As the community of SoTL scholars has grown across Canada and around the world, however, there has been a growing sense that SoTL work has been dominated by the epistemologies, philosophies, and research methods of the social sciences, a view that has been supported by SoTL journal editors and resources dedicated to introducing faculty to SoTL (Gurung and Schwartz, 2009; Jarvis and Creasey, 2009; McKinney and Chick, 2010; Chick, 2012). To quote Nancy Chick (2012) in a recent book on the current state of SoTL in the disciplines, “while many well-known SoTL leaders come from humanities backgrounds …, the on-the-ground work largely marginalizes the practices of their disciplines.”
The question then follows: “How does the apparent under-representation of (arts and) humanities-based disciplines affect expectations for SoTL, from norms for research design and methodology to the genre and style of its products?” (McKinney and Chick, 2010).
This special issue of The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning seeks to explore this question, and also to provide examples of SoTL work that uses the genres, approaches, research designs, theoretical and epistemological frameworks, and methodologies of the arts and humanities to explore key topics in teaching and learning.
For the complete call for submissions, please click – Special Issue Call for Submissions
For more information, please contact Brad Wuetherick (brad [dot] wuetherick [at] usask [dot] ca).
The following was posted on H-Net: We welcome manuscripts on teaching any historical subject, time period, or region. Here are some questions that may be addressed... other questions as well as proposals from diverse perspectives are encouraged. 1. What pedagogical or andragogical approaches should be used in teaching an undergraduate or graduate history class? 2. As our understanding of history and historical development changes, how should we adjust our teaching and learning facilitation methods to reflect these changes? 3. What types of methods work best at each level--high school, community college, undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate? 4. How appropriate or effective are currently broadly popular methods, such as cooperative learning (i.e. group work), service learning, and educational games, for the history classroom? 5. How much should we adapt old methods or move to completely new approaches? In other words, how and how far should we teach beyond the textbook? 6. How can we assess the relative effectiveness of new methods for teaching history? 7. What do we teach and/or should we teach in a secondary school history class: memory, heritage, traditional indigenous histories, counterfactual history, or reading and writing? How much history should be required in a school curriculum? 8. What educational technology is useful for teaching history? 9. How can we effectively use educational technology to promote historical understanding? 10. What is the effect of computer-based technology on historical scholarship and teaching? Who May Submit: Manuscripts are sought from those whose experiences and methods in the college or high school classroom have produced meaningful ways to teach history, whether in the traditional classroom, through on-line courses, or a combination of class meetings and web-based work. Submissions may be in the form of research reports, case studies, research in progress, or theoretical papers. Please identify your submission with keyword: HISTORY Submission deadline: Thursday, 28th February 2013. Submission Procedure: http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/rufen1.htm Dr. Gary Kieffner, AEQ Teaching History Feature Editor Assistant Professor, Department of History The Fiji National University, Lautoka Campus Tel. 679-6667-533 ext. 7017 gary [dot] kieffner [at] fnu [dot] ac [dot] fj< javascript:DeCryptX('hbsz/ljfggofsAgov/bd/gk')>
See www.bitingduckpress.com for a forthcoming new reference book on how to study history.
“Making Sense in History” provides a guide for history students and teachers. This work provides descriptions and analysis of several approaches for writing history. While the focus is on how history has been written, the methods that are researched in the book are suitable as a reference work for college-level history students and teachers. It provides an overview of how research has been undertaken, and how authors throughout history have written history. Most works of this type deal with either the philosophy of history, methodology for writing history, or historiography. This work combines all of these elements into one work. Students are therefore provided with a broad overview of what history is, along with a chapter on practical skills that students can refer to while doing their own research, reading to evaluate sources, how to write a research paper, and how to write a critical book review. This e-book will help the new generation of students and teachers with learning and teaching history course work. The author is a history professor who draws on his own experiences with teaching and research to make the content vibrant and interesting to younger college students.
John Tagg, co-author with Robert Barr of “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Higher Education,” will be speaking at Indiana University on Friday 15 October 2010. Tagg’s talk is entitled “Dispelling the Fog of Learning through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” The event will be held at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center from 11:00am to 12:30pm.
Dr. Robert J. Thompson, of Duke University’s department of Psychology and Neuroscience, is starting Indiana University’s SOTL events for the 2010 – 2011 year. The title of Dr. Thompson’s talk is Reframing Assessment: Teaching as an Iterative Process of Inquiry. Below is the description of the talk, set to be delivered Friday September 17th at noon in the Indiana Memorial Union’s Dogwood Room. Interested parties should register here.
“The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has increased our understanding of the learning process and developed promising pedagogical approaches and classroom practices. Because of those efforts, it is now possible for research universities to embrace a culture of experimentation and evidence when it comes to improving undergraduate education. As members of the teaching and learning community, we must continue to build upon teaching as a process of inquiry, reframe assessment for improvement rather than accountability; and continuously engage in systematic, iterative processes to improve the quality of teaching and learning. That is, we need to commit ourselves to the self-evaluative and self-correcting processes common to all scholarship; a process that has also become a cornerstone of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Insights and evidence of promising approaches to teaching as inquiry are presented from the Teagle and Spencer Foundations project, “Systematic Improvement of Undergraduate Education at Research Universities.” Led by Robert J. Thompson, participating faculty members at 13 major research universities, including Indiana University, are focusing on teaching and learning initiatives that develop the core intellectual skills of a liberal education: writing and critical thinking. Thompson will discuss the work being produced over a three-year period and how all 13 universities are developing initiatives that specify student learning outcomes, evaluate those outcomes and then use the results to revise and improve educational practices.”
Checkout a post on edwired, T. Mills Kelly’s blog about all things education, history, and digital. Kelly notes that while end-of-semester course surveys have gotten better, they still do not focus enough on assessing what student’s learned. Further, Texas A&M University is considering offering “successful” instructors monetary incentives to improve teaching performance. Click here to read all about it.