American Association for Higher Education

Barbara Cambridge

Stephanie Cole

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Marcia Babb

Richard Gale

Pat Hutchings

Cluster Leader Abstracts

The following twelve abstracts provide more detail about the topic, work, potential research and direction of the clusters.

Topic: Organizing to Foster the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Cluster Leader: Illinois State University

Contact: Kathleen McKinney (kmckinne@ilstu.edu)

Abstract: The Illinois State University Cluster, "Organizing to Foster the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," will focus on assisting core members to enhance the support for, value and recognition of, and practical use of SoTL on their campuses. The focus of our cluster leadership would be to assist groups or institutions, especially in our geographical region, that are just beginning or are in the early stages of doing, supporting, and using SoTL (systematic reflection on teaching and learning made public). Examples of general strategies we would describe, model, and facilitate include the following: 1. faculty and staff development activities, 2. electronic support, 3. ways to work with disciplines and departments, and 4. institutional change mechanisms. Our work will utilize a web page, a virtual community, resource materials, a regional conference, disciplinary associations, and meetings with institutional representatives or teams.

Topic: Communities of Practice to Foster the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Cluster Leader: Middlesex Community College

Contact: Donna K. Duffy (duffyd@middlesex.cc.ma.us)

In many higher education institutions across the country faculty are committed to teaching but due to large course loads often seek ways to sustain and energize their daily work. Since the fall of 1998 faculty at Middlesex Community College have created an evolving, interdisciplinary community of practice to address this issue. Participants have shared teaching and learning experiences, focused on a thematic approach to integrating SoTL projects, and studied their craft in a collaborative way over time. Using the developmental model of communities of practice (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002) to frame our work and to deepen our own practices on campus, we plan to accomplish three objectives: (1) connect with others to establish a broader learning community that will improve our collective communities of practice, (2) generate a thematic focus to facilitate growth and continuance of this community, and (3) implement and disseminate activities and materials about the thematic focus.

Topic: Scholarship Supporting the Cognitive-Affective Relationship in Teaching and Learning

Cluster Leader: Oxford College of Emory University

Contact: Patti Owen-Smith (psypos@emory.edu)

Sharon Lewis (slewis@learnlink.emory.edu)

This cluster focuses on the creation of a Center for Cognitive-Affective Learning, that is, learning which involves the heart as well as the head, learning which involves the whole person. “This Center-Without-Walls” will be a collaborative endeavor bringing together faculty, staff, and students from institutions who are interested in holistic educational practices, practices which promote what Alexander Astin has characterized as "affective talent” -- e.g., empathy, a sense of social responsibility, the capacity for teamwork and leadership -- as well as deep and enduring learning. It will encourage the exploration, generation, and dissemination of information regarding the cognitive-affective connection in learning.

Those practices we choose to focus upon may include many already familiar to those engaged in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and to those desiring to do so:

With its core members, Rockhurst will serve the continuing need to provide faculty support for the initiation and ongoing development of teaching and learning projects that fit within the scope of SOTL. Through an annual summer SOTL Institute, the cluster will provide mentoring opportunities for scholars who are at beginning or middle levels of experience in SOTL. Our focus is on helping move scholars toward completion and publication of their SOTL project(s). In addition to the annual summer SOTL Institute, the cluster will develop a variety of supports for scholars and potential scholars that will make their SOTL work easier. These supports include a) developing and sharing resources through use of online tools such as websites and a listserve; b) developing strong institutional systems such as seminars or research circles; and c) linking and networking with national organizations so that current literature can be shared with cluster participants.

This cluster focuses on developing and studying various curricular models that incorporate appropriate technologies, assessments, and pedagogies such as active learning, problem-based learning and service learning in large-enrollment classes in disciplines agreed upon by the cluster members. The cluster will strive to incorporate the basic tenets of SoTL in all its work by giving a public account of our work, thereby opening it to critical review by members of our cluster or other peers, and subsequently disseminating it so that others can use our work to enhance their own efforts. Thus, the goal of the cluster will be to create and disseminate original work that makes a contribution to our deep understanding of various disciplines as well as to the knowledge and practice of other teachers. The purpose for institutional collaboration, then, is to promote cross-disciplinary and inter-institutional discourse about teaching in the context described above and to establish a venue for inter-institutional critical peer review of the results.

Topic: Faculty and Student Collaboration to Support the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Cluster Leader: Western Washington University

Contact: Carmen Werder (carmen.werder@wwu.edu)

This cluster will facilitate national and international conversations on ways that faculty can partner with students as agents of institutional change. Western’s Teaching-Learning Academy (TLA) - a campus-wide forum that includes faculty, students, administrators, and staff - works to collaborate across institutional boundaries and power differentials. Grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning, the TLA’s central mission is to create a community of scholars who work together to understand better the existing learning culture, to share that understanding with others, and to enhance the learning environment for everyone. We are eager to provide leadership and to learn from others about how to sustain and enhance this kind of scholarly, institutional learning community.

Topic: System Support of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Cluster Leader: University of Wisconsin System

Contact: Lisa Kornetsky (lkornetsky@uwsa.edu), Tony Ciccone (ciccone@uwm.edu)

The collaborative UW System/UW-Milwaukee cluster will develop, implement, examine and refine strategies that encourage and build effective collaboration on SoTL among institutions with diverse missions. Our core members include, but are not limited to, two-year, four-year and doctoral campuses of the UW System. We hope to raise the level of understanding of SoTL work on individual campuses, create and nurture connections among campuses with similar interests and needs, support individual and campus SoTL work and disseminate it, and create multi-institutional modes that advance the practice of teaching through scholarly inquiry into student learning.

Our cluster will work to strengthen the connection between the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and improving undergraduate education on a variety of teaching college and university campuses. Our cluster will assist those institutions in building capacity to enhance teaching, encourage scholarly investigations in teaching and learning, and support the public sharing of that scholarship. We will focus on ways to cultivate the campus infrastructure necessary to implement and sustain the SoTL. We will develop communities of practice that encourage strong connections between peer institutions and their academic leaders, faculty, and students.

Topic: Collaboration for Learning Achievement, Success & Sustainability In the First Year

This cluster will support, promote, and share results from scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) efforts working to understand and improve student learning, development, and success during the critical first year of college. Through SoTL projects, participants in this cluster will develop, field-test, and share a portfolio of effective and efficient approaches for assessing, measuring, and documenting student achievement of common first-year learning outcomes – including curricular, co-curricular, and first-year seminar outcomes. Cluster Co-Leaders and Core Member campuses will agree to focus a significant portion of their SoTL efforts on these shared objectives. For example, both PSU and UA have ongoing faculty/staff cohort programs and funding aimed at promoting, supporting, and sustaining SoTL. These SoTL programs, and analogous “faculty learning communities” on Core campuses, will focus efforts over the next three years on identifying and developing common outcomes, standards, assessments, and improvement strategies for first year learning, development, and success.

The University of Michigan (UM) and core members from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC – the big ten plus the University of Chicago) will investigate student learning in the area of multiculturalism. The cluster will examine the effects of multicultural programming (especially interactive theater) on faculty and student attitudes, the effect of intercultural study programs on student learning and attitudes, and the documentation of the learning that takes place in courses focused on multicultural content.

Topic: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in a Research University

Cluster leader: Indiana University/Bloomington

Contact: Jennifer Meta Robinson (jenmetar@indiana.edu)

This cluster will build a scholarly "literature" of diverse types and using various media that is founded on the research and creative skills of faculty content experts who address contextualized questions about the relationship between teaching and learning. This cluster will cultivate scholarly productivity--held to the same standards of rigor, relevance, and review as other kinds of scholarship--by supporting a rich and varied community of scholars of teaching and learning. This community will disseminate its scholarship widely--within and across disciplines, within and among campuses--through electronic forums, special meetings, and recognized academic media, such as journals, books, and conferences. Two kinds of outcomes will arise from this cluster: original scholarly documentation of teaching and learning and successful processes for cultivating SOTL. Both outcomes will be disseminated through special meetings, electronic forums (including discussion forums and electronic libraries), and recognized academic media, such as journals, books, and conferences.

Topic: Advancing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a Networked Community Practice

Cluster leader: Georgetown University

Contact: Randy Bass (bassr@georgetown.edu)

Over the next three years, this cluster seeks to do the following: (1) Document effective hybrid methodologies (online and face-to-face) to facilitate faculty engagement with the scholarship of teaching, especially for doing collaborative inquiry; (2) develop, test, and refine some innovative digital networked environments that might support truly collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning practices; (3) research and document ways that collaborative SoTL inquiry can advance knowledge about student learning in disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; and (4) develop one or more specific projects analyzing how collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning practices, and new networked environments, might both complicate and facilitate recognition and reward of faculty work related to the scholarship of teaching, in different institutional contexts. The framework for the Cluster grows out of the Visible Knowledge Project, a six-year, multi-institutional project exploring the impact of technology on learning, through collaborative scholarship of teaching practices. See http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/.