A recent scholarly analysis comparing student outcomes in lecture and “active learning” courses has re-energized debates about whether lecture is an effective, or even an ethical, teaching method in higher education. In May 2014 Scott Freeman and colleagues published the…

What defines high quality undergraduate research mentoring? We asked participants in the Center’s research seminar on Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research and other scholars focused on undergraduate research to share key characteristics of high quality mentoring. httpvh://youtu.be/u8c4wMdRc08 As their responses highlight, high…

How do international teacher-scholars define undergraduate research and inquiry? We asked participants in the Center’s research seminar on Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research to share their definitions: httpvh://youtu.be/XTx6G_M-z5k Many of our seminar scholars begin with the Council on Undergraduate Research…

According to the most recent statistics, nearly 300,000 U. S. students now study abroad, while close to one million students from other nations are studying abroad in the U. S. In an upcoming Center for Engaged Learning (CEL) seminar on…

This post is adapted from chapter 5 of A. Cook-Sather, C. Bovill, and P. Felten, Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching (Jossey-Bass, 2014). Decades of research indicates that close interaction between faculty and students is one of the…

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…

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.

Scholarship of teaching and learning can have an effect on multiple levels. While SoTL can be a source of ideas and part of an individual scholarly agenda, it also has the potential to foster change on larger levels. One person’s research can inspire a whole department to try new ways of working with students. One department’s work can serve as a template for colleagues across campus. A cluster of SoTL scholars in a single field can lead the way to transformation of teaching within a discipline. And all of that work, on all of those levels, yields insights about teaching and learning that should be part of regional, national, and international discussions about higher education policy. SoTL scholars can become public intellectuals, and together we can advocate for the importance of faculty and student voices in decision-making about the future of higher education.

What happens when you ask three scholars to explore learning spaces from their unique individual and institutional perspectives? Audience members are challenged to reconsider their understandings of physical, program-level, and online learning spaces, along with their expectations for conference plenaries. The Friday, October 4, 2013, Plenary at ISSOTL 2013 featured TED-style talks by Thomas Horejes (Gallaudet University), anthony lising antonio (Stanford University), and Siân Bayne (University of Edinburgh). More information about the speakers and their talks is provided below the video.

There is a tendency to view situated research such as SOTL as an attenuated or diminished form of scholarship when contrasted with the mainstream kinds of research published in social science or educational research journals. Traditional research aims to contribute to theory, to achieve generalized findings and principles that are not limited to the particulars of setting, participants, place and time. Situated research is always reported with its full particulars and seeks to describe, explain and evaluate the relationships among intentions, actions and consequences in a carefully recounted local situation. It is therefore seen as contributing less to “knowledge.”

I shall argue that the search for generalizations and principles that transcend participants and contexts is a vain quest. Lee Cronbach observed that “generalization decay.” Jerome Kagan recently called generalization, in both the social and life sciences, “insidious.” Even the gold standard, experimental studies such as clinical trials with randomly assigned treatment and control groups, are often of little value at the level of generalization, but potentially useful when analyzed in their particulars. Situated studies of teaching and learning will emerge as the new mainstream, the gold standard for educational scholarship. SOTL is not at the margins, but at the center.