Approaches to Biology Teaching and Learning: From a Scholarly Approach to Teaching to the Scholarship of Teaching

Abstract

We live in a time when the seeds of change in scienceeducation have borne fruit all around us. The rhetoric of thecalls for change issued by national scientific societies andagencies is supported by the reality of compelling examplesof change, accomplished by scientists who have rethoughtthe way they teach, the way they think about teaching, andthe way they define themselves as science educators(Handelsman et al., 2004; Project Kaleidoscope, 2004).The seeds have germinated in some potentially rockysoil—including the graduate and postdoctoral trainingprograms that generate future scientists (Luft et al., 2004).For many of us who received our preparation for what wenow do as educators before those seeds were sown, however,our graduate and postdoctoral programs may have donejustice only to our future roles as research scientists. Ourpreparation for teaching may have consisted largely ofservice as a laboratory teaching assistant, or as the delivererof a curriculum designed by others. When faced with the callto consider the way we teach, we are often on unfamiliarground—a ground littered with incomprehensible jargonand diverse standards for what constitutes best practice.Should we go back to the figurative school and, in essence,reinventourselves?Whatisthepotentialpayoff?Dowereallyhave the time to take a scholarly approach to teaching, in ad-ditiontotheprofessionaldemandsplacedonusinotherareas?The three scenarios presented below are offered as illustra-tions of situations in which scientists who teach are poised atthe brink of finding value in the principles and practices thatconstitute what is an emerging area of scholarship: thescholarship of teaching (Hutchings and Shulman, 1999).