Beyond Boyer: SoTL in the Context of Interesting Scholarly Things

Abstract

The positive effects of Ernest Boyer’s broader definition of scholarship have been attenuated by stress on published outcomes as indicators of all his scholarships, including the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). At universities outside the research university sector, we need to find ways to recognize and reward a wide variety of interesting scholarly things related to teaching that are not likely to meet the formal assessment criteria that have come to define the SoTL category of scholarship. The faculty’s scholarliness in teaching should be recognized and evaluated directly. There is considerable evidence that university faculty members outside the research university sector have felt increasing pressure since the 1970s to publish scholarly work in order to be awarded tenure, promotion and merit increases (e.g., Boyer, 1990; Milem, Berger, & Dey, 2000). One concern about this long-standing trend is that faculty members engaged in traditional forms of published scholarship will neglect teaching and public service activities. Perhaps most notably, Boyer (1990) and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation felt that the emphasis on publication meant that faculty members who were doing other useful things were not getting sufficient credit. In response to this concern, Boyer and his Carnegie colleagues offered a broader view of scholarship. It included faculty work on teaching (SoTL) and on public service (the scholarship of application or engagement) as well as on more traditional forms of scholarship (the scholarships of discovery and integration). They envisioned universities where a wide array of scholarly activities would be recognized and rewarded. They thought that the broader model of scholarship would be of special help to faculty members at comprehensive universities and small liberal arts colleges where what “counted” as scholarship tended to be most problematic (Boyer, 1990; Leatherman, 1990; Rice, 2005).