SOTL Research Methods Series

The CTL is happy to kick off its first SOTL Research Methods Series April 12th.  Drawing on the expertise of our Stonehill colleagues, the series is meant to give faculty opportunities to think about how different disciplinary research methods can be applied in their research on teaching and pedagogy (often termed the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SOTL).

Each session will consist of a 15 minute presentation on a standard research method followed by 45 minutes of discussion about how that method might be used in various SOTL projects.  All faculty are welcome to attend!

If you have any questions, contact the CTL Faculty Fellow, John Lanci (ext. 1239) or CTL Director, Stacy Grooters (ext. 1324).

Find the full schedule below or on the CTL website.

Fellow’s Corner: Promoting Faculty Writing

Writing in college is important. God knows, that message has filled our ears and powered faculty meetings for years, most recently on Academic Development Day last fall, when we considered—yet again—strategies for improving student writing.

But what about our own writing? Writing is just as important for faculty as it is for students, maybe more so. For many of us, if we don’t write, we don’t get tenure and then we don’t teach. At least not at Stonehill. Writing is important for all of us, even for those of us who are not on the track to tenure and—let me go out on a limb here—even for those of us who are already tenured.

But I have not ever met a professor for whom writing comes easily. I don’t have to rehearse here the reasons for this; we all know them. Hell, we have all experienced them.

That is why you find my own writing sitting here on your screen right now. I have a suggestion for you about how to make the writing you need to do, or want to do, a little less onerous and a little more likely to actually happen. The suggestion involves joining an Agraphia writing group.

Teacher’s Bookshelf: The Last Professors

Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors. The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

A number of books have come out in the last decade addressing the current state of our profession and prophesying about its future. Rarely is the foreseen future an encouraging one, especially for those of us who do our professing in the humanities. Reading The Last Professors, one of the more influential of the recent crop, was like jumping into a cold pond on a morning in late October—bracing enough to wake you up fast, but not shocking enough to kill your spirit completely.

According to Donoghue—and, unfortunately, this book’s claims are well documented—things look grim out there for the future of Ph.D.’s in traditional humanities departments. The tenure system is eroding quickly; for-profit universities, which rarely offer their clients a non-technical course beyond English 101, are on the rise; only 16% of today’s students fall into the traditional age bracket (18-22 years old); less than 10% of undergraduates today major in any of the humanities.

Teaching and Learning Strategies Seminar (due Dec 1)

All full-time Stonehill faculty are invited to apply for the 2011-2012 Teaching and Learning Strategies Seminar.  Applications can be submitted online and are due December 1st.

The Teaching and Learning Strategies Seminar provides faculty the opportunity to critically reflect on their teaching in collaboration with their colleagues and in the context of the larger Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Declining Creativity in the US

This summer, Newsweek reported on evidence showing a long-term decline in creativity among Americans — and on how problem- and project-based learning strategies can help reverse the trend:

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

. . . . .

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Read the full article here: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

CFP: Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education

The newly-formed Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education is seeking submissions for its inaugural issue. Find the call for proposals here.

The JPSHE features public scholarship—that is, academic inquiry that forms community partnerships to address shared problems, issues, and opportunities. This kind of scholarship—what many think of as Boyer’s “scholarship of engagement”—involves the community in reciprocal relationships with the university; however, it also serves to discover and disseminate new disciplinary knowledge and/or pedagogical practice.

CFP: SOTL Conference in Banff, Alberta (due Aug 20)

The Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University is pleased to announce a call for proposals (CFP) for our first annual Centennial Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, held November 11-13, 2010 in Banff, Alberta (heart of the Canadian Rockies).

This event is a “practitioners conference” dedicated to developing teaching and learning research, sharing nascent findings, going public with results of completed projects, and building an extended scholarly community.

CFP: Learning Technologies

Academic Exchange Quarterly—a peer-reviewed, print journal—invites original, unpublished manuscripts of 2000 to 3000 words for its Winter 2011 issue.

Learning technologies—technologies used to enhance learning, teaching, and assessment—are rapidly gaining popularity in higher education. However, the debate concerning the effectiveness of these technologies over more conventional means of teaching remains ongoing.

The focus of this topic is to explore evidence-based research on any area relating to learning technologies, but they are especially interested in the following:

• pedagogical techniques that rely on learning technologies;
• the use of learning technologies in assessment of outcomes at any level (individual student to entire campuses); and
• comparisons of technologically-enhanced learning outcomes and conventional outcomes.

In any case, they are seeking empirical, evidence-based research studies more than theoretical pieces.

Submissions are welcome from researchers, teaching and learning scholars, learning technology users, as well as others who are actively involved in higher education learning, including graduate students, faculty members, academic staff members, administrators, and researchers in non-academic settings.

Submission instructions are available at http://www.tinyurl.com/AEQ-Tech.

Submission deadline is August 13, 2010.

SOTL Writing Retreat — due April 9

Thanks to the efforts of our new CTL Faculty Fellow, John Lanci, the CTL is sponsoring a three-day overnight retreat devoted to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) this May 25-27, 2010.

The retreat – which will be held at the Cedar Hills Retreat Center in Duxbury, MA – will be geared both to faculty developing new SOTL projects and those working on writing up their SOTL findings.

In addition to workshops on SOTL methods and project design, faculty will have opportunities to share their work with others and free time for writing. Meals and lodging are provided.

Applications are due April 9, 2010.

For more information and the link to the online application form, visit the CTL’s website.

Call for articles: “Teaching with Technology”

Radical Teacher – a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal grounded in radical left politics — is seeking submissions for a special issue on “Teaching with Technology.”

Completed submissions are due September 15, 2010.

Inquiries, proposals, and drafts should be sent to Emily Drabinski, J. Elizabeth Clark and Sarah Roberts, editors, at emily.drabinski@liu.edu.

Excerpts from the call for articles are below: