ISSOTL2016

Karen Manarin, Mount Royal University

To begin this conference about Telling the Story of Teaching and Learning, I ask us to identify and consider our assumptions about the genres of SoTL. Genres like poetry, fiction, or scholarly articles invite different types of reading; within each genre, and subgenre, conventions shape our expectations and reading practices. How does the way we read SoTL influence (and constrain) the way we understand teaching and learning? Moving beyond Ashwin and Trigwell’s (2004) levels of scholarly investigation and Hutching’s (2000) taxonomy of questions, we will explore the generic conventions that shape the stories we tell. Genre provides a necessary frame of reference that helps readers understand text. As genre-theorist Chandler (1997) notes, “Generic frameworks may function to make form (the conventions of the genre) more ‘transparent’ to those familiar with the genre, foregrounding the distinctive content of individual texts.” While stories and storytellers who fit easily within a dominant generic framework often benefit from this transparency, stories and storytellers who are too far outside the framework risk being silenced. Readers who experience generic conventions as transparent may expend less energy understanding text, but they lose the opportunity to experience a productive friction which allows them to see the familiar anew. In this plenary, I will use a combination of poetry, literary theory, and SoTL studies to explore different ways of reading in order to make the conventions of SoTL less transparent.