How do we know? The goal of a scholarship of teaching and learning is to answer that question in a way that is rigorous and transferable; to contribute to public inquiry, improve ongoing cumulative student learning, cultivate a new understanding, a new awareness.
During the 2003-2004 academic year the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), in collaboration with the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, will be working with faculty who are committed to the investigation, analysis, and dissemination of new insights about undergraduate student learning.
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Spring ’04 Brown Bag Lunch Series—An Experimental Approach
During the current semester, brown bag lunch discussions on Wednesdays in Trippet Hall are focusing on the question of how growth toward wisdom might be an outcome of a liberal arts education. Our texts are a wide variety of essays from the learned popular press. Discussion leaders, in each case for two weeks at a time, are a Wabash faculty member and a Center of Inquiry staff member working as a team. Please join us whenever it works with your schedule during this busy semester. Here is the schedule, with a few details yet to be filled in:
Jan. 14/21, Leaders: David Maharry, Bill Doemel
New York Review of Books: Freeman Dyson, "Clockwork Science," a review of Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time; Oliver Sacks, "In the River of Consciousness," a review of Gerald M. Edelmann, Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, Jean-Pierre Changeux, The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge, Henry James, Henri Bergson, and others
Jan. 28/Feb. 4, Discussion Leaders: Brenda Bankart, Michele Tomarelli
The New Yorker: Cynthia Gorney, "Chicken-Soup Nation: The Art of Turning Heartwarming Stories into Cold Cash"; Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Car of Tomorrow: Why Hydrogen-Powered Vehicles Are Attracting Some Unlikely Supporters"
Feb. 11/18, Discussion Leaders: Mark Brouwer, Cherry Danielson
Parabola: "Spiritual Masters: Linking Heaven and Earth. An Interview with William Segal"; Father Dunstan Morrissey, "Your Cell Will Teach You Everything: Can We Ever Be Patient Enough for Patience?" edited by Susan Moon
Feb. 25/Mar. 3, Discussion Leaders: John Aden, Kim Kline
Atlantic Monthly: Jonathan Rauch, "Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?"; Adam Bellow, "In Praise of Nepotism"
Mar. 17/24, Discussion Leaders TBA
Hudson Review: Harold Fromm, "The New Darwinism in the Humanities, Part I: From Plato to Pinker"; Harold Fromm, "The New Darwinism in the Humanities, Part II: Back to Nature, Again"
Mar. 31/Apr. 7, Discussion Leaders TBA
Commentary: Terry Teachout, "The Murder Artist"; Joseph Epstein, "Oh Dad, Dear Dad"
Apr. 14/21, Discussion Leaders TBA
American Scholar: readings TBA
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Opinion Page -- from the Chronicle of Higher Education
"It's a peculiarity of the scholarly life that everyone is expected to be able to deliver a lecture well, but almost no one is trained to do it. Academe resists the idea that the teacher is a performer, but the classroom and lecture hall prove that, like it or not, you need performance skills to get your ideas across.
Once upon a very long time ago, educated people studied rhetoric and oratory. When they spoke, people listened." William Germano, "The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 2003.
"If the goal is to do more than recite a laundry list of oppression, then intellectuals must join the struggle to aid the vulnerable. I got the notion that struggle is key to the intellectual's vocation from the communities I grew up in. In the fifth grade, I was transformed by the teaching of Mr. James, mostly because she helped her students to see themselves in a fresh and powerful racial light. My birth certificate says I'm a Negro, like all birth certificates of colored children born as I was in the late '50s. But Mrs. James helped us to shed definitions and to embrace a new grammar of self-respect tied to what soul singer Curtis Mayfield called 'a choice of colors.'" Michael Eric Dyson, "The Public Obligations of Intellectuals," Chronicle of Higher Education, December 5, 2003.
"As a boomer myself, I was intrigued that those in my generation -- who had stormed administration buildings on campuses to demand the elimination of dress codes, dorm hours, and in loco parentis in the late 1960s -- were now demanding to be involved in so many aspects of their childrens' [sic] college lives. I received hundreds of phone calls each year from parents 'taking on' problems that should have been handled by their sons and daughters. . . .
Such demands have only increased over the past decade. College parents are savvy consumers, and many expect a level of service commensurate with the rising tuition bills they are paying." Helen E. Johnson, "Educating Parents About College Life," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 9, 2004.
"I always wish I'd heard Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great philosopher, at Cambridge. He was well before my time, but I've read several accounts of his performances. He never appeared to have prepared much of anything, though he had a specific philosophical problem in mind when he walked into the lecture hall. He would worry that problem aloud, as if the shutters of his mind -- an awesome thing in itself -- were flung open suddenly, and the class could look into the whirring mechanism of his brain. They sat there breathlessly, wondering if so much intellectual effort might actually kill the man." Jay Parini, "The Well-Tempered Lecturer," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 2004.
"The modern university has become a kind of intellectual shopping mall. Universities offer a wide array of different 'goods' and allow, even encourage, students -- the 'customers' -- to shop around until they find what they like. Individual customers are free to 'purchase' whatever bundles of knowledge they want, and the university provides whatever its customers demand." Barry Schwartz, "The Tyranny of Choice," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2004.
"More than ever, we require the deep historical perspective and specialized knowledge of other cultures, regions, religions, and traditions provided by the humanities. And precisely because of the rapid developments in science and technology, we must think carefully about the nature of the human, the ethics of scientific investigation, and the global effects of technological change." Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, "A Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2004.
To read the full text of any of the articles excerpted on these pages from the Chronicle of Higher Education, go to the archive section of its website. The address is http://chronicle.com/chronicle/archive.htm.
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