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St. Olaf, Carleton to co-host conference on innovations in the scholarship of teaching and learning

By Amy Gage
March 28, 2005

St. Olaf College and Carleton College together will host the national conference "Innovations in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the Liberal Arts Colleges," April 1-3, 2005.

The conference is the first to address the scholarship of teaching and learning as it applies specifically to the liberal arts environment.

Academics from Carleton and St. Olaf, as well as Macalester, Haverford, Alma, Beloit, Connecticut and Whittier colleges, are among those scheduled to present papers at sessions all day Saturday and on Sunday morning at St. Olaf.

Carleton will host a dinner and keynote speech on both Friday and Saturday nights.

The co-organizers from Carleton and St. Olaf say they expect the conference to help further the ongoing, 15-year dialogue about how scholarly inquiry by individual faculty members into student learning can -- or should be -- considered a valid subject of academic scholarship.

"I had attended several meetings about the scholarship of teaching and learning and had been struck by the relative absence of the liberal arts colleges, particularly since I knew that a lot of thoughtful and innovative teaching occurs at our institutions," says Professor of Economics David Schodt, director of the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts at St. Olaf.

"Our conference," he explains, "originated out of a desire to bring together and to make public the innovative work that we know is taking place at the liberal arts colleges."

Adds conference co-organizer Mary Savina, coordinator of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching and the McBride Professor of Geology and Environmental Studies at Carleton College: "This conference gives us a chance to hear about projects in scholarship of teaching and learning that relate directly to the educational ideas that underpin the liberal arts."

Conference events and programs
Friday's keynote presenter will be Pat Hutchings, vice president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which has spearheaded the "culture of teaching and learning" movement in the academic world.

(The Carnegie Foundation, based in Stanford, Calif., was founded in 1905 with a mandate to "uphold and dignify the cause of higher education.")

Hutchings, who will speak on "Institutional Identity and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," has written extensively on the scholarship of teaching and learning as it applies to course portfolios and on peer collaboration and review of teaching. She previously chaired the English department at Alverno College.

Presenting on Saturday evening, also at Carleton, will be award-winning Professor of Psychology Charles Blaich, director of inquiries at Wabash College's Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts. He will speak on the question: "Do Liberal Arts Colleges Really Promote Better Teaching."

That broad topic will be examined and debated at the daylong program hosted by St. Olaf on Saturday.

Among the topics for breakout sessions: "Reacting to the Past: Empowering Students in the Classroom," "Assessing and Improving Freshman Writing," "Sitting in Debate Rather Than Throwing Chairs" and "Student Evaluation of Courses: Kicking and Screaming into the 21st Century."

Carleton's Savina and St. Olaf's Schodt aim to document and assess what they believe is already done well at institutions such as theirs.

"Liberal arts colleges are widely recognized for excellence in teaching and learning," Schodt explains. "Yet, the specific instructional practices that contribute to such excellence are not frequently shared publicly, nor are they often well documented.

"We look forward to this conference as an opportunity for liberal arts college faculty to share what they have learned about what works to promote student learning and why it works," he says.

The 'scholarship of teaching' defined
In 1990, the Carnegie Foundation published what proved to be a groundbreaking piece of academic research -- about academic research.

In "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate," Carnegie Foundation President Ernest L. Boyer argued that the academy defined "scholarship" too narrowly as proven, tested research, placing other important academic functions, such as teaching, on a lesser plane.

"Boyer looked at how faculty spend their time and divided it among four areas of scholarship: application, integration, discovery -- or research -- and teaching," explains Richard Gale, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation, where he serves as director for the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Higher Education Program.

Gale, who holds a doctorate in theater from the University of Minnesota, will take part in a panel discussion at St. Olaf on Sunday, April 3, called "Doing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the Liberal Arts Colleges."

A recent academic article co-authored by Pat Hutchings, the conference's opening keynote speaker, acknowledged that some faculty find the very notion of teaching as "scholarship" to be "off-putting or confusing." She refers to Boyer's work in her argument, however, that "excellent teaching is marked by the same habits of mind that characterize other types of scholarly work."

A 1999 academic article by Randy Bass, a professor of American studies at Georgetown University, claimed that academics resisted defining teaching as scholarship because a "problem" is always at the heart of the investigative process by which research itself is defined.

"In one's teaching," he wrote, "a 'problem' is something you don't want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a 'problem' in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one's teaching would probably seem like an accusation."

Teaching and the liberal arts
The study of the scholarship of teaching and learning took hold in the 1990s in research universities, at the master's level, according to Richard Gale.

Why not at liberal arts institutions? "There is an assumption and belief that teaching is Job One anyway," explained Gale on a recent visit to St. Olaf to prepare for the April conference. "Also, because we are trying to formulate this as scholarship, research is expected, too."

Still, Gale hopes the conference will break down the divide between teaching and learning -- and give academics permission to take teaching more seriously and to study the art, craft and science of good teaching.

"If you're a biologist and you get a National Science Foundation grant, your so-called reward is not to teach," says Gale. "What does that say about the importance of teaching? We need to use the tools of our discipline but on students, to study how they learn, not only on a fruit fly.

"If we do this well," he continues, "we should be sharing it, analyzing it, not saying: 'You have to be there to experience good teaching.' We want to analyze the process of learning, so we can surface how students best learn."

For more information, visit the conference website, or contact Susan Carlson at St. Olaf College, 507-646-3553.

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.