Changing Future Faculty's Conceptions of SoTL

Abstract

Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) programs provide graduate students across all disciplines with professional development that addresses a range of faculty responsibilities. The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) combines education research with the practice of teaching by implementing, disseminating, and applying research on educational practice and interventions. During a PFF program at a public university, we used a pre-post writing prompt to examine changes in future faculty’s conceptions of SoTL. Pre-workshop responses included misconceptions that indicated unfamiliarity with SoTL. Post-workshop responses had an increased emphasis on sharing outcomes from educational interventions. Only 8% of pre-workshop responses included all main elements of SoTL, and this increased to 44% for post-workshop responses. We suggest that graduate programs should include training in SoTL so that future faculty are prepared to develop and advance their teaching programs using both existing pedagogical research as well as scholarly approaches to research in to their own teaching.