• About
  • Events
  • Get Involved
  • Awards
  • Resources
  • Contact
    • Become a Member
  • Shopping Cart
  • My Account
International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL)
  • About
  • Events
  • Get Involved
  • Awards
  • Resources
  • Contact
    • Become a Member

Blog

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Blog
  • Origin of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Origin of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

  • Posted by ISSOTL Admin
  • Categories Blog
  • Date June 19, 2020
  • Comments 2 comments

Prepared by Dan Bernstein and Gary Poole – May 2020

There are many ways to describe the early days of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching (ISSOTL).  Some might use flowing prose, some might use a literature review, some might be more poetic.  When asked about the origins of ISSOTL, Dan Bernstein and Gary Poole decided to produce a list—a storyboard, if you will, of what we see as the milestones in ISSOTL’s development.  

There are many things we could have put in the list.  We believe the items we chose were particularly impactful, at least from our experience.  Here, then, is a collection of moments in time—moments we believe have brought the Scholarship of Teaching and ISSOTL from their original conceptions to where they are today.

  • In the United States, in 1990, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered; in 1997 CFAT published Glassick, Huber & Maeroff’s Scholarship Assessed; these two works proposed and developed the construct of Scholarship of Teaching, as intellectual work distinct from scholarship of discovery in education
  • In 1998 CFAT President Lee Shulman and Vice-President Pat Hutchings created the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning; the program convened an annual cohort of university teaching scholars meeting in two fourteen-day summer residencies plus a short mid-year meeting; summer sessions overlapped across annual cohorts; through 2005 a total of 156 scholars worked at the CFAT Center for Advanced Study
  • CASTL scholars’ mid-year meetings morphed into CASTL colloquia for all cohorts to share work on their courses and their students’ learning that followed from their CASTL Scholar periods; sessions were convened at the American Association for Higher Education annual conference; participants were largely from the US, with a gradually increasing international participation
  • 1998-2001 CFAT also organized the Carnegie Teaching Academy Campus Program that enrolled 70 institutions in hosting local conversations on engaging teaching; 2002-2005 CFAT organized 12 CASTL Institutional Leadership Clusters providing guidance and collaboration among 98 institutions for developing and nurturing scholarship of teaching and learning and providing outlets for faculty members to share their work
  • By 2005 the Leadership Clusters expanded into the CASTL Institutional Leadership and Affiliates Program that enrolled ~150 campuses in 13 clusters, each organized around particular interests in teaching goals and approaches; each cluster was led by a campus team that coordinated both shared activities and convened well attended gatherings of participants to share examples of the work being done in their courses
  • In 2004 One of the ILAP clusters (Expanding the SoTL Commons, led by IU-Bloomington) envisioned an international society that would support the growth of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning; IUB leaders (Craig Nelson, Whitney Schlegel, Jennifer Meta Robinson and others) recruited CASTL scholars to form a society to continue the CASTL work as the funded CFAT program wound down; with the help of a larger network of colleagues, they identified academics from around the English-speaking world who might be excited by this vision; about 30 people attended a “Founding Members” meeting, primarily from the US, Canada, the UK and Australia  
  • In 2004 the IUB group decided to host a conference on SoTL to affirm the creation of such a society, inviting people from all of the 13 ILAP clusters to attend and present work to the newly formed teaching and learning commons; they hoped that at least 50 people would attend, and 400 did.
  • In 2005 many of us quickly saw the potential of these numbers, and SoTL began to feel like a movement; this was especially true for many of us who were trying to establish SoTL at an institutional level; the University of British Columbia hosted the second annual ISSOTL conference, hoping for 400 participants; 600 attended
  • In 2006, the third year, about 800 attended the conference at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and at that point, we felt established; the Society had bylaws, functioning leaders, and a regular set of procedures for election of officers and identification of conference sites; this feeling was reinforced in 2007 when we held our 4th conference in Sydney, Australia, hosted at the University of New South Wales by Kathy Takayama and Adrien Lee
  • By the 2010 conference in Liverpool we had reached a point of experiencing growing pains; approaches to SoTL between and within various countries were similar, but not identical; some wanted to focus on making SoTL a highly rigorous field of study with only the very best research being published and discussed; the definitions of rigor often revolved around empirical approaches, a view that was contested by many in humanities; others still preferred Boyer’s notion of SoTL being intellectual work distinct from discovery scholarship in education; a growing percentage of members came from positions in academic development   
  • The establishment of ISSOTL’s journal, Teaching and Learning Inquiry, was a major step forward in the Society’s development; concurrent with much of this, colleagues at Elon University and elsewhere began creating some highly regarded online resources; Special Interest Groups formed and they devised their own priorities, missions, and standards of excellence; ISSOTL has developed three loci of exchange of intellectual work – the journal, the conferences, and the online community resources of the Society web presence
  • In more recent years, other regional societies have begun to spring up;  Euro SoTL has become a major entity, and SoTL in the South has brought in countries like South Africa;  happily and wisely, ISSOTL has helped nurture these entities rather than see them as competitors.
  • Share:
author avatar
ISSOTL Admin

    Previous post

    2020 ISSOTL Fellows
    June 19, 2020

    Next post

    Making sense of writing about learning and teaching
    September 3, 2020

    You may also like

    ISSOTL Fellows 2020 Spotlight – Hasitha Mahabaduge
    13 April, 2021
    ISSOTL Fellows 2020 Spotlight – Amrita Kaur
    12 March, 2021

    What drew you to SoTL? The SoTL process which is rooted in reflection, systematic inquiry, and encourages mindfulness for teaching and learning is one key reason I began to value SoTL. The inquiry is a unique amalgamation of science and art- …

    ISSOTL connect 2021 virtual event graphic
    ISSOTL Connect Cluster 1: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Justice in and through SoTL
    22 February, 2021

      2 Comments

    1. Mick Healey
      August 17, 2020
      Log in to Reply

      Many thanks to Dan and Gary for putting together this fascinating storyboard of the origins of ISSOTL. It bought back many happy memories. I think it is important though to recognise that it is only one of several possible storyboards.

      It is notable that the first five bullet points in the storyboard are exclusively about important US-based initiatives that pre-dated ISSOTL. These stimulated discussions that contributed to the founding of ISSOTL, but they are not the only initiatives that stimulated those discussions.

      I well remember Craig Nelson emailing me in 2003 outlining a proposal for a largely North American SoTL society and inviting me to be involved. I replied by saying that I was honoured to be asked, and I could give him a list of many other colleagues based outside North America who were interested in SoTL, so why not establish an international society.

      There were many SoTL initiatives from outside North America that predate ISSOTL. For example, David Gosling and Vaneeta D’Andrea founded the International conference on the scholarship of teaching and learning that met annually in London for about a decade from 2001. From 2003 it was led by Joelle Fanghanel. In 2000, Keith Trigwell co-edited a special issue of Higher Education Research and Development on the scholarship of teaching, drawing mainly on the work of Australian scholars. One of the key ideas in the founding of ISSOTL was to bring these and other initiatives from different countries and disciplines together.

      With around three-quarters or more of the members of ISSOTL being based in North America when it was founded, it is not surprising that the critical impact of initiatives by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and other North American organisations receive most attention, but let’s not forget the influence of initiatives from outside North America in writing the history of ISSOTL.

      Mick Healey
      17 August 2020

    2. b.higgs
      November 15, 2020
      Log in to Reply

      Thank-you Dan and Gary for this reminder of the initiation and the progress of ISSoTL. I was fortunate enough to benefit from the final CASTL Scholars programme, 2005-6 and first joined ISSoTL for the Washington DC Conference. They were eye-opening and memorable steps in my journey and I remember a decade of conversations around the theme ‘what is scholarship of teaching and learning?’!
      Thanks Mick for pointing out there were other stimuli, some on this side of the Atlantic. In my 2000-2002 studies for a PG Certificate in Teaching and Learning in HE, offered by the Open University, UK, my course texts contained references to scholarship carried out in the 1980s and 90s (not to mention a few in the 60s and 70s). They were mainly UK and Australian texts, some classroom based and some scholarship of discovery in Education.

      I believe Boyer (1990) was responding to what he saw, not just to what he foresaw. His important analysis of scholarship both named and legitimised the scholarship of teaching that existed, and that was to follow. His work provided an anchor and important reference point in time, and increased clarity, for those undertaking and progressing the scholarship of teaching and learning since then.
      The London SoTL conference was a catalyst for many and was sorely missed when it came to an end. In 2014, ISSoTL gave Europe regional VPs and members the confidence to initiate EuroSoTL. The memory of the London SoTL conference gave them a tried and tested model. As Dan and Gary indicate, the intention was that ISSoTL would be strengthened by the regional initiatives. One very interesting insight gained from the interaction of ISSoTL and EuroSoTL was that scholarship of teaching and learning existed in many non-English speaking European countries, but it had been largely invisible to us, because the word ‘scholarship’, as used by Boyer, did not readily translate.
      Thanks for sparking this conversation – I look forward to hearing more viewpoints.

    Leave A Reply Cancel reply

    You must be logged in to post a comment.

    Search

    Categories

    • Blog
    • Jobs
    • News

    Archives

    • April 2021 (1)
    • March 2021 (2)
    • February 2021 (5)
    • January 2021 (2)
    • December 2020 (4)
    • October 2020 (3)
    • September 2020 (2)
    • August 2020 (1)
    • June 2020 (4)
    • April 2020 (1)
    • March 2020 (3)
    • January 2020 (2)
    • November 2019 (5)
    • October 2019 (31)
    • September 2019 (3)
    • July 2019 (1)
    • April 2019 (3)
    • March 2019 (27)
    • January 2019 (2)
    • November 2018 (2)
    • October 2018 (6)
    • August 2018 (1)
    • July 2018 (1)
    • June 2018 (2)
    • May 2018 (9)
    • March 2018 (1)
    • January 2018 (3)
    • December 2017 (2)
    • November 2017 (1)
    • October 2017 (3)
    • September 2017 (2)
    • August 2017 (5)
    • June 2017 (4)
    • May 2017 (2)
    • April 2017 (2)
    • March 2017 (3)
    • February 2017 (2)
    • January 2017 (4)
    • November 2016 (3)
    • October 2016 (4)
    • September 2016 (1)
    • August 2016 (1)
    • May 2016 (1)
    • April 2016 (3)
    • March 2016 (1)
    • February 2016 (3)
    • January 2016 (1)
    • December 2015 (3)
    • November 2015 (6)
    • August 2015 (1)
    • July 2015 (1)
    • June 2015 (2)
    • May 2015 (2)
    • April 2015 (1)
    • February 2015 (2)
    • January 2015 (3)
    • December 2014 (2)
    • November 2014 (1)
    • August 2014 (1)
    • May 2014 (1)
    • April 2014 (1)
    • January 2014 (3)
    • December 2013 (3)
    • November 2013 (1)

    ISSOTL

    © 2020 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) All rights reserved.

    Contact Us

    MENU

    • About
    • Events
    • Get Involved
    • Awards
    • Resources
    • Contact

    Calgary Web Design by Clio Websites. Powered by WordPress.

    Login with your site account

    Lost your password?

    Not a member yet? Register now

    Register a new account

    Are you a member? Login now