Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning: Professional Literature That Makes a Difference,
Maryellen Weimer, Jossey-Bass 2006.
Reviewed by Terri A. Tarr, Ph.D., Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

As an admirer of Maryellen Weimer's thorough and analytical yet clear and practical writing style, I anticipated reading her latest book with pleasure. She did not disappoint. In this volume, she provides the big picture of published pedagogical scholarship and analyzes the collected body of work into its component parts, describing a classification scheme for the work and spotlighting exemplary articles. This makes it a useful resource both for theorizers and for those who like to learn from concrete examples.

Weimer sets the stage for the rest of the book by discussing why it's important to look back at what's been previously published in the area of pedagogical scholarship. She points out that the recent emphasis in higher education has been to encourage faculty to produce the literature with less emphasis on getting them to use the literature. From her personal experience, she's seen a need for faculty to become more conversant with what's already been written. She sometimes asks faculty in workshops, "What are you reading about teaching?" and "What have you learned recently from the literature?" The lack of response she typically gets to these questions is congruent with the evidence she cites about how infrequently faculty read about teaching.

In the second chapter, Weimer provides an introduction to the pedagogical literature and where it can be found. In order avoid debate over the precise definition of the "scholarship of teaching," Weimer uses the phrases "pedagogical scholarship" and "scholarly work on teaching or learning" to describe the work she reviews. She provides a definition of pedagogical literature and draws a distinction between the literature she reviews in this book and educational research produced by educational professionals. She also points readers to useful lists of discipline-based, cross-disciplinary, and topical pedagogical periodicals in the book's appendices.

Weimer provides a framework that readers can use to organize existing published work on teaching and learning.  She categorizes the work into two major classifications: Wisdom-of-Practice Scholarship and Research Scholarship. Each of those classifications has several sub-classifications.  For each of seven classifications, she describes rationale for critically assessing the quality of work and standards or criteria that could be used to assess the quality of work in each classification.

The Wisdom-of-Practice classification refers to work that is based on what authors have learned from their experiences. These works are further differentiated into

- personal accounts of change,
- recommended-practices reports,
- recommended-content reports, and
- personal narratives.

The Research Scholarship classification is used for work that takes a more objective approach. The sub-classifications include

- quantitative investigations,
- qualitative studies, and
- descriptive research.

For each approach, Weimer gives a description of what it is, discusses quality concerns that are common with work that takes that approach, highlights published articles that are examples of the best work of that type, gives suggestions of standards that might be used to judge that type of work, and discusses contributions that this type of approach has made to pedagogical knowledge. For example, she describes personal accounts of change as articles in which faculty might talk about what they changed in their instruction and how they implemented the change. She notes that this type of approach is often criticized for a lack of objective outcomes assessment and inadequate referencing of previous work in the area. The standards she suggests could be applied to this type of article include recognizing the knowledge base that justifies the change, critically analyzing the change in depth, and containing evidence that adaptation occurred.

In addition to taking a comprehensive look at existing work, Weimer speculates about what's ahead and what the field can learn from what's been published so far. One suggestion she makes is that it's important to look at work critically, but to "let go of our automatic preference for pedagogical scholarship that is research-based and narrow definitions of research that prevent us from considering other kinds of systematic inquiry." She suggests that experienced-based scholarship can be legitimate, and can be done in a more scholarly way than it sometimes has been in the past.    

Weimer wraps up with chapters aimed specifically at faculty and academic leaders. Weimer gives reasons why pedagogical scholarly work is an important way for faculty to improve teaching and gives practical ideas for getting started. The chapter for academic leaders focuses on what can be done to promote and support pedagogical scholarship.

Weimer's book provides a comprehensive overview of the field of pedagogical scholarship and would be an excellent resource for faculty, faculty developers, and administrators interested in, just as the title says, enhancing scholarly work on teaching and learning. It would be an excellent book for a group of faculty to read and discuss together. Weimer's classification scheme along with the exemplary articles that are cited provide an excellent introduction to scholarly work on teaching and learning.