Is Trust Being Taken for Granted in SoTL?

By Kathryn A. Sutherland, Rachel Forsyth, and Peter Felten

We became intrigued by this question during conversations in mid-2021 as part of an Elon University Center for Engaged Learning research seminar. Thrust online for the first year of the three-year seminar due to pandemic travel restrictions, the three of us came together over Zoom from different corners of the world, along with Stacey MacKinnon from Canada. Stacey helped set the path for our research journey but then unfortunately had to withdraw from the seminar. We are grateful for her input in those early stages, as we began to explore how student-teacher trust might influence learning in higher education.

We had noticed that SoTL scholars often mention trust as an essential component for effective teaching and learning environments, but that relatively little literature backed that claim. SoTL papers that did mention trust seemed to define it, and citations often referred to the psychological literature on interpersonal or organizational trust and not to the higher education teaching context. Was trust, we wondered, being taken for granted in SoTL?  

That big question motivated our inquiry. And it also humbled us. We quickly realized that classroom-based trust is complex, dynamic, and relational. Time matters, as trust can be built or broken throughout a course. Context matters, including various aspects of the course itself (e.g., discipline, class size, etc.) and also the institutional and cultural context (e.g., New Zealand or Sweden, research university or liberal arts college). People matter, including the personalities and identities of the teacher and the students. And the “this matters” list could go on. . . .

Thanks to guidance from student and faculty colleagues in the Center for Engaged Learning research seminar, we sharply narrowed our inquiry to focus on academics teaching in large enrolment STEM courses, and our recent paper shares their expressions of trust. This means, however, that our work currently leaves out essential factors, including students and cultural contexts. We intend to move into those areas over time, and sincerely hope others will join us in researching how trust matters in higher education learning and teaching contexts around the world. There’s a lot we all still have to learn about trust.

Read the TLI article here.