Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence

Origins

SoTL focuses on higher education and is conducted by disciplinary specialists. SoTL is unique in its target of a multidisciplinary audience and purpose in focusing on how learners learn. The formal origins of SoTL begin in 1990. In an effort to define the scholarship performed by professors in academia as more than just 鈥渢eaching versus research,鈥� Ernest L. Boyer, in his influential book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990), concluded that 鈥渢he work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions.

These are: the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship  of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching鈥� (p. 16). This conceptualization of scholarship elevates the traditional role of teaching from 鈥渁 routine function, tacked on鈥� to an essential component of a professor鈥檚 scholarly life. Furthermore, Boyer argued that the academy should recognize and reward all four components of scholarship, including the scholarship of teaching.

Building on Boyer鈥檚 work, Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene I. Maeroff, in their book Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate (1997), identified six markers of scholarly work, including the scholarship of teaching (p. 25). Scholarly work should have

• Clear goals
• Adequate preparation
• Appropriate methods
• Significant results
• Effective presentation
• Reflective critique

These goals are familiar to faculty members from their evaluations of the scholarship of discovery (traditionally called simply 鈥渞esearch鈥�) yet are now applicable as standards of the other three scholarships.