As described in last week’s post, the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer highlights teaching practices that promote writing transfer. These include: Constructing writing curricula and classes that focus on the study of and practice with concepts that enable students to analyze expectations…

George Kuh (2008) identifies Writing-Intensive Courses as a high-impact educational practice – a practice that facilitates both student retention and engagement. The Association of American Colleges and Universities describes Writing-Intensive Courses as “emphasiz[ing] writing at all levels of instruction and across the curriculum, including final-year projects. Students are encouraged to produce and revise various forms of writing for different audiences in different disciplines.”
Yet what do higher education stakeholders know about supporting student writing across the curriculum? How can universities best prepare students to write “for different audiences in different disciplines”? How can general education courses equip students with knowledge and strategies for writing in their majors and beyond? Writing transfer research tackles these questions.

This post is adapted from C. Johansson and P. Felten, Transforming Students: Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pages 5 and 13-15. Transformative learning has been the subject of considerable scholarship over the past forty…

Sharing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects online is not a new concept. The University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence has a well established portfolio gallery and the Elon Teaching and Learning Partnership highlights SoTL projects by secondary and post-secondary school faculty – just two examples of SoTL online. Yet what would it look like if the SoTL community embraced online tools to disseminate research more quickly and more broadly, while also facilitating peer review of projects?

Imagine an online resource that cataloged Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) studies from across global contexts. Now imagine if you could search that archival site to find not only the key findings of studies but also rich contextual information about where each was conducted. If you could, through one online tool, aggregate all the SoTL studies conducted in educational contexts like yours, how might you use the data? How might the aggregated results inform your future scholarship? Your research-informed practices?

Association of American Colleges & Universities, Washington, D.C., January 25, 2014 Session facilitators: Peter Felten & Jessie L. Moore, Center for Engaged Learning, Elon University (U.S.) Research panelists: Michael Reder, Connecticut College (U.S.) Luke Millard, Birmingham City University (U.K.) Jeffrey Coker and Desiree…

From college-to-career readiness discussions to professional networks to publications on teaching, higher education stakeholders are witnessing steadily increasing calls for evidence-based teaching. Yet what do policy makers, administrators, and faculty/academic staff mean by “evidence-based”? Lee Shulman suggests that our understanding of…

As Lee Shulman notes, one exciting characteristic of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is that it has evolved. It has a rich history sparked by a core group of scholars and extended by an international community. Where did SoTL start? Briefly…

Questions about the value of higher education and governmental focus on its costs continue to filter into discussions about colleges and universities. From Our Underachieving Colleges (Derek Bok, 2006) to Academically Adrift (Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, 2011) to news stories around the globe, higher education’s status quo is being called into question… Fortunately, a growing number of scholars are recognizing the potential of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to change campus cultures about student learning.

One of the key characteristics of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is publicly sharing “both the process and the products of inquiry” (Felten, 2013). While faculty develop writing strategies for their disciplinary scholarship as they advance through their degree programs and careers, SoTL writing requires faculty to learn how to write about classroom practice, pedagogies, and evidence of student learning – often unfamiliar writing realms. For many faculty, their early efforts at this type of writing invoke challenges regarding genre, voice, and expertise (Cambridge, 2004). What, then, can universities do to support faculty embarking on SoTL writing projects, and how can faculty position themselves to make this transition successfully?