Chemical Sciences at the Interface of Education
An Infrastructure for Developing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

A Carnegie Scholar Project in the CASTL Program
The Carnegie Academy on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

From where can the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning arise?

Scholarship, which most prominently represented in discovery research and related creative activities, arises from a deliberately constructed infrastructure of professional development. First-year college students are identified for their potential to make academic contributions based on their performance in coursework. This means that course design has evolved, in some respects, to expose the potential of the future scholar. Today, the voice of scholarship heard by students only talks about discovery research. But scholarship can be understood, as Boyer reaffirmed in 1990, in a broad and capacious way. Scholarship is a practice and a habit that can be brought to all aspects of one's professional activity. To develop a true scholarship of teaching and learning, to give it it's voice, there are many things that need to be done. Around the world, individuals are examining ways to understand and represent this borader notion of scholarship. Because our understanding of scholarship arises through our professional development, we need to think about how a broader understanding is communicated to the next generation of faculty members. We need to think about the work of students, progressing from undergraduate courses to the development of new faculty. Across higher education, we need to target programs within academic departments at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels that will allow us to identify individuals with the potential for the scholarship of teaching and learning, and then help them to develop it. Pieces of such program are out there already, while others are beginning to form. These ragtag troops now need to be organized.

For most faculty members, scholarship is defined solely as research. Likewise, the highly developed standards and training programs for research have made "becoming a scholar" synonymous with "becoming a researcher." We do not have to look any further than the term "teacher-scholar" to see how we have come to implicitly understand and accept instruction as falling outside of the domain of scholarship. Our understanding of scholarship has progressed substantially during the twentieth century, but its development has been constrained to the single context of the research mission.

The infrastructure that develops the scholarship of discovery is a highly evolved model, but it is not intrinsically tied to discovery research. One way to conceptualize the scholarship of teaching and learning is in its professional development. If we accept the tenets of scholarship and scholarly work, and we accept the fact that we have tools with which we examine scholarly work, then we are faced with the question at the top of this page: from where can the scholarship of teaching and learning arise? Can we use an infrastructure of professional development to incorporate an understanding of the scholarship of teaching and learning into the program that develops the scholarship of discovery (traditionally called "research")? We have conceptualized the need to broaden the experience of future faculty the same way in which we understand the need to educate any student in an emergent area that intersects his or her primary area of interest. In this case, the broadly construed work of the disciplinary faculty in higher education is the area for which we have coined the term ISIE: Interdisciplinary Studies at the Interface of Education. ISIE is where disciplinary expertise and issues that arise in higher education are joined.

A professional development program results in behaviors one identifies with scholarship (informed practice, reflective thinking, public accountability, etc.). ISIE scholarship applies to issues typically associated with teaching and learning such as curriculum design, development, implementation, and assessment. ISIE also takes into account the complexity of one's life as a faculty member, covering the range of responsibilities which demand other high order ethical reasoning, such as mentorship, authorship, and professional citizenship. As is true for the scholarship of discovery, these are issues that need to begin to be addressed at the undergraduate level, proceed to the graduate and postdoctoral levels, and finally on to the new faculty. To a degree, these objectives, at the graduate level, overlap with the AAHE (American Association of Higher Education) programs on Faculty Roles and Rewards (FRR), and especially the AACU (Associationof American Colleges and Universities) and CGS (Council for Graduate School) program on Preparing Future Faculty.

Chemical Sciences at the Interface of Education. CSIE is a project devoted to developing and documenting examples of working units within the professional development infrastructure outlined above. As a starting point, these pieces can be developed in a single department at a single institution, but an infrastructure for professional development (and the true emergence of broadened understanding of scholarship that includes the scholarship of teaching and learning) relies on a minimum number of schools (perhaps 15) having some or all of these pieces in place, having them represented in multiple disciplines, and in having a broadened form of scholarly activity being valued by these institutions. Undergraduates who achieve a level of education and practice in this broadened scholarship at one school must have graduate institutions where they can continue this professional development in the context of Ph.D. programs, and then on to postdoctoral and faculty positions that require this kind of experience. Without a doubt, a new faculty member who is the product of this kind of development plan will be quite different from a traditional new faculty member. As is true in research, this new faculty member will bring the latest notions and practices of scholarship to his or her department and institution. There must also be faculty custodians who oversee and nurture this infrastructure and its participants, faculty whose area of specialization within the discipline is ISIE.