Packing up the Big Tent

Abstract

Our reflection begins with our presentation at the 2013 Banff Symposium in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning where we undertook a critique of the “big tent” metaphor that had thus far characterised much of SoTL’s thinking about its inherent diversity. We acknowledged that as proposed by its originators— Huber & Hutchings (2005) —the “big tent” of SoTL was intended as a capacious space, with room for all who wished to enter. Reflecting on this presentation, we argue that the celebratory big tent with its focus on better teaching and learning may helped SoTL become a more respectable academic enterprise. However, this success has entailed ignoring approaches that often bring into view the challenges of teaching “difficult knowledge” as well as students’ desires to remain ignorant of such knowledge. Now, in Canada at least, we argue the Big Tent must be packed away in order to focus on the messier aspects of teaching and learning. We offer some thoughts on what a decolonizing SoTL might look like.