{"id":47,"date":"2025-10-28T19:02:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T23:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/thresholdconceptsconference\/?post_type=chapter&p=47"},"modified":"2026-01-16T12:37:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T17:37:27","slug":"the-scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning-in-higher-education-have-we-been-the-architects-of-our-own-demise","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/thresholdconceptsconference\/chapter\/the-scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning-in-higher-education-have-we-been-the-architects-of-our-own-demise\/","title":{"raw":"The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Have We Been the Architects of Our Own Demise?","rendered":"The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Have We Been the Architects of Our Own Demise?"},"content":{"raw":"

Abstract<\/strong><\/h1>\r\n
This reflective essay interrogates the rapid expansion of \u201cscholarship\u201d in higher education and argues that conflating scholarship with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has hindered the field\u2019s maturation and impact. Drawing on personal experience with faculty learning communities and foundational SoTL literature, the paper traces the liminality and threshold concepts that make SoTL conceptually demanding and slow to master. It critiques persistent myths\u2014\u201cscholarship is the same as SoTL,\u201d \u201cthere is no definition of scholarship,\u201d and \u201cSoTL is bad educational research\u201d\u2014showing how inclusive \u201cBig Tent\u201d approaches, while well-intentioned, have inadvertently rewarded undeveloped work and diluted standards. The essay situates these myths within institutional contexts that profess to value teaching but misalign incentives, creating paradoxes around promotion, evidence, and accusations of grade inflation. A set of actions is proposed: name and practice SoTL explicitly (not generic \u201cscholarship\u201d), acknowledge the time and staged expertise required to become proficient, reward rigorous SoTL on par with disciplinary research, and distinguish genuine learning gains from grading artifacts. Framed through threshold concepts, these changes are transformative, integrative, irreversible\u2014and troublesome\u2014because they challenge entrenched norms. The paper concludes with a call to re-center SoTL as a research field and to reconsider teaching-and-scholarship career structures that perpetuate the current impasse.<\/div>\r\nKeywords<\/em>:\u00a0Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), Liminality, Big Tent, Academic promotion and incentives\r\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/h1>\r\nIn this reflective essay, I explore the explosion of \u201cscholarship\u201d in higher education and think about the reasons why this may not yield the results we hoped it might have.\r\n\r\nI was introduced to the concept of SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in 2007, when I joined a faculty learning community (FLC) (Cox, 2004) in my institution. At the time, I was teaching biology to a large first year undergraduate class. My colleagues and I had recently been transferred to a teaching and scholarship (T&S) academic contract, and we were part of a wider cohort of T&S academics who wanted to know more about \u201cscholarship\u201d. We spent a year, guided by Jane MacKenzie, an advocate of SoTL who had spent time with the Carnegie Scholars, learning about what SoTL meant and the impact it could <\/em>have on us, our careers, and our students. Although I have changed jobs, I still keep in touch with members of that group. We had two shared outcomes from the FLC; an early paper which outlined our aspirations for the group (Bell et al., 2006) and a paper written at the end of the FLC where we explored what we had learned about SoTL (MacKenzie et al., 2010). Despite our enthusiasm for SoTL, we acknowledged that many of the concepts presented were still \u201cfuzzy\u201d after a year of exploration.\r\n\r\n\u201cI certainly have a slightly clearer notion of what scholarship is, it is still quite fuzzy and grey, but\u2026I think coming to the Learning Community and finding out that it\u2019s fuzzy and grey for everybody else\u2026is better [group laughs]\u2026A shared fuzziness<\/em>.\u201d (MacKenzie et al., 2010, p. 279)\r\n\r\nThis quote hints at liminality and some of the conceptual challenges of understanding SoTL. It was a few years later, at ISSOTL in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that I attended a presentation by Niamh Kelly titled \u201cFrom STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to SoTL\u201d (Kelly et al., 2011) that I started to understand this perspective of how complex SoTL was, the many barriers to understanding that there were, and the length of time it takes to grapple with the liminality of it. The paper that followed that conference presentation, \u201cA Difficult Journey: Transitioning from STEM to SoTL\u201d (Kelly et al., 2012) remains one of my go-to papers when I introduce with new (and experienced) academics to SoTL. As a former STEM educator myself, I understand the challenges to understanding SoTL, and I think it\u2019s important for colleagues to understand that it\u2019s part of the process to be confused and uncertain.\r\n\r\nI begin with this introduction, as it illustrates the notion that SoTL is not easy. In terms of threshold concepts, there are many that can be identified. For example, I have looked at the threshold concepts inherent in the dimensions of Trigwell, Martin, Benjamin & Prosser\u2019s Model of Scholarship (2000), identifying threshold concepts in all four dimensions of the model (Tierney, 2017). However, I\u2019d like to take a look at what has happened in the development of \u201cscholarship\u201d, primarily in UK universities, as that is my workplace, but extending the experience to the English-speaking higher education sector.\r\n

Persistent myths in SoTL<\/strong><\/h1>\r\nI\u2019d like to start this section of by stating that SoTL and scholarship are not the same thing, and I believe this conflation of terms is the root cause of a lot of the trouble we are now facing in higher education. As academics, we could<\/em> use scholarship as a shorthand for SoTL, providing we had a common understanding of what SoTL is. However, we (academics in the widest sense) do not have a shared knowledge of SoTL. It\u2019s not taught in any undergraduate curriculum, and if we are introduced to it at all, it\u2019s quite late on in our educational journey. There are a number of myths that persist around SoTL, and they may be traced to the conflation of SoTL and scholarship. I will examine them one by one.\r\n

\u201cScholarship is the same as SoTL\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nIn the arena of unintended consequences sits the conflation of \u201cScholarship\u201d and \u201cSoTL\u201d. The idea of the \u201cBig Tent\u201d (Huber & Hutchings, 2005; McKinney, 2014) has sensible origins. SoTL is not a field which is taught in the way other fields or disciplines are taught. For most academics, their first encounter with SoTL is in their first academic role, although this may have changed with the advent of Students as Partners (Cook-Sather et al., 2014) which seeks to include students in the process. Nevertheless, encountering SoTL as a student is an ad hoc occurrence. Novice academics often encounter SoTL in their PGCert course which is taken as CPD during their probation. For some this may be the only meaningful contact they have with SoTL in their careers. For others it may be the start of an intellectual transformation, for example that experienced by Niamh Kelly and Susan Nesbit (Kelly et al., 2012) who document a ten-year transformation from disciplinary researcher to SoTL practitioner. This wide range of engagement is where the concept of the \u201cBig Tent\u201d originated, as an attempt to include practitioners of different levels in a concerted attempt to improve student learning experience. However, that came at a price. As I explored in earlier sections, the assertion that there is no definition of scholarship and the call for an expanded definition of \u201cscholarship\u201d has resulted in the situation where \u201cscholarship\u201d at a superficial or undeveloped stage is lauded and rewarded in an attempt to be inclusive. While that is not a bad thing in itself, as novice scholars should be encouraged, it means that there is no incentive to develop intellectually, meaning that The Big Tent has actually been detrimental in the development of SoTL as a field.\r\n

\u201cThere is no definition of \u2018scholarship\u2019\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nI have heard this line repeated for two decades. I first started hearing it on moving to a teaching and scholarship contract in the early 2000s. Going back to the quote earlier in this paper, the definition of \u201cscholarship\u201d can feel \u201cfuzzy\u201d and confusing, pointing at liminality and uncertainty in understanding. However, we can reframe this by asking \u201cis there a definition of SoTL?\u201d and the answer is an unequivocal yes. The literature provides us with a developing definition of SoTL which has evolved over time. We start with with Boyer\u2019s (1990) proposition that teachers in higher education should be familiar with, and use theories of teaching in their practice. Almost a decade later, Glassick, Huber and Maeroff (1997) outline what makes a SoTL project; how we carry out the steps to evaluate our teaching, make improvements, test them, and then disseminate the outcomes to benefit our colleagues and their students. Keith Trigwell (2000) and colleagues propose a model of scholarship in which they propose that scholarship (SoTL) is composed of four dimensions which cover literature, communication reflection and conception of learning. This model proposes levels of activity within each dimension which include novice to expert understanding of SoTL, so there is an expectation of development of expertise within the model. Carolin Kreber (2002) continues with that expectation of development in her paper where she proposes that teachers go through the stages of teaching excellence, teaching expertise, culminating in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.\r\n\r\nIt is of note that these examples of papers outlining the definition of SoTL are relatively old, appearing within a decade or so of Boyer\u2019s (1990) proposal. There are other, later papers, such as Antman and Olsson\u2019s (2007) theory\/practice model and the third book in the Carnegie Scholars\u2019 trilogy of SoTL (Hutchings et al., 2011). However, at the same time there is also a strand of publication which asserts the lack of a definition of scholarship\u00a0, and we start to see papers which claim an unclear\/disputed definition of scholarship, or attempts to reclassify it. Papers invite us to \u201credefine scholarship\u201d (Milner et al., 2023) or \u201cexpand the view of scholarship\u201d (Beattie & Scholarship, 2000). This is distinct from the idea of the \u201cBig Tent\u201d (Chick, 2014), a viewpoint long espoused by organisations such as ISSOTL. As time has progressed, the voices claiming that there is no definition of scholarship \u00a0have become louder, drowning out those who have demonstrated that there is. I have questions for those in positions of power who claim that there is no definition of scholarship \u2013 if that is true, then why are you asking individuals to do it? And why do you have promotion criteria which include it?\r\n

\u201cSoTL is bad educational research\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nWhile I have categorised this as a myth of SoTL, there is actually some truth in the claim. We should examine this more closely and try to understand it. Over time there has been a failure to develop SoTL into a meaningful field in its own right, for reasons which I will explore in following sections. However, when thinking about SoTL as \u201cbad educational research\u201d there have been warnings in the literature. Pat Hutchings (2007) was particularly interested in the lack of theory in SoTL, naming it the \u201celephant in the room\u201d. \u00a0Two years later, Boshier (2009) summed up the criticisms of SoTL. Boshier identifies five areas where SoTL can be criticised:\r\n\r\n\u201c<\/em>First, scholarship of teaching is used as a synonym for other activities. <\/em>Second, Boyer\u2019s (1990<\/a>) definition was conceptually confused. <\/em>Third, it is difficult to operationalize. <\/em>Fourth, much discourse concerning SoTL is anti<\/em>\u2010<\/em>intellectual. <\/em>Fifth, there is an over<\/em>\u2010<\/em>reliance on peer review.<\/em>\u201d<\/em> (p. 2)\r\n\r\nBoshier\u2019s (2009) criticisms serve as a warning to scholars of what pitfalls to avoid when setting out on a SoTL journey. However, as a sector we have fallen into the trap of these pitfalls, and it seems increasingly difficult to get out of them. Canning and Masika (2022) describe SoTL as a \u201cthorn in the flesh of serious scholarship into learning and teaching in higher education\u201d. They put much of the blame of this on the expanded definition of scholarship which has muddied the waters of what SoTL is. As in the previous section, we see the consequences of the rejection of a definition of SoTL and the pursuit of an expanded version of \u201cscholarship\u201d, which leaves SoTL open to criticism. In the next section, as I explore another SoTL myth, I look at why this matters.\r\n

\u201cWe value teaching and learning\u201d<\/strong> and \u201cYou must teach better\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nI will address these two myths together, as they are related to one another, as well as being linked to the previous myths. Firstly, institutions announce that they value teaching and learning, while the evidence states that it is more difficult to get an academic promotion for teaching and learning than it is to get it for disciplinary research (Freestone, 2018). For those scholars who are serious about improving the student learning experience, they are often caught between a rock and a hard place \u2013 while their evidence-based, scholarly interventions improve student learning, any increase in grades is met with an accusation of grade inflation (Bachan, 2017). While grade inflation is may be a phenomenon,\u00a0 driven by neoliberal education policies and student fees, or a conflation of understanding norm- and criterion referenced assessments serious scholars of SoTL work to improve student learning, which should result in higher grades and\/or degree classification. It follows therefore that there is no incentive to \u201cteach better\u201d either from the point of view of career progression or improving student learning.\r\n

Not drowning but waving<\/strong><\/h1>\r\nThere are a number of things which could and should be done to change the current state of SoTL. However, they are not easy to change as they have become embedded in the psyche of higher education. However, I believe they are necessary if we are to move forward. And this is where Threshold Concepts (Meyer & Land, 2003) comes in, as I believe that we have to address these myths and misconceptions for what they are, and refuse to amplify and support them any longer. Only then can we start to address SoTL in a meaningful and transformative way:\r\n