"George Bernard Shaw's famous
maxim - 'He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.'
-- encapsulates the low esteem in which teaching is
often held... No other activity takes as much of our
time and yet is as ill rewarded within institutions
and professional disciplines...
"Yet... there is plenty of evidence that...
faculty care quite passionately about it (teaching)...
For surely if we think teaching is so important,
then it is worth paying more attention to how it
is done, how it works, and what good teaching looks
like... In addition, since reward structures are
so firmly entrenched around what we call scholarship,
then a "scholarship of teaching" would make it at
least more likely that teaching was rewarded - whether
in better pay or better job mobility.
"As Lee Shulman has rightly observed, one of
the key characteristics of scholarship is that it
must be "public" and hence susceptible to critical
review by others within a scholarly community...
a friend... suggested that we know remarkably little
about what our colleagues (particularly our senior
colleagues) do in the classroom... Thus, I would
argue that one of the simplest and most important
first steps we can take toward creating a scholarship
of teaching (and improving teaching) is to make our
teaching more public.
Historians--and other scholars--routinely spend
hundreds or thousands of hours of research and reflection
to produce a great book or article. We should not
expect that great work in the scholarship of teaching
to take any less. When I teach about the history
of the recent past, I tell my students that one of
the greatest dangers is that they think that they
already know what happened and why. Similarly, in
approaching the scholarship of teaching, we have
to rid ourselves from the preconception that we already
know the answers about teaching because we have done
so much of it. If we can pursue the scholarship of
teaching with the same rigor as the best scholarship
of history, then that the scholarship of teaching
- and hopefully the practice of teaching -- will
gain some of the respect that it so richly deserves.
- Roy Rosenzweig
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