Expanding Our Vision of Indiana University’s Research Mission: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

George E. Walker, Vice President for Research and Dean of the University Graduate School

This text is the slightly modified version of the talk given to the American Association for Higher Education, Washington, DC, December 4, 1999.

It is truly a pleasure and a privilege to be here this morning. I’ve been in higher education for more than 30 years, and it seems to me that quite frequently something wonderful like this initiative occurs that makes me very proud to be part of the academic community. The institutions represented here have a special commitment to excellence in learning, making it a particular honor for me to be with you.

I would first like to briefly acknowledge the leadership that my colleagues at Indiana University (such as Moya Andrews, Eileen Bender, Barbara Cambridge, Ray Smith, and Samuel Thompson) have provided in the area of the scholarship of teaching. The scholarship of teaching steering committee at Indiana University has played a pivotal role in our local initiative in this area. They have identified scholars in this area and have publicly encouraged their work. They have realized that scholars need different kinds of help such as mentoring, resources, and adequate time for research, and have worked to provide the appropriate support. They have recognized that this scholarship is central to the mission of a research university and have begun a series of public occasions that provide information and platforms for discussion. My hat goes off to them for their outstanding contributions.

This morning I want to talk a little bit about my personal experience in teaching and research, which has led to my belief that the scholarship of teaching is very important to our institutions. I will mention some ways we are working at Indiana University to provide opportunities for those interested in the scholarship of teaching, as examples of how each of us, as Presidents, Provosts, Vice Presidents, Deans and Faculty, can work together internally to facilitate that activity.

Let me start first on a personal note. When I was a little boy, I was an only child in a rural community, and one of things that I would do to entertain myself before I went to sleep was to daydream. Every night I’d decide which of my ongoing daydream stories I was going to “watch,” and for a half hour or 45 minutes before I went to sleep, I would continue that story. It was as though the daydream had a life of its own, with characters who developed independently of my will. Believe me, it wasn’t worth publishing, but to me it was exciting. It was my way of entertaining myself when I was a very young child, and it is something that I remember very fondly in terms of my development.

I also remember as a young child being intrigued by the difference between humans and animals. Whenever an animal would do something, people would say, “that’s instinct,” and when people would do things, they would say, “that’s learning, or, that’s intelligence.” I always wondered if what I myself was doing was instinct or learning, and how I might understand the difference. I decided as a youngster that if I could do something differently, or if I could take something that my parents said, such as, “Don’t you know what it means to behave, George?” and think about it and apply it in a different way, then that would probably mean it was not just instinct. And that was the little rule that I made for myself: you have learned something when you can apply it in a substantially different way.

The daydreaming and application habits have been the basis for my scholarly career. I’m a theoretical physicist, and like most of you, I’ve spent most of my life outside of administration as a researcher and a teacher. One of the things I found very early in my own personal learning was that if I tried to memorize things, I couldn’t use them effectively in the creative process. It was as though what I memorized fell into a different part of my mind. I could repeat the things I memorized in physics, but I couldn’t really use them or adapt them or solve problems with them. The way I found that I could learn things and make them my own was to make models of them, or to make analogies, and to create mental pictures of all these things. I admit that some of these pictures are pretty surrealistic—I wouldn’t want the public to ever see what’s going on in my mind—but that was the only way that I could make physics my own.

Since, I wasn’t very sophisticated, the kind of pictures and models and analogies I made were relatively straightforward. But in the process of creating them, a very interesting thing happened: I could start the picture or the model going, and it would do new things! In other words, I was using my personal learning technique in the creative process.

The other idea, that I have to use things in an entirely new way in order to know that I’ve learned something, also stood me in good stead; because that process led me to further analogies and encouraged me to try to do things in new ways. I found out very quickly that in order to have a rich storehouse of analogies and models, I needed to try to know as many different things as possible about a lot of different fields. So I’ve come to know a little about quite a few things; I have found that very fascinating and enjoyable, and I have found it to be incredibly useful in the learning process in terms of my scholarship in physics.

And there is a bonus. When I started teaching and had to communicate my learning or facilitate learning in others, it turned out that the very analogies, stories and models that I used to facilitate my own learning and be creative in research, were the same things that appealed to both undergraduate and graduate students. Perhaps I had to use a slightly different vocabulary and the jokes were a little different, but the analogies or models were very similar. So the creative process was helping me facilitate the learning of others.

Let’s suppose for the moment that we didn’t have the words “teaching” and “research.” Suppose we had never thought of those words; we might actually be a little better off. There are times when we are limited because we don’t have certain words in our vocabulary, but at other times I think we are limited because we do have the words and we are bound by the limitations we associate with those words.

Suppose we were concerned only with facilitating our own individual learning. We might do a variety of things to achieve that goal. We might do experiments, we might contemplate a question or daydream about it, or we might invent models or make up stories. And then we could go on to apply this to facilitating other peoples' learning. The first effort—facilitating our own learning—would be “research” in the traditional sense. The second effort—facilitating others’ learning—would be “teaching.” It’s not that these two efforts merely complement each other; at the molecular level, so to speak, they are the same thing, because the very habits of mind, the very “dance steps” I learned in order to be a good researcher, are the same habits and “dance steps” that also facilitate my teaching. I just wear different “clothes” when I do one or the other.

I’m not certain whether this learning/teaching/research process works the same way for other people. It may be quite idiosyncratic. I don’t know for sure if it works the same way in other disciplines. But I suspect there may be a good deal of carryover and a good deal of similarity in other fields. This is why, for me, the supposed teaching/research dichotomy has never really been an issue. Both are ways of facilitating learning and developing a learning community.

I know as I look out here that there are people who are far more knowledgeable about this and are more sophisticated than I on this topic. I’m not just preaching to the choir, I’m singing country music to opera singers! So please bear with me if I don’t say it quite right or use the words with their correct technical meanings. I mean well and, in the end, perhaps the most useful thing is that a “Vice President for Research” is here and passionately believes that the scholarship of teaching is important and is a high priority area for investment in higher education. Indeed, the scholarship of teaching and research in teaching are very important, and we must develop ways to facilitate them both internally and externally.

I have never done research in teaching, but I have done a little bit of informal reflection on teaching. Some of us, following Jules LaPidus, the president of the Council of Graduate Schools, have a back-to-basics way of distinguishing between research and scholarship. This may not be the way we traditionally use these words, but for Jules and for me, research is what you do and scholarship is what you think about what you do. Scholarship is more reflective. Research can be essentially learning to use big widgets to obtain certain kinds of data, or learning certain kinds of techniques—learning to use a hammer. Scholarship is the kind of thing that keeps you from seeing everything as a nail, once you’ve learned to use a hammer. There is a reflectiveness associated with scholarship that complements or goes beyond research, but the two are still very tied together. Others might tie them together differently, but that’s how I see them.

In my several decades as a Professor, I have taught a variety of physics courses. I recall when I first started teaching, people would tell me what “our kind of people do.” And I wanted to be “our kind of people” because I wanted to be respected and promoted and tenured. For example, since I was a theoretical physicist I found that some felt that our kind of people didn’t teach undergraduates. Equally insightful was the idea that our kind of people didn’t use computers. What you have to do is to take these supposed pieces of wisdom with a grain of salt. They may not even apply to you. I’ve always loved talking about my discipline, and so I particularly like working with undergraduates. They’re open and honest about what they don’t know. By the time you get to be a graduate student you’re almost a faculty member, where you feel you have to know everything, and so you have trouble admitting, even to yourself, that there are things you still need to find out.

We are starting on a pilgrimage together toward developing a scholarship of teaching. I want to make the point that when we mentor other folks starting out on their scholarly pilgrimages, we shouldn’t overly limit them. We need to be careful that we don’t take the baggage that we carry and transfer it to the people we are mentoring. Part of the problem is that we often don’t recognize our own limitations, so we are inadvertently limiting the next generation of scholars. We need to be careful about that and keep it in mind.

In addition, it’s important when you, yourself, are starting on the scholarly pilgrimage that you pack a wide variety of tools in your suitcase. These will allow you to have a longer, safer, and more wonderful trip, and will also enable you to do a better job of helping others along the way. It’s important not to be self-limited, and I believe part of the challenge in thinking about the scholarship of teaching is some self-limitations that we’ve inadvertently put in place. I’m not worried, incidentally, about the scholarship of teachingBBit’s going to take place. It’s just a question of time. Is it going to be something that is a mainstream activity in institutions of higher learning in the short term, or in the longer term? I believe it’s inevitable that as we become wiser, as we become more experienced, that we will give greater importance to this area. So don’t worry that it won’t happen, we just want it to happen as soon as possible at our institutions because students and faculty will benefit greatly from it.

When I teach I use a variety of gimmicks or techniques to get students interested in physics and to help them sustain that interest. I’m going to mention some of themBBthey are probably the kind of things many of you have also usedBBand I want to distinguish between these gimmicks on the one hand and research in teaching. The gimmicks may play a role in helping one become a more effective teacher, but that’s significantly different from research in teaching. Research in teaching promises to help us all, collectively and individually, to be better teachers, and it’s not at all the same as gimmicks. But gimmicks are useful.

When I was teaching beginning physics, I would tell my students, “I’m going to show you ways that physics can reveal to you whether your girlfriend or boyfriend really cares about you.” This would get their attention. And the students would laugh, but they would write it down. Later, when they graduated, they would come back and say, “You know I remember that part about centripetal force, that if the girl slides toward you and the car is going this way, she should slide the other way, and the fact that she doesn’t might mean something.”

I often had as many as 50 or 60 students show up for one session of office hours. The problem was how to handle this, especially since many of the students had the same question. So we set up a strategy at the start of the hour, a group approach to problem solving. I would work with certain students, and then they would work with all the other kids out in the hall. It was very helpful, the students enjoyed it, and it allowed me to get to more students than I could have otherwise. It had an added benefit since, as we know, one of the best ways to learn something is to be involved in teaching it to others.

When I taught physics for elementary school teachers, I learned that the course was the most frightening thing these folks had ever encountered. They thought they had planned their entire career so that they would never have to take a physics course. But the School of Education and the state decided that elementary school teachers needed to take some science. I had 89 students in my first class of future elementary school teachers who were taking beginning physics from me. They were very concerned. I tried my best bedside manner, I tried to be winsome and all of that, but they said, “Well, we know you seem like a nice person, and we’re going to have all these fun classes, but then there’s going to be a test and you’re going to strip us of all dignity because we know that physics is an art form and we are not that kind of artist.”

Their math anxiety was also incredible. I could say “is” and it was all right; if I said “equals,” there was a real problem. So I made a deal with them that for each class session I would write down five main principles. For example, instead of the equation saying “F equals MA,” I would write on the board “Force is the same as Mass times Acceleration.” They liked that, and they would write that down. I told them I would give them the five principles and we’d talk about variations of them. I knew if they felt uncomfortable with the way mathematical concepts were explained in class, they were going to feel really uncomfortable with them on tests. These future teachers are going to interact with our children first, before we ever get them in high school and college. If they go away hating science and with heightened math anxiety, we are in deep trouble.

I tried using open book, unlimited time, one-week take-home problems with my more advanced students. On their final exam I had them pose their own questions and answer them. And then as we got further along with my group of research students and the faculty, we would have two kinds of seminars. The first seminar was called the Pea-brained Seminar. The Pea-brained Seminar was where, coming into the room, you must not have thought carefully about anything you were going to say. This was very easy for me. The idea was that you left your title at the door. Professors and graduate students would come in and just shoot from the hip all kinds of physics ideas. Every once in a while the students would see a professor saying, “Oh yeah, I forgot momentum is conserved, so that’s a silly idea.” They would see that you can have this kind of interplay and daydream type of activity, and it leads to new ideas and new ways of looking at things. One of the troubles that may plague us after we have been in our disciplines for a while is that our critical ability begins to exceed our creative ability, and we sometimes take existing paradigms too seriously and thus limit ourselves without realizing it.

As an aside, one time students were speaking about the Pea-brained Seminar when we had a visitor from Argentina. During his talk, the professor from Argentina said, “I can’t wait to meet Professor Pebrun, from whom all of these ideas have come.” So you do have to be careful.

After the Pea-brained Seminar came the Snake Pit. The Snake Pit was what we did after going through the Pea-brained Seminar quite a few times, and it was used before someone was going out to give a talk. There is a story told that John Wooden, when he was basketball coach at UCLA, was asked what was the best team that his team had ever faced during the years when UCLA was winning the national championships. I am told coach Wooden said, “the second team.” In other words, the second five players on the team were essentially the toughest group that the first five faced, and they faced them every day in practice. Our thought was, we wanted to make sure, before any of our students and faculty went out and represented the university and gave talks, that we grilled them in practice with constructive criticism harder than anyone would from the outside world. So, they had to get up and talk and endure a Snake Pit. We would try to find a hole in everything they were saying. It turns out that if you have the right kind of collegial relationship, faculty members can do this to each other and still talk to each other later. Everyone understood why we were doing this: we were trying to build strength.

These ideas may have been useful in teaching and learning of various kinds, but none of them is applicable to research in teaching. Formal scholarship or research doesn’t happen until you have a certain method of approach and reflect on it, until you carry out certain experiments and compare the results with a standard of some sort. And that means assessment—assessment both of the new approach and of the “placebo” effect, or whatever you would call it. Then, of course, you have to reflect on the results and interpret them. After you have reflected and interpreted, you need to write up the results because it is in the act of writing that an important part of the creative process takes place. These are elements of the process we call scholarship. It’s not just informal little ideas. It’s not even one big formal idea. It’s a general approach. Informal ideas that we all have are wonderful and may help us with our teaching, but they’re not, by themselves, the scholarship of teaching. Of course, what we need now is quality scholarship of teaching.

Recently, here in Washington, I was part of a discussion about distance learning involving the Department of Education, and a discussion about science teaching and learning with some folks at the NSF, including Rita Colwell, the director. A common theme was the need for more real research on teaching at all levels, focusing on various teaching techniques and technology, distance learning, and classroom learning. We need to carry out solid, peer-reviewed research that is worthy of publication in such journals as, for example, the American Journal of Physics. I see signs the federal agencies are currently interested in funding programs to improve teaching, and the funding available is expected to increase in the future.

You probably all know about the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program that has been a partnership between Pew, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and CGS. You are probably familiar with the various initiatives that this program provides to broaden the education and teaching experience of graduate students. This is a wonderful start, and more focus on this area is needed. It will come as no surprise that there are still graduate students who come to me as Graduate Dean to say they are afraid to admit they are interested in becoming better teachers. They say that they would like to be part of the PFF program, but they are afraid to tell their thesis advisor because they think that if they do, they will be treated in an inferior way. They feel that their thesis advisor is training them to be a specific kind of researcher (not scholar) and would disapprove if they were to show an interest in other things, particularly an interest in teaching at an institution that’s not a Research I institution. I am informed that the vast majority of the academic jobs today are at non-Research I institutions, and the majority of the students from Research I institutions who get tenure-track academic jobs find them at non-Research I institutions. So we still have work to do in this area, and we should be willing to be helpful in any way that we can.Of course, I’m not in any way advocating that we should diminish disciplinary research; in fact the scholarship of teaching initiative will make disciplinary research better: there is a synergism that should arise between disciplinary and teaching research. Not for a moment would I condone diminishing the importance, intensity and the quality of disciplinary research. Furthermore, the same high expectations that we have for disciplinary research—research in theoretical physics, for example, or our many other disciplines—should be required of our scholars engaged in the scholarship of teaching. If we hold to those expectations, I think we will not only enhance our research reputation, we will make this community even richer and more vibrant, an even better community of learning. We will also do a much better job of mentoring and training both undergraduate and graduate students, who will be the next generation of intellectual leaders.

There is already a considerable amount of funding available for the scholarship of teaching. The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Department of Education, and NSF are just a few of the places where there is interest right now. At Indiana, in cooperation with the scholarship of teaching steering committee and others who know best how to disseminate this information, we will create a Web site where current and anticipated funding opportunities for the scholarship of teaching are available, from the private sector, the government, and from Indiana University.

Among the efforts we are making at Indiana University, our Sponsored Research Services staff is providing workshops and working with the faculty to develop proposals. The Research Office is only one administrative area, and we need to work closely with others, for example, school deans, academic affairs, and other academic and support units. The Research Office is a team member, but support for these activities should not and cannot come from one unit alone. However, the Research Office is able to participate in and provide resources for some initiatives. We are also working with our Human Subjects Committee to prepare guidelines for research on teaching and learning.

There are some incentives the Research Office can provide. For example, matching funds for external funding received from federal, private, and individual donors for research on scholarship of teaching. I have instructed our office to make sure that this is a high priority and in no way is given second place to the matching funds that we provide for research in other areas. Second, we are expanding our Summer Faculty Fellowship areas to fund research in teaching project.

The Academic Affairs Office has made changes in our faculty annual report forms to enable faculty to describe their research on teaching and learning activities. I am also working with the schools to encourage them, even though we know that money is very, very tight, to expand the opportunities for departments to work on pedagogy training for Ph.D. students and junior faculty. IU has a Research Design Working Group that has a goal “To lay a foundation of continuing collaboration and support for faculty contemplating or engaged in research on teaching and learning.” In the fall of 1999 they sponsored their first seminar, “Jump-Starting Your Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Research Projects: Researchable Questions, methods, and Resources.”

For many of us, this is a new area, and we want to carry over the same high standards we have in our disciplinary research into the research on teaching. These efforts are just a beginning.

Let me conclude by offering a quotation, from former Indiana University President John Ryan’s report of several years ago. It was focused on the winners of teaching awards:

“What makes a great teacher? Of course, there’s no simple answer to that question. The qualities of great teachers are as various as their personalities. When we think of great teachers, we think in terms of what they give. We think in terms of the hard work and organization that go into a well-planned lecture, the clarity of explanations, the wealth of knowledge. We think of humor combined with scholarship, of excitement and challenge brought to a topic we might have expected to be dull; of insight that cuts to the core of a problem. We think of the discipline of objectivity, of energy, enthusiasm, warmth, and honesty. These are a few of the gifts of great teaching. But anyone who has had the good fortune to encounter a great teacher knows that the essence of great teaching goes beyond these. It lies not just in what a teacher has to give, but in what the teacher encourages the student to give. A great teacher is a motive force, demanding more than we knew we had in us, making us aware of new strengths and interests, changing what we expect of ourselves. A great teacher is someone who brings out the best in us, someone whom we remember years later as having made a difference in our lives. Indiana University rejoices in the gifts of its great teachers.”

If we rejoice in the gifts of great teachers, and I believe we do at Indiana University, then it is all the more important—in fact, it’s essential—for us to learn more about great teaching. And that requires research, and then a body of research and reflection. The scholarship of teaching and learning is the means to that end, and therefore is a vital endeavor for a great university.

So, the good news is that there is broad interest nationally in the area of scholarship of teaching and learning, and there are unlikely partners at your institution that can help with resources and credibility and ideas (but you have to ferret them out). The better news is that this issue is so important to our society that the scholarship of teaching is going to flourish, it's just a matter of how long it will take and whether or not it will be on our watch. The best news is that you personally as scholars and mentors are going to have a profound and satisfying positive influence on generations of learners by your efforts in this area. Long after your specific teaching, research, and administration has ended, the mentoring you have carried out in this area (when you didn’t even know it and thought you were doing other things) will, without time and limitation, profoundly affect those who come into contact with you. Thank you for your leadership.

Back to Events page

SITE LINKS: What is SOTL | Funding | Community | Events | Bibliography | Resources | Contact Us

Last updated: 6 November 2000

URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~sotl/
Comments to: teaching@indiana.edu
Copyright 2000, the Trustees of Indiana University