Teaching as Scholarship
Introduction: The purpose of this presentation is to give you all an idea of the different activities that make up faculty’s day to day work and the pressures that they face, and why teaching sometimes takes a backseat to research, and vice versa. Broadly, I will explain how research and teaching aren’t all that different from each other when we consider them under the umbrella of scholarship, and later in the presentation we will look at an educational approach called scholarly teaching to illustrate how the skills that go into research can be applied to teaching as well. So, our approach to research and teaching can actually be very similar.
Research and Teaching: If we consider that the mission of most educational institutions involves a combination of creating and disseminating knowledge, then research and teaching appear to be two sides of the same coin. Many professors are required to engage in both activities to some degree, and we can acknowledge that good professors will be basically proficient in both.
Operationalization: The way that we value research and teaching has a lot to do with the perceived outcome of both. While the end goal of research is to create a tangible publication, it’s a little harder to measure teaching. Some ways to gauge success as a teacher is by looking at student success, by collecting student evaluations, and by having fellow teachers and education professionals observe and evaluate your teaching. We have to keep in mind that professors can have different job descriptions, which will determine how much time they spend on teaching and research.
Expecting too much: If we consider the increased demands placed on faculty on all fronts, it seems a little unreasonable to expect all professors to be great teachers and great researchers simultaneously. To summarize these demands, I’ll read a brief quote by David Rosowsky: “The expectation for great teaching has given way to great teaching and engagement in scholarship. This has given way to great teaching and great research. This has given way to great teaching and great research and being able to attract significant external funding. We then added new expectations around transferring that research to the broader public (including outreach, professional practice, and community engagement, so-called ‘broader impacts’). We then added expectations around student success, and then student recruitment, and then student retention, and then student satisfaction, and then student mental health and other support services.”
This has to be unsustainable. Because we demand so much from faculty, and because their promotion is often tied to their research output, they often have little time and energy left to teach. I would argue (and I’ve linked a couple of op-eds in my bibliography that have articulated this) that good teaching requires one to be a competent consumer and user of research, but that there is no tangible link between producing research and being a good teacher. If we have to prioritize our expectations of faculty, I would say that those expectations should be based on individual skills and should be written into your job description, so that good teachers can focus on teaching, while good researchers can focus on researching.
Research vs Teaching Faculty: While most professors have to do at least some teaching and some research, we have a few teaching professors at SILS whose job descriptions look different from the regular associate professors. I don’t know specifics on the differences in tenure requirements for teaching and non-teaching professors, but I do know that across UNC teaching professors have to have an annual evaluation with the Center for Faculty Excellence, which they call a teaching peer review. I really like that label because it indicates, to me, that peer review of teaching is of the same quality as peer review of publications. I’m also assuming that student evaluations and student success play a bigger role in tenure for teaching professors. So, if you’re formally designated a “teaching” or a “research” professor, then your success as a professor will be evaluated differently.
Also, there’s been a push in recent years to allow research on teaching to count equally as discipline-based research for tenure. Many professors that focus on teaching will get involved with something called “the scholarship of teaching and learning” or “discipline-based educational research” which is essentially evidence-based research showing how students learn most effectively within specific disciplines. Some professors will conduct this type of research on their own to better inform themselves on how to design courses, and there’s been a push to allow this type of research to count towards tenure. This is one way of making sure that faculty feel encouraged to become better teachers without needing to be designated “teaching faculty.”
Scholarly Teaching: Scholarly teaching takes the traditional idea of teaching as imparting existing content knowledge to students through lecture, and it moves beyond that by encouraging teachers to essentially do their own research and figure out how their students learn best. It ties into this common definition in the way that professors continually make sure that they are teaching effectively so that their students are learning effectively. It’s essentially the opposite of the stereotypical dinosaur professor that has been teaching a class the exact same way with the exact same materials for 30 years and never updates or evaluates it. Scholarly teachers are constantly going through this cycle below by identifying areas in which their students aren’t learning effectively, by experimenting with new strategies to help students learn more effectively in that area, and (this is important) by documenting your outcomes and drawing conclusions from them so that you can share your insights with other teachers. This is the communication part of scholarly communications, and good “scholarly” teachers are always looking at what other people are doing and thinking of ways that other strategies might work for them.
How does this process of scholarly teaching compare to the six more broad steps of creating scholarly work, ie research? The exact words aren’t used, but the process is incredibly similar. I’m hoping to show you, through this comparison, that teaching and research aren’t that different if you take a critical approach to teaching. So, if I was approached by one of those sciency professors that feel like teaching is a waste of time and that they’d rather be conducting research for a tangible publication that will help with promotion, I would encourage them to take this scholarly teaching approach and to think about their teaching as they would a research question or problem to answer. And I would hopefully also be able to tell them that their research into their teaching can also count for tenure, but that depends on the institution.
References
Beard, Virginia and Paula Booke. "Research as Pedagogy: Using Experimental Data Collection as a Course Learning Tool." College Teaching 64, no. 4 (2016):149-157.
Bunnell, Sarah and Daniel Bernstein. "Overcoming Some Threshold Concepts in Scholarly Teaching." The Journal of Faculty Development 26, no. 3 (2012): 14-18.
Faulconer, Emily. "In Support of Scholarly Teaching." Journal of College Science Teaching 48, no. 6 (2019): 7.
Medina, Melissa et al. "Report of the 2011-2012 Academic Affairs Standing Committee: The Evolving Role of Scholarly Teaching in Teaching Excellence for Current and Future Faculty." American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 76, no. 6 (2012): 1-17.
"Peer Review of Teaching Initiative." UNC: Center for Faculty Excellence, https://cfe.unc.edu/teaching-and-learning/peer-review-of-teaching-initiative/.
"Scholarly Teaching." University of Portland, https://www.up.edu/tl/scholarly-teaching/index.html
"Teaching and the Relationship Between Research." https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2492/Teaching-Research-Relationship-Between.html [blog]
"What is Participatory Action Research in Education?" Mills University, https://online.mills.edu/blog/participatory-action-research-in-education/. [blog]