Supporting all disciplines to transition to SoTL

Proposal Statement

We will explore the experience of transitioning from discipline-based research to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), identify enablers and inhibitors, and develop strategies that CAULLT members can implement to promote engagement with, and high-quality practice of, SoTL in their institutions.

Relevance to CAULLT

Requirements for universities to engage in SoTL appear in TEQSA HES Standards 3.1.2 (scholarship informs course design; the content and learning activities of a course of study engage with advanced knowledge and inquiry) and 3.2.3 (teaching staff maintain knowledge of their field of teaching through continuing scholarship; teaching and assessment principles are contemporary and relevant to the discipline).

CAULLT members promote engagement in SoTL in their institutions as a strategy for academic development for expanding the understanding of teaching and learning in order to respond to major challenges facing universities.

However, we champion SoTL in the face of controversy stemming from the belief that “pedagogic research is somehow less rigorous than non-educational research” due to “the lack of theory and awareness of previous work reflected in many publications” (Canning and Masika, 2020). This is said to be because those engaged in SoTL lack adequate training (Larsson et al., 2020)

We seek to understand the origins of this lack and identify strategies to mitigate this gap.