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SoTL at Western calls for a university-wide commitment and
collaboration among faculty, administration, staff and students
in initiating and continuing systematic conversation, reflection,
research and dissemination about teaching and learning that
is made public and open to critique in order to establish
the scholarship of teaching and learning as research that
is as institutionally valued and rewarded as traditional disciplinary
scholarship with the ultimate goals of improved student learning,
teaching effectiveness and enjoyment, faculty development
and the creation of a deeply collegial academic community
of and for teaching and learning.
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The new university initiative, the Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning at Western Carolina University (SoTL at
Western), is a powerful focus upon Western's central
mission of continually improving student learning. SoTL
at  Western
has my full and enthusiastic support and I encourage
all colleges, departments and faculty to become involved
in ways most appropriate and relevant for them. SoTL
at Western has the potential to transform our academic
community and push Western into greater regional, even
national, prominence for the excellence of its faculty
and the ways that faculty guide students in critical
and creative learning experiences. SoTL at Western is
another reason for us to be excited about Western's
future.
Dr. John Bardo, Chancellor.
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"Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, first published in 1990, encouraged universities to recognize four  types of scholarship: discovery, integration, application, and teaching (the research and application of knowledge to improve the teaching- learning process). Faculty can endorse a teacher/scholar model that links scholarship to the students’ teaching-learning experience. The teacher/scholar model is an inclusive one that embraces all forms of scholarship, from basic research to the scholarship of teaching and learning. As teacher/scholars, Western's faculty have a central interest in learning how people learn and in making student learning more dynamic and effective, the goal of SoTL.
Dr. Kyle Carter, Provost
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"For an activity to be designated as scholarship,
it should manifest at least three key characteristics:
it should be public, susceptible to critical review
and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use
by other members of one’s scholarly community.”
"Viewing teaching as scholarly work is essential.
Teachers so often have to carry out their work in isolation
from their colleagues. The result is that those who
engage in innovative acts of teaching do not have many
opportunities to build on the work of others. [The
Scholarship of Teaching] seek[s] to render teaching
public, subject to critical evaluation, and usable
to others in the field."
Lee Shulman, President, Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
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Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning as a Banyan Tree
A banyan tree is a beautiful, tough, spirited
myth of a tree. As it grows, it sends down from its branches
thin fibers that eventually reach the ground and root.
The fibers thicken and begin to support the
branch which can then grow out further and send down more
fibrous threads. These threads are aerial roots growing down
from above and enable the banyan tree to spread. Banyans
have been called trees that walk.
Such roots become new trunks and a single banyan
tree may have many such trunks. In India a large banyan tree
can protect vendors and their goods from the rain and from
the scorching sun under a canopy hundreds of feet in diameter.
School children can have class under its leaves and swing
from its roots.
The process of faculty development in teaching and learning
about learning is like the growth of the banyan tree. As
it first grows, it has a single trunk or focus, but as time
passes and experiences of teaching take deeper root, the
branches of wisdom about teaching and student learning reach
out by sending down new roots of teaching experiments that
sway in the breeze until reaching the ground. The vision
of teaching spreads as the roots deepen and become themselves
new trunks to support further professional development.
The tree of teaching becomes much more than one had ever
imagined. Past, present and future intertwine, as do the
roots and branches, under the flourishing canopy The story
of the tree is as the story of one’s life of teaching,
continually growing and expressing the wisdom inherent in
the necessary risk of such growing.
The banyan tree with its ever-spreading canopy and its every
expanding system of aerial roots, is the symbol of SoTL at
Western. SoTL is that canopy and from it grow the roots of
teaching and learning experiences with students, experimentations,
innovations, research, collaboration, publication or dissemination.
It is a tree and canopy that spreads and deepens simultaneously.
SoTL at Western is the canopy of the banyan tree of the
teaching and learning life at Western Carolina University
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