Every Monday from April to June, the GATA Network will be sharing advice on how to make your summer productive. This week we offer ways to tackle the wealth of literature out there on teaching and learning as part of your summer reading (’cause we all should be reading).

Image courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk, “How many books will you read in your life-time?”

We’re risking building a reputation as a group of literature pushers, but the Network loves to talk about reading. It just so happens that there’s a lot written on teaching and learning, and so (lucky for us) our pastimes tend to collide. Mired in student marking and your own coursework, it’s easy to lose enthusiasm for reading period, let alone tough reading that requires thinking on the side. Be that as it may, if reading could make our jobs as a student teachers/researchers easier, wouldn’t it be worth it? Especially for those of us still gazing in the mirror and wondering if we look “teachery” enough, it might be time to embrace our new-found roles in the classroom by getting informed about this teaching business and what it’s all about. So when things slow down to a summer’s pace, it’s a good idea to make an investment in your understanding and take up some SoTL reading.

What is SoTL?

We talk a lot about “SoTL” often here on Towards Better Teaching, but it’s entirely possible that you have no idea what it stands for, especially you new student teachers. SoTL is short for “the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning”, which is really a term that focuses on sharing best practices in scholarly teaching, which is really about teachers reflecting on what they do in the classroom, which is really about enhancing student learning. If we follow that rabbit hole all the way through, SoTL is a movement that seeks to recognize that teaching within higher education as an object of study rather than a by-product of academic work. Its efforts can be seen in the type of research that exploring teaching, student learning, effective teaching strategies, teacher/student identity, classroom ideologies, and so on. Publishing this research, and even the exploratory and reflective parts that pre-empt it, is the ultimate means to making the work visible and contributing to best practices in teaching and learning.

What’s Worth Reading?

In an effort to save you the trouble of a full-scale literature review, we’ve collected some fast-tracks to important readings below. In some cases these links will provide you with titles that can help you narrow your reading to the most influential SoTL. Others will do the reviewing all themselves. The choices abound!

A SoTL Reading List

SoTL is like anything else in that everyone you talk to about it has a different list of important texts on the subject. Still, there is pretty wide-spread agreement on some texts, such as Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990) and much of Mary Tyler Huber, Keith Trigwell, and Pat Hutchings’ work. Below are some helpful guides in building a reading list for crash coursing SoTL:

• The Centre for Teaching and Learning keeps a small collection of SoTL texts in the CTL library, open to instructors, graduate students, and staff, located in 2103 Lambton Tower. Many of the texts you’ll find here offer simple, practical, evidence-based advice.
• The Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) provides a list of “seminal literature” in their online introduction, “What is SoTL?” The website also lists some important publications on SoTL from a Canadian perspective, as well as some helpful hints to databases and other collections, under “Links and Resources“.
• Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching and Learning has a separate website, my.vanderbilt.edu/sotl, with two important functions: 1.) it provides a brief but detailed overview of SoTL itself, and 2.) it connects to the Center’s SoTL Research Guide, developed in partnership with Vanderbilt’s Jean & Alexander Heard Library.

The Blog Crowd

The reality is that most of us are too heavily involved in our degrees/coursework/Game of Thrones to actually build a reading list and dedicate a portion of our busy days to SoTL reading. Chances are, however, that you still find time each day to cruise your favourite blogs for the latest happenings. Why not add a few SoTL blogs to your daily routine? We maintain a blogroll (scroll right) for just such purpose. Here are some other important blogs:

• As a start, there are lists of popular SoTL blogs out there, like George Mason University’s Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence’s list of SoTL resources.
• It’s no secret that the GATA Network is a big fan of GradHacker (also on the blogroll), which is really a resource for graduate students in general, but often explores student teacher issues. The benefit of GradHacker is that much of its content is written by actual student teachers going through much of what you might be experiencing in your GA/TA posting.
• SoTL Canada is a new useful blog with a distinctly Canadian focus. The blog also functions as a meeting place for SoTL scholars around the country, which is a good place to build a community of practice with your Canadian peers.

Quick Guides

There some other ways to expose yourself to SoTL literature without actually reading book after book after book. Many institutions have put together useful, downloadable guides in an attempt to synthesize the research for your benefit. You can find many of these on the STLHE website. Don’t forget to check out our Teaching and Learning Handbook, too!

CELT

The journal for Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching (CELT) has strong roots at the University of Windsor and publishes works connected to the STLHE annual meeting. Its issues tend to have a fair amount of GA/TA content mixed among wider concerns in teaching and learning. Its articles are also practice-based, which means they’re more like show and tell and less like reading philosophy in a foreign language.

More Resources

Have a question you can’t find in the literature? Interested in a topic but don’t know what’s/who’s been written/writing on it? Try the CTL’s “Links and Resources” page under Teaching and Learning Resources. Or ask us at gata@uwindsor.ca.