New Directions for
Teaching and Learning
Catherine M. Wehlburg
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Number 139 • Fall 2014
Jossey-Bass
San Francisco
MULTIDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION: RESEARCH AND RELATIONSHIPS
Karen Weller Swanson (ed.)
New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 139
Catherine M. Wehlburg, Editor‐in‐Chief
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Since 1980, New Directions for Teaching and Learning (NDTL) has brought a unique blend of theory, research, and practice to leaders in postsecondary education. NDTL sourcebooks strive not only for solid substance but also for timeliness, compactness, and accessibility.
The series has four goals: to inform readers about current and future directions in teaching and learning in postsecondary education, to illuminate the context that shapes these new directions, to illustrate these new direction through examples from real settings, and to propose ways in which these new directions can still be incorporated into other settings.
This publication reflects the view that teaching deserves respect as a high form of scholarship. We believe that significant scholarship is conducted not only by researchers who report results of empirical investigations but also by practitioners who share disciplinary reflections about teaching. Contributors to NDTL approach questions of teaching and learning as seriously as they approach substantive questions in their own disciplines, and they deal not only with pedagogical issues but also with the intellectual and social context in which these issues arise. Authors deal on the one hand with theory and research and on the other with practice, and they translate from research and theory to practice and back again.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has been a movement in higher education for many years. This volume of New Directions for Teaching and Learning has as its focus SoTL and how collaborations among and between disciplines can strengthen education and the ways in which students are taught. The community of scholars that exists at any institution can provide a fertile ground for interdisciplinary collaboration that can enliven the educational process and the research that supports it. The chapters within this volume are written by individuals from many different disciplines who teach and who use SoTL to inform their own practice and as a method to share what they have done with others.
Catherine M. Wehlburg
Editor‐in‐Chief
The impact of the movement we have come to call the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) can be measured in terms of its products and the processes that yielded them. In terms of products, we now have a significant number of journals, some with an international focus. We have an impressive range of influential books written by Carnegie scholars and many others. We look to these and other products to make our teaching more scholarly.
Equally important for me are the processes by which these publications and other products come to be. In this regard, I have always considered it of paramount importance that what we might call distal work—that which is conducted at other institutions around the world—be complemented by local work conducted in our own backyards—our home institutions and departments. This brings us to Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Research and Relationships.
Local work has local relevance and authenticity, and these are extremely valuable for scholarly approaches to teaching. Even more vital is the fact that engaging in local SoTL work builds communities of practice in this area and adds measurably to an institution's teaching culture. To this end, those of us who work in SoTL envision institutions in which SoTL work is the norm. It is an integral part of what a reflective institution and its practitioners do. This is why I am so encouraged by Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Research and Relationships. Here we see reflection and research about teaching brought to life at one institution.
As we read Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Research and Relationships, I invite us to ask if this type of SoTL community is thriving at our institutions. We might also ask what it takes to create and sustain such a community. Certainly, administrative support is essential. With this in mind, it is very encouraging to see that one of the contributing authors in Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Research and Relationships was Mercer University's provost, Wallace Daniel.
Of course, if volumes like Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Research and Relationships help build a community, we must ask who is included in such a community. The broad range of disciplines represented in this volume is very impressive in this regard. I am especially pleased to see that librarians’ perspectives are included. We have much to learn from librarians regarding teaching and SoTL, and it is very encouraging to read in that chapter that librarians want to be part of the learning processes that SoTL affords.
It is worth noting that a number of authors in this volume address the notion of signature pedagogies. Signature pedagogies provide both an important context for SoTL and an opportunity to look critically at that pedagogy. The authors of this volume are to be applauded for doing both.
It is one thing to describe and affirm common practice as found in signature pedagogies. It is something else again to use SoTL methods to examine, and perhaps challenge, what may be the status quo, as a number of these authors have done, especially in the area of student supervision. This examination takes some courage, and it is why I am so impressed with the chapters in this volume that take this on. This is how we affirm who we are as teachers and improve at the same time.
It is also impressive that some of the authors in Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Research and Relationships describe processes in which data are collected and responded to before a course ends. This practice of what one author calls “real-time instructional feedback” (Jane West, Chapter 5 of this volume, 57) requires a considerable degree of organization and timeliness. It is an excellent practice, not just for the immediate benefits to students but also for what they see modeled in their instructors.
Indeed, this volume provides models for all of us to follow. When we do, Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Research and Relationships will get even more of us talking.
Gary Poole
This chapter provides the structure of a Community of Learners using a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning framework.
Karen Weller Swanson
Indeed, educators as well as students construct meaning of their experiences; and just as the ways students interpret events shape their reactions to these events, so too do the ways educators interpret pedagogical models shape whether and how they choose to use them in their own practice.
Baxter Magolda and King (2004, 303)
I am constantly seeking equilibrium. I want balance, but some teaching days are anything but balanced. I planned, I expected good class interaction and it was ok but not what I had hoped for in my mind's eye. On other occasions, a risky lesson plan evolves into an exceptional teaching and learning experience. It turns out I'm not alone. Faculty across campus are asking the same questions and having similar experiences.
Mercer University is a Baptist affiliated private university in Atlanta, Georgia. The Atlanta campus consists primarily of professional, graduate programs. The university does not have a Center for Teaching and Learning, yet several colleges (Nursing, Pharmacy and Health Service, Education, and Continuing and Professional Studies) promote the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in their tenure and promotion process. There is no centralized office or designated faculty to provide professional development, organize resources, or provide teaching and learning support.
Two workshops were offered to any interested faculty to begin conversations based on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning model. These sessions were designed to inform participants on how to use course management software, such as Blackboard, to gather data from their students to explore the student learning experience. The goals were to demonstrate how to use adult development and learner-centered literature in any discipline and to analyze classroom data for the purpose of creating rich experiences. The purpose for choosing adult learning theory was to provide faculty outside of education a framework in which to situate their thinking about graduate students. The purpose for choosing learner-centered literature was in response to faculty struggling with the practical issues of modifying the traditional lecture delivery model. The second workshop continued the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) model but with a specific emphasis to practically meet the requirements of publication and presentation for promotion and tenure.
A third workshop was specifically requested by the directors of the physician assistant department and was attended by faculty also from Physical Therapy and Nursing to provide discipline-specific research ideas around teaching and learning. Examples were chosen from medical journals, and those faculty held discussions on topics specific to health professions.
The result from these three sessions was a group of six faculty committed to researching their practice. Each was invited to write conference presentations from their own work and one collectively about our interdisciplinary collaborations. As a result, we presented at two international conferences. The next step for our collective group was to author the chapters in this volume for the purpose of working systematically through their ideas, data, and literature to better understand and develop answers to their pedagogical questions. Table 1.1 identifies the authors, their discipline, the theoretical framework they identified in their chapter, and the research methods used to investigate their teaching.
Table 1.1 List of Authors, Disciplines, Theoretical Framework, and Methodology
| Author | Discipline/Context | Theoretical Framework | Research Method |
| Jeannette R. Anderson; Niamh M. Tunney | Physical Therapy | Scholarship of Teaching and Learning—Shulman | Mixed Methods |
| Caroline M. Brackette | Clinical Mental Health Counseling | Mixed Methods | |
| Wallace Daniel | Past Provost and Professor of History | Communities of Learners | Narrative |
| Patricia J. Kelly | Physician Assistant | Steven Brookfield's Critical Incident Model | Qualitative |
| Peter Otto | University Libraries | Information Literacy Standards | Narrative; Exemplars |
| Karen Weller Swanson | Education | Scholarship of Teaching and Learning | |
| Jane West | Education | Steven Brookfield's Critical Incident Model (modified) | Qualitative Questionnaire |
A community of learners can define itself in a multitude of ways. Wenger (1998) suggests that it includes four elements of social participation: meaning, practice, community, and identity (5). This chapter will demonstrate how we developed a community of learners using SoTL. A community of learners supports individual interest and motivation and scaffolds relationship and research.
The capacity for our conversations is exponential. Our goal is to add a new collaborator within our departments to the conversation. An interesting example is at a lunch meeting a faculty member from Physical Therapy asked about fort and house toys (broom, mop, and dust pan) she had seen in the meeting room in the college of Education. The toys belonged to a faculty member who was also a play therapist and had been previously used in the Early Childhood courses to teach play. These items were no longer used in the curriculum. As a result the faculty members from Education and from Physical Therapy now coteach a course with children to new PT graduate students. They expect to publish from this experience and have received several small grants.
A practical point was for our group to read common texts to frame our conversations. The texts we have used up to this point include McKinney's (2007) Enhancing Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The Challenges and Joys of Juggling, which provided an overview of the entire process and background for SoTL. It also provided the language that individuals needed to add to articles and presentations. One of the hurdles in embracing SoTL is learning a new language in which to talk about disciplinary passion in terms of teaching and learning. A second text was Regan Gurung, Nancy Chick, and Aeron Haynie's (2009) Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind. This book stimulated valuable conversation in that for disciplines such as education and pharmacy, signature pedagogies were easily identifiable and articulated in the literature. However, for areas such as Physical Therapy and Physician Assistant a signature pedagogy was more a compilation from other related areas. Both books jump started our conversations and work on individual and joint conference presentations. As a result, the chapters presented by individual authors in this book were constructed with support.
Our third book was Knud Illeris's (2009) Contemporary Theories of Learning; the purpose behind this choice was to assist noneducation faculty to find a learning theory that best fit their discipline and personal teaching philosophy. A faculty member may appreciate that a pedagogical strategy worked well but not understand why or what to frame the strategy within to connect it to learning. Equally challenging is when a strategy does not go as planned and understanding if more scaffolding was required or the method was mismatched to the desired outcomes. Knud's book provides 16 theorists' learning frameworks to spark the thinking of faculty to better understanding their teaching. In terms of our group, we will be working through the theories that faculty find most useful. We may or may not delve into all 16; again I value the authenticity of faculty to determine what they need.
Many faculty individually read Brookfield's (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher and have incorporated Critical Incident Questionnaires (CIQ) into their classes and research. I will explain Brookfield's CIQ since several members began with this technique for assessing the student experience in a course. A CIQ initially asks five questions to help students articulate their learning experience:
- At what moment in class this week did you feel most engaged with what was happening?
- At what moment in class this week were you most distanced from what was happening?
- What action that anyone (teacher or student) took in class this week did you find most affirming or helpful?
- What action that anyone (teacher or student) took in class this week did you find most puzzling or confusing?
- What about the class this week surprised you the most? (115)
After the questionnaires are collected, the faculty member reads and collates the responses. The following class session, the feedback is given back to the students in the form of a PowerPoint with synthesis of all the responses. Subsequently, there is a conversation about how individual students are experiencing the class community and curriculum. This is powerful for students to understand that what worked for them may not have worked well for other students to learn the content and vice versa. The feedback can lead to students and faculty developing a community, problem solving, and cocreating a course. Brookfield's goal is to create, in essence, a community of learners within each course. He provides six reasons to ask these reflective questions in a course:
Future texts will be determined by the conversation and what others in the group may find and contribute. Our goal for the 2013–2014 academic year is to incorporate L. Dee Fink's (2003) Creating Significant Learning Experiences into our syllabus construction as a way to more systematically evaluate courses and better value all that the students and faculty bring to the learning experience. I would expect that over time our group will be less tied to reading similar texts and begin to discuss across texts for similarities and differences. I can imagine a text floating from office to office as we cross-pollinate much like Brookfield's Critical Incident Model was a fit for many faculty members.
SoTL was chosen as our framework because the literature addresses the pressures of higher education to publish consistently and teach well. The emerging theoretical theory is dynamic and inclusive versus exclusive. In 1990, Ernest Boyer stated that higher education needed to “move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader, more capacious meaning, one that includes four distinct but interrelated dimensions: discovery, integration, application, and teaching” (16). Our group embraced their four dimensions; we were individually trying to answer our questions systematically. Therefore, SoTL was a perfect fit for our conversations. A second reason for choosing SoTL was that our deans, provosts, and president valued teaching and were promoting scholarship. SoTL provided a common language to translate our accomplishments to those who were in a position to make decisions.
Shulman (1999) identifies three attributes of scholarship that support the community of learners’ organization and goals of our group. Scholarship should be public. Publicity is not limited to publications but even modestly lunch with our group or joint conference presentations. Scholarship should be an “object of critical review and evaluation by members of one's community” (15). This is provided through our meetings with the purpose of asking critical questions and possibilities. The “members of one's community begin to use, build upon, and develop those acts of mind and creation” (15). For example, many of us use Brookfield's Critical Incident Questionnaire after two members had success using the student feedback to immediately adjust their teaching.
Shulman (1999) refers to public critique of scholarship of teaching as a way of making it community property. He suggests that SoTL is a way of “recording, displaying, examining, investigating and building more powerful pedagogies for dealing with the challenges presented by the pathologies of learning, which are pandemic in our classrooms and institutions” (16). Our group shares an institution's set of boundaries and possibilities, but we each have disciplinary language, signature pedagogies, and habits of mind. So our common space is pedagogy and the systematic approach to studying it. The pedagogical thread that connects the members of our group is a SoTL research agenda. Our interdisciplinary discussions are sensibly noncompetitive because our content expertise is not challenged. We each employ a desire to engage students, raise student learning results, and enjoy our teaching.
A practical example is when a faculty member from Pharmacy says “I have an idea to redesign an exam.” We talk about the impetus to redesign, the impact on learning, and the measurement of success for both the students and the faculty member. Subsequently, we examine the test results and student feedback about the new testing process. This is a development of SoTL acts of mind and creation within Pharmacy and for this faculty member. He innately asks good teaching and learning questions, and our group offers a place for him to develop a systematic way to examine those ideas. He will eventually present his findings to us and at a national professional conference.
Another example is when Niamh Tunney, from Physical Therapy, received a scoliosis cadaver. Her question was “How do I use a grossly twisted spine to teach normal muscular development?” It wasn't that she didn't have normal spinal cadavers, but it was an opportunity to show how the body reacts. This conversation is still under development and consideration but will result in an invaluable opportunity for Niamh and her doctoral students. She has also since finished this project and preparing for publication.
The SoTL experience has been powerful in building campus relationships with individuals who share a love and priority for teaching and learning. We enjoy each other as professionals and people. Our motivation continues to be a nonthreatening pedagogical and research-based understanding of our content and students. My hope is that we remain diligent in terms of always asking vital questions about learning. We value the authenticity of our group, our conference presentation opportunities, and mostly the support we provide to encourage each other to sit down and write.
The Community of Learners chapter was written by Mercer University's past provost, Dr. Wallace Daniel. He sets a historical context for powerful pedagogical experiences and the possibility of creating a vision for an institution. Each of the following chapters follows a format in which the author identifies the research question for their teaching, the signature pedagogy for the discipline, the study, and conclusions. The overall theme among the five disciplines is that graduate students articulate valuable thinking about their thinking. Giving the space to provide feedback has changed the teaching for next week and subsequent students. Each faculty member creates a learning community for each class. The last chapter is written by our librarian who tirelessly found creative ways to support our new pathway. He created a new section of the online library for us to display our new resources, bought texts we could share, and provided a sleuth-like ability to identify what we could not yet formulate.
Our intention is to use SoTL to support our professional growth, improve our teaching, and better understand student learning. We expect that our scholarship will expand, shift, and become increasingly collaborative as our positive outcomes make us progressive both professionally and personally.