International Collaborative Writing Groups: The ICWG-Public Track
ICWG-Public cohorts focus on writing for audiences beyond the educational community to produce public SoTL, or works of public scholarship informed by SoTL. In her ISSOTL19 closing keynote entitled “SoTL as Public Scholarship,” Nancy Chick explained how public SoTL
extends the purpose of SoTL toward advocacy, its audiences toward a broader public, its products toward more public forms of communication, and its influence beyond courses and academic programs. This outreach model begins with the recognition that SoTL and public scholarship have common roots in Ernest Boyer’s expansion of recognized scholarships: his notion of “the scholarship of teaching” (1990) grew into SoTL, and his later description of “the scholarship of engagement” (1996) encompasses what we now call public scholarship, with the goal of developing spaces where “the academic and civic cultures communicate more continuously and more creatively with each other” in order to “connect the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems.” (Read the book chapter based on this keynote here.)
ICWG-Public Projects & Products
The products of the ICWGs-Public are more public modes of writing, in forms aimed at audiences beyond academics, such as white papers, public statements on pressing issues, material for mainstream media, web resources, public art installations or performances, or series of blog posts, podcasts, or audio-visual content. For more possible products, see “Public SoTL: Amplifying the Purposes, Audiences, and Products of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” For inspiration for what public SoTL might be about, as well as a couple of tools to help envision public SoTL projects, see the “Imagining Public SoTL” blog post.
