“Boyer Reconsidered”: Fostering Students’ Scholarly Habits of Mind and Models of Practice

Abstract

In his Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Ernest L. Boyer argued for a conception of ‘scholarship’ that recognizes traditional research – what he termed the ‘scholarship of discovery’ – but which also includes the scholarly domains of ‘integration’, ‘application’, and ‘teaching’. His validation of teaching has spawned a virtual ‘industry’ devoted to what is now known as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). fIn this paper I seize upon the fact that, in the process of assembling his argument for better recognition of the range of faculty work, Boyer reconsidered the very concept of scholarship, arriving at a broader conception that highlights and celebrates a rich intersection of varied scholarly activities and practices. After introducing Boyer’s four domains of scholarship and summarizing the various scholarly activities – what might be termed the ‘habits of mind’ and ‘models of practice’ – that are associated with those domains, I use the faculty-teaching-scholar template that emerges to generate a map for the development of the student-as-scholar. There is, I believe, a serious need to balance the (quantitatively and qualitatively) great work on the faculty-teaching component of SoTL with an increased focus on the student-learning side. Finally, I demonstrate how the various scholarly habits of mind and models of practice that help define the student-as-scholar are potentially developed in teaching and learning contexts identified as ‘high-impact educational practices’. These scholarly habits of mind, models of practice, and high-impact practices are placed in the broader context of ‘purposeful pathways’, i.e., degree-level curricular and co-curricular plans that could be considered as analogues of faculty-scholars’ research agendas.