From Practice to Inquiry: A Peer Review Response to “An Educator's Journal”

Abstract

I've been struggling with where to begin in my commentary on Mark Giese's service-learning outreach project because it has learning written all over it. The students are obviously expected to learn about video production, mass communication concepts, and even health issues, but I suspect they will learn much more. For example, they may learn about what it means to go to college, what they might study there, how college professor thinks, and the standards he sets for student work. The instructors are also likely to learn something about teaching, perhaps how to collaboratively design and deliver course, how to engage at-risk students in school work, how to structure experiential learning activities, and how to assess project with several important goals. The students will also help Mark learn about the kinds of public health messages likely to reach an audience of teenagers. In addition, the readers of this journal have an opportunity to learn. Mark will share with us an approach to teaching that we might risk trying in our own communities and schools. Moreover, by opening this window onto his service-learning course, he may teach us something about the scholarship of teaching. And I'd like to find ways to help him take up that challenge. Until recently, the term scholarship of teaching served as an endorsement of the value of good teaching. Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, described it as a way of saying that teaching-good teaching-was serious intellectual work and should be rewarded (2004, p. 149). Over time, the term has become more precise, and it is now used to describe teaching that is reflective, evidence-based, informed by pedagogical and subject knowledge, and public. Shulman argues that for teaching to be truly scholarly, there must be a public account of some or all of the full act of teaching-vision, design, enactment, outcomes, and analysis-in manner susceptible to critical review by the teacher's professional peers and amenable to productive employment in future work by members of the same community (1988, p. 6). Moreover, the scholarship of teaching involves inquiry: the teacher must investigate the impact of his or her teaching practices on student learning (Shulman, 2004, p. 150). In the first installment of his journal, Mark expresses genuine concern about complex problem: how to assess the range of student learning that should occur in this course. Is this what advocates of the scholarship of teaching have in mind when they talk about inquiry? Let me dig little deeper into Mark's journal to answer this question. Mark describes this class as form of experiential learning. The students are learning about video production and mass communication concepts, so they can produce set of public service announcements for teenagers. They must apply their growing knowledge of technology and media to realworld task. As part of the experience, they are also practicing thinking in new language, and this should equip them not only to produce media, but to think and talk about it knowledgeably. (I'm hoping Mark can tell us more, in future issues, about how he and Nancy, his co-teacher, facilitated these learning experiences.) Mark also tells us that he and Nancy made conscious decision to treat the students in the class as if they had no prior media experience, even though some had taken courses in multimedia or electronic arts the high school. He and Nancy began, he writes, at the beginning by addressing basic media literacy issues. At this point, I began to ask myself some questions about teaching and learning that may help us think about how to solidly ground this project in the realms of both public scholarship and the scholarship of teaching. Research indicates that one way to motivate students and facilitate their learning is to build on their prior experiences (e.g., Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, 2000; Mestre, 1994). …