Reimagining the 4M Framework in Educational Development for SoTL

By Mandy Frake-Mistak, Jennifer Friberg and Melanie Hamilton

As a triad of educational developers who just happen to be beyond passionate about SoTL, we’ve engaged in numerous conversations over the years. These conversations are largely centred around framing what we do as educational developers as SoTL. This has been particularly challenging when we do not necessarily engage in SoTL research on a daily basis—often it’s in a supporting role. Doing SoTL advocacy work in our respective institutions can be difficult, considering our positionality within the institutional hierarchy. So we decided to write about it and open up a dialogue with those engaged in SoTL and teaching and learning related work (not just educational developers!) about the ways in which our SoTL work happens on the ground. We offer our ideas and visions through what we term the 4M Continua for Educational Developmentas a possible understanding of the work that SoTL-focused educational developers do, as well as those who engage in educational development who have a SoTL-focus. To do this, we adapted the DART model (Kern et al. 2015) to situate educational development work using the 4M Framework to inform the ways in which we do, contribute to, consume, advocate, and support SoTL broadly, including at local, provincial, national, and international levels. Our hope is that the establishment of a fluid and flexible model for educational development SoTL-related activity will allow for opportunities to explore how this work is done in a systematic manner.

Read the TLI article here.