The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a subversive activity

Authors

  • David L. Boose Gonzaga University
  • Pat Hutchings Gonzaga University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.6

Keywords:

SoTL, Faculty Learning Community, Higher Education, Inquiry

Abstract

One of the most serious challenges facing higher education today is the erosion of academic culture—a declining sense that faculty form a community whose members reflect, deliberate, and make decisions together in the name of a shared educational vision. Our experience with Gonzaga University’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Initiative suggests that SoTL can be a powerful counter force to this erosion. What became increasingly evident as the initiative unfolded was that its most important result was the creation of a kind of alternative academic community that stands in opposition to many of the dis-integrative, disempowering forces at work in higher education. The scholarly examination of practice, done in a collaborative context, changed participants’ perceptions of learning, of themselves as teachers, and of the larger endeavor of which they are a part. Thus, we came to see the SoTL initiative as a subversive activity in the sense used by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in their 1969 book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity: one that invites critical questions about education’s purposes, practices, and underlying assumptions, and in so doing reanimates core values.

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Author Biographies

David L. Boose, Gonzaga University

David Boose is Professor of Biology at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington (USA). From 2007-2015 he served as theDirector of Gonzaga University’s Center for Teaching and Advising.

Pat Hutchings, Gonzaga University

Pat Hutchings was the Scholar in Residence at Gonzaga University’s Center for Teaching and Advising from 2012-2015. She is a former vice president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (USA).

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Published

2016-03-01

How to Cite

Boose, David L., and Pat Hutchings. 2016. “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning As a Subversive Activity”. Teaching and Learning Inquiry 4 (1):40-51. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.6.