Let me show you something that drives me crazy:

You know what this is: the big, cumbersome, difficult to turn,
—and I might add "well defended"--battleship of higher education. 

I don't know about you, but in the circles I travel—or rather, the circles I try not to travel— this metaphor rules.  It may come in different flavors: an aircraft carrier or an ocean liner, but the image of something big and hard to move stands, implicitly if not explicitly, behind a whole lot of what one hears about higher education today. 

It's not, of course, that the image is all wrong in its message.  My own organization—actually, the Carnegie Council, which the Foundation supported in the 1980s—noted that "Universities…have experienced wars, revolutions, depressions, and industrial transformations, and have come out less changed than almost any other segment of their societies" (Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, 1980, p. 9). 

 The problem is that metaphors conceal as well as reveal, and the image of a ponderous, ocean-going behemoth (graveyards pop up too) may well prevent us from seeing the significant change that IS going on in higher education.     

And so today I'd like to look at the scholarship of teaching and learning as a case of such change—unfinished, fragile, not without its dangers and possible derailments, but moving ahead on a promising path that intersects in promising ways with the work of faculty development.  And to explore this change, I want to shift metaphors—sticking with nautical images because we're in Portland—but moving from battleship to something more nimble:

Meet the SoTL tug: tough, maneuverable, eager to serve, and a little pushy. 

My goal is to tell the story—well, A STORY, my version—of the scholarship of teaching and learning as it has evolved over the past almost two decades, how it got to where we are today, where that IS, and what can be said about getting from here to there, by which I mean "the center" invoked in my title.  My thesis is that we've reached a critical moment, where one course will put the scholarship of teaching and learning in a powerful position to deliver on its promises, and where another risks….(I'm afraid I'm going to abuse this metaphor over the next hour) missing the boat.  My hope is to contribute to an ongoing conversation about what it will take to harness the power of this hard-working vessel, and to suggest how the scholarship of teaching and learning and POD communities can work together to meet our overlapping goals. 

And in that spirit, before we start this journey, I want to acknowledge the significant connections that are already in place.  Insofar as the scholarship of teaching and learning has caught fire and made a difference—as I believe it has and is—it's in very large part because of the efforts of people in this room and in this community, who have worked on their own campuses and beyond, some with the Carnegie program, to bring what I like to call the big ideas of the scholarship of teaching and learning to their colleagues, and along the way to negotiate some of the challenges arising from this work.   So let me acknowledge the tremendous work and learning that has gone on through POD….and to thank you for that.  

OK, welcome aboard….for a journey in three parts.

1. Preparations and Provisions 

The usual marker for the beginning of the scholarship of teaching and learning movement is Ernest Boyer's 1990 Carnegie Foundation report Scholarship Reconsidered.  But certainly it has earlier roots.  Probably, in fact, it's best understood as a convergence of several longer-standing lines of work and communities of practice, including classroom assessment, continuous quality improvement, educational research, and the work of teaching and learning centers—and I use the word "center" though I know that not all of your campuses have centers, and that faculty development can be organized in a variety of ways.

That said, Scholarship Reconsidered added a powerful catalyst to the mix.  One reason, if I may say so, was the prestige of the Carnegie name.  Another was Boyer's framing of the idea.  The scholarship of teaching gained a hearing less because of its novelty or precision than because it gave teaching a place within a broader vision of scholarship.  Indeed, the report is remarkably IMPRECISE in its account of the scholarship of teaching, providing no sharp definition, and no way to distinguish it from, say, excellent teaching.  Looking back, I would argue that this framing was a shrewd move on Boyer's part for it opened up a big space for discussion and debate.  And of course there WAS debate because while some people were deeply engaged by this new phrase, others found it off-putting. 

(I recall, for instance, a session at the American Association for Higher Education in which Barbara Walvoord, then director of the teaching center at Notre Dame, noted the potential of the scholarship of teaching in her setting but told us she simply couldn't use the language.)     

In general, however, when it comes to preparations and provisions for a scholarship of teaching and learning journey, Boyer gave us some powerful fuel injection—a dose of what one of my colleagues calls "a BHAI. 

A big hairy audacious idea, with the capacity to fuel and feed a lot of interesting work and bring new energy to the pedagogical enterprise.   

And so we come to the next stage:

2. Getting Oriented

Not surprisingly, the bigness (not to say hairiness) of the idea of the scholarship of teaching and learning raised questions, and the second stage of the journey, as I see it, is characterized by efforts to be more precise about defining features, landmarks, and boundaries. 

For instance, and this was very early on, we saw distinctions being made between the scholarship of teaching and the scholarship in teaching.  In Change magazine in 1999, Lee Shulman and I proposed a distinction between effective teaching, scholarly teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning, largely to point out that powerful teaching is, as we said, "a good sufficient unto itself," not an immature version of the scholarship of teaching and learning. 

In Carnegie's work with campuses, too, one of the important first steps was to pose a "sacrificial definition" and ask each institution to discuss and amend it to fit their own circumstances and mission. 

Interesting international maps began to be drawn as well.  In the UK, for instance, some observers distinguish between Pedagogical Development and Pedagogical Research, the former more focused on individual teaching improvement, the latter on building knowledge.    

For many people's taste (I confess to having occasionally been one of them), this definitional stage of the scholarship of teaching and learning journey was a bit tiresome.  It seemed, sometimes, that more energy was going into talk about the scholarship of teaching and learning than into the doing of it.

But in fact the conversation about definitions has been—and is, because in fact this stage of the journey isn't over—a crucial process.  For one thing, it has helped to create some shared vocabulary, some language to rally around as common ground, a condition, arguably, for any knowledge building venture.  Moreover, definitions have real stakes for the value attached to the work, who feels welcome and who excluded, and therefore how widely it will matter.    

For instance—to develop this point just briefly--it made a real difference that there was a conversation about disciplinary differences in the scholarship of teaching and learning.  Many of you will know Mary Huber and Sherry Morreale's book Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which includes essays from ten very different fields—communication, chemistry, math, management—to situate and describe this work in ways that map onto the particular field's history, culture, and intellectual orientation.  Doing so was an essential prerequisite for later activities and engagement in those communities, which could then take up the scholarship of teaching and learning in their own terms. 

Our next stage is:

3. Finding fellow travelers

Here I'd like to talk a bit more about the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.  I know that some of you are familiar with the program, but others may not be.  It's a useful context, in any event, for looking at how people have come together in this work, and how important that is.     

So, just a bit about the original structure the program, in three parts:

1.                              The Carnegie Scholars Program for individual faculty " 160 in six cohorts since 1998, in a wide range of fields and interests.   

2.                              The Campus Program, which has involved some 200 campuses.   

3.                              Work with scholarly and professional societies

Behind this three part structure, there's a kind of theory about what it would takes to realize the promise of the scholarship of teaching and learning. 

·                                From the individual scholars program we wanted good examples of what the work looks like, and good people to model how it can be done.    

·                                At the campus level: our goal was to create campus cultures in which the work can thrive, even if, at first, only in small pockets.

·                                From the scholarly and professional societies we wanted to send signals to faculty about what work counts, what's scholarly. 

In all three arenas, a central goal has been to move from "pedagogical solitude" (to use a much quoted phrase by Lee Shulman) to teaching as community property—that is, to provide the sense of community and exchange which is essential to all forms of scholarly work and professional practice.  And Carnegie has tried to track the development of this sense of community—this finding of fellow travelers:  

For instance, in a survey of Carnegie Scholars a couple of years ago, 94% said that an important or very important initial impetus for their involvement in the scholarship of teaching and learning was to "find new colleagues with whom to pursue my interests in teaching and learning"—second in motivation only to "I had questions about my students' learning that I wanted to explore."

And—good news—72% reported that they "found new colleagues and communities outside of CASTL for work on teaching and learning…"  

On the campus front (and here my number is based on a self-study report completed by about 60 CASTL campuses in their first stage of work):

95% percent sponsored campus-wide and departmental events for faculty interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning, with many reporting regular increases in the percentage of faculty attending such events.    

Quite a number of campuses have also developed their own campus-based versions of the Carnegie Scholars Program.    

And in the scholarly and professional societies we've seen the rise of new conferences, journals, sections of journals, and committee structures for bringing together those who have made serious work on teaching and learning a significant part of their scholarly career.

Crossing all of these is a new organization—the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning—which now has approximately 1000 members, bylaws, officers and committees to enact those bylaws, a very nice web site, an online newsletter, and an annual conference, that attracted 650 participants in 2006 and more than 800 in 2007.

Ok, so we've got fuel, maps, and friends….The question is, where is this journey taking us?  What do we see on the horizon? Here are a few sights that struck me and my Carnegie colleagues over the past year and a half:

§                                 A National Academy of Engineering study (2005) calls for recognition of work on engineering education as research.  

§                                 62% of CAOs say "at my campus it is commonly believed that many aspects of college teaching may be defined as scholarship"  (Rice and O'Meara, 2005).  

§                                 Awards of $1 million over 4 years to 20 Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellows for scholarly projects on T&L.

§                                 Science, in partnership with HHMI, announces (December 2005) a new feature on "scientific approaches to teaching science."

§                                 Bok, in Our Underachieving Colleges, calls for faculty (individually and collectively) to engage in systematic investigations of their own students' learning.  

Well, I don't know how this list strikes you (or what you might want to add to it) but to me it feels like good news:   

But as with many good things, success may have a shadow side, and I believe that is true today of the scholarship of teaching and learning, where it's not too hard to imagine that we could (sorry) miss the boat, for instance by 

•                                 Getting caught up in definitional battles

•                                 Becoming a club, a cult…an "in group" (with "in" language and acronym) . 

•                                 Becoming another specialized research area for a few specialists

(In an essay for Carnegie's Initiative on the Doctorate, Wisconsin historian William Cronon captures my concern here when he writes that "the proliferation of subfields can so divide the intellectual landscape…that critical interconnections among highly related phenomena become completely obscured."  Right:  Taken to the extreme, specialization can be a road back toward pedagogical solitude.) 

•                                 And then there's the related danger of what K. Patricia Cross has described as an "overemphasis" on publication and rewards.

In an email this past summer, Cross writes: "let me be clear that I am a huge fan and supporter of SoTL.  But I worry that the movement may become a victim of its own success….The current overemphasis on publication is shifting the motivation away from the desire to know how one's own teaching is affecting learning, to the desire for external recognition and reward.  Often, I think, more effort goes into preparing something for ‘publication' than something that is ‘useful' in one's own teaching."  

Let me be clear in saying that I am playing a bit of the devil's advocate here.  I came across an idea a few years ago that I found sort of appealing—(from Sufi thinking as I recall) that every virtue, every good idea, has a "near enemy," which is what you get when the good idea is taken to extremes.  Publishing is a good thing, specialized knowledge is often what we need, communities by definition exclude as well as include, and definitions matter….but it's useful, I think, to play out as a kind of thought experiment where each of these "good things" might take us if pursued to the extreme. 

And so my point is step back and ask (here we come back to the title of my talk today) what it will take to move the scholarship of teaching and learning to the center, to make it matter for more faculty and more students, and to harness its considerable power…and to reflect too, as the conference organizers invited me to do, on how centers for teaching can both contribute to and benefit from this move.

The answer, I believe, is right smack in the middle of the name of this organization: it's the "O" in POD, the attention to organizational development.  I don't mean to undervalue the "P"—without that, nothing else probably matters much.  But I do want to explore some organizational directions and roles which might help forge a more productive nexus between the POD community and the community of the scholarship of teaching and learning.   

So, what roles can Centers play?     

1.  First, moving to the center puts a premium on cultivating collaborative work and leadership.

This point goes back to the third part of the journey as I described it earlier.  Faculty have their own very particular questions about their own students' learning (and that's where the energy for the scholarship of teaching and learning comes from) but their work is incredibly enriched when it takes shape in the company of like-minded colleagues doing similar work.  The question is how to do this: it's easy to put people in the same physical space but much harder to create the conditions—when no one has time and there are all sort of centrifugal forces in play—in which they can really learn from one another, where their work can add up to more than the sum of the parts, and where the experience of working with others can build the capacity for leadership in a next venture.    

The good news for both POD and the scholarship of teaching and learning is that there are wonderful answers to these challenges on your campuses.  The model of Faculty Learning Communities that has caught fire through the leadership of Milt Cox and Laurie Richlin, is a wonderful example of what's possible.  Many of the CASTL campuses have developed interesting models as well: St. Olaf has created a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Learning Community: a group of five faculty led by a Center associate in a year-long exploration of a pedagogical question; The University of Wisconsin La Crosse has developed a lesson study project in which faculty work by discipline to document, examine, and refine lessons on key concepts in the field (a model that is spreading through the Wisconsin System); and Western Washington University has established a Teaching/Learning Academy as a vehicle for ongoing conversation and reflection about learning by faculty, staff, and students. 

As I say, these are promising models, and they deserve to be carefully studied: How can work with cohorts of faculty and others, over time, really begin to change institutional culture, to make a more rewarding, productive space for looking at and sharpening the teaching-learning connection?  What other models and possibilities are out there, or need to be?  And what about this idea of including students?  Is the scholarship of teaching and learning an opportunity to bring new and different people "to the center"?        

2. This question leads to a next proposition, which is that the scholarship of teaching and learning can be moved to the center by building knowledge around institutional agendas for student learning. 

One of the challenges faced by teaching centers—or so it seems to me as an outside observer—is the press to be all things to all people, responding to a truly daunting mix of individual interests and needs.  Without abandoning that mission, the scholarship of teaching and learning can be seen as a push (remember the tugboat) toward embracing shared institutional agendas for teaching and learning and building knowledge that can actually shape what goes on for students.    

What I'm describing here is, in fact, precisely the design (or hope) of the newest phase of CASTL, in which campuses applied to be part of a group of institutions focusing not on the scholarship of teaching and learning in general but on some particular shared agenda for student learning that can be advanced with careful inquiry and study: For instance (to list just three of the themes) we have groups of campuses working on
1) undergraduate research, 
2) "affective learning," and  
3) educating students to be socially and politically engaged. 

And I'm sure you can think of other themes. 

The idea is to take seriously the goal of building knowledge by treating the local experience of teaching and learning as a laboratory for organizational learning. 

Of course it wouldn't need to be just one theme.  On any given campus there might be several: a new general education curriculum, a press toward more active learning strategies in the math department, continued work with problem-based learning in the school of business…..

There are questions here about which institutional agendas the scholarship of teaching and learning can really contribute to, the right bite size, the best catalyzing questions, how to organize the effort, and in particular about how to balance the need to welcome all comers, to invite lots of different perspectives and levels of experience….with a role in building and generating knowledge, which necessarily seems to get one into the business of testing out claims, and moving toward (something that teaching centers have often been nervous about) answers that can help shape the way teaching and learning are carried out on the campus.    

3. Maybe one route toward this end is to join forces in strategic partnerships with other campus functions that can shed light on student learning. 

I'm thinking first of assessment.  As I recall from my days as director of the AAHE assessment forum, centers for teaching were understandably wary of any connection with a process that carried connotations of evaluation.  But one of the lessons of the scholarship of teaching and learning is the power of focusing on student learning as a kind of test of teaching.  Tony Ciccone, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee puts it this way in a volume on the Carnegie program: "The scholarship of teaching and learning perspective, which has challenged us to redefine the value of teaching improvement in terms of its effects on student learning, is gradually becoming the lingua franca of professional development in Wisconsin"     

If that's right, there are interesting questions about the relationship between the teaching center and the assessment office (or committee, or whatever) Might there be useful collaboration about the development and testing of tools and resources, for instance?    

What kinds of relationships currently exist and how can they be built upon?

And how about institutional research?  Traditionally, IR offices have kept track of all kinds of things, but student learning was not typically among them.  But at Notre Dame, institutional research was enlisted as a partner in the work of CASTL Scholar Dennis Jacobs who was, with the help of the teaching center, tracking student performance and later success of a large sample of chemistry students.  Are there other examples of this kind of collaboration?  Would those be useful?  Or, how can NSSE data, which typically comes into the institution through IR, be brought to bear in the work of the Center, perhaps as data to set institutional agendas that might then be tackled through collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning efforts?      

4. Moving the scholarship of teaching and learning to the center might also mean translating among different audiences.

One of the tenets of the scholarship of teaching and learning is "go public."  The call is to make the traditionally private work of the classroom available for others to build on, and in so doing to make teaching more like other professions that have ways to preserve what is learned through practice.  The idea is to move from a circumstance in which teaching is a seat of the pants enterprise that we all learn on our own through trial and error to one in which we stand on the shoulders of others.

This has been one of the most powerful and empowering aspects of the scholarship of teaching and learning but also in my view one of the most problematic because in many settings it has been understood exclusively and predictably as a call for publication, narrowly defined, with faculty writing articles about their teaching for peer reviewed scholarly journals.  That's often a very good idea, and I know that some centers are trying to facilitate such efforts, for instance though writing residencies for faculty engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning. 

But there are lots of other kinds of going public we might have in mind, and many of them are less a matter of getting the word out (a la "dissemination" and publication) than of translation.  What role do centers play in translating new work on, say, teaching mathematics so it can be useful to those in physics or, further afield, nursing or English. 

And what role does the teaching center play in translating what goes on in classrooms in ways that speak to more external questions and interests: from administrators, the board of trustees, potential students, policy makers.  I'm thinking in part here, as you would guess, about the Spellings Commission's call for higher education to give an account of itself in terms of impact on student learning, of course that report is simply the most recent of such calls.    

My point is that the scholarship of teaching and learning raises some pretty significant questions about the role of the teaching center in going public with various audiences and stakeholders about how the campus undertakes its educational mission. 

6. And finally, we can move the scholarship of teaching and learning to the center by keeping it open….and keeping it big.

I said earlier that discussion about definitions is not over.  Indeed, I would like to argue that moving the scholarship of teaching and learning to the center means that it may be time to move beyond some of the boundaries and distinctions that have been worked out in the last fifteen years, important as those have been.  The challenge now is to figure out how to focus on the ground underlying all of them. 

And many of you will sense where I'm headed here: This notion of common ground, of a space where different kinds of work can come together is the heart of the notion my colleague and Mary Huber and I have been writing and talking about under the name of the Teaching Commons—a big tent in which those who care about teaching and learning can find one another, and trade ideas and materials in ways that advance the enterprise—a process we take for granted in, say, scientific research but that is only recently becoming possible and expected in teaching and learning.    

And so, as Mary and I describe it in The Advancement of Learning, the teaching commons is "a space for efforts than can be either highly elaborated or more modest, qualitative or quantitative (often both), focused on a large sample, or the work of just one student,  documented on a Web site, shared in a workshop, or reported in a article or book.  All of these, in our big-tent view of the scholarship of teaching and learning, belong in the commons, where they can, as it were, rub up again an even broader range of work, work that is not the scholarship of teaching and learning (ours is a big tent, but it is not the whole universe) but that extends and deepens its possibilities."  

This broad view brings challenges; it may make it harder to claim such work as traditional research and thus complicate the problem of rewards, especially at research universities, where the distinction between scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning has been rather carefully honed.   But it also means that the scholarship of teaching and learning is much more likely to be broadly transformative, to be central rather than marginal, and to do the tough work of moving the larger enterprise.