Recently I reread social psychologist Ellen J. Langer's book, Mindfulness (1989, Addison-Wesley). In a chapter with the intriguing title “Decreasing Prejudice by Increasing Discrimination,” Langer argues that more careful observation and description of difference, for example age or disability, or gender, leads to an increase in “categorizing and consequently fewer global stereotypes” (167). Making specific distinctions rather than global distinctions – greater discrimination, contributes to “breaking down the mindset of prejudice” (154). Faculty, students, and administrators carry prejudices – pre-judgments about each other, about teaching, and about learning. Too often, one's set of “global stereotypes” dulls the pedagogical senses and interferes with careful observation of one's own teaching practice and of the dynamics of students' learning. At its best, the scholarship of teaching and learning provides a corrective to pedagogical prejudice. It can offer a fresh perspective or a new angle of vision on a long-standing challenge. It can strengthen commitment by building a community of purpose. At its best, the scholarship exhibits the careful observation, discriminating description, and elaborated analysis that undercut obscuring prejudices, disclose new insights, and so, reorient faculty. This leads to refocused, refined, even a more discriminating, practice. Topics of teaching and learning that are complex and significant enough to warrant sustained scholarly attention emerge from multiple venues: the institutional and larger cultural contexts within which faculty teach and students learn, particular student behaviors and reactions to material or assignments, incongruity between anticipated and actual results of particular pedagogical practices, and more. When such topics do emerge, they invite reconsideration and realignment of one's thinking about pedagogical purposes, the contexts within and material with which one works, and the students with whom one works. The articles and notes in this issue reflect the range of venues from which projects in the scholarship of teaching and learning emerge. Three pieces address course structure and pedagogy. Helen Blier found herself confronted with the task of creating a combination online and face-to-face course. She accepted the challenge and through careful observation, discovered ways that this hybrid structure contributed to students' autonomy as learners, their openness to community, and their acknowledgement of disciplinary expertise. Her piece exemplifies discriminating observation and attention to context and practice. Fred Glennon also attends to practice. He considers a decade of results from his use of a particular pedagogical strategy, the learning covenant. In various ways, he has deployed this strategy to promote the freedom and responsibility among his students intended to improve their learning. Russell Butkus and Steven Kolmes provide an extended description of their team-taught, interdisciplinary religion and science course (with appendices on the Wabash Center website). They probe inquiry-based, interdisciplinary, and perhaps most intriguingly, kinesthetic learning. They argue that learning about the environment occurs best when a sustained fieldwork/ service-learning component is included. Lisa Hess takes on a larger institutional and cultural topic. She probes the meanings of the term “formation” in theological education, examining especially how formation is and could be incorporated more effectively into seminaries. Finally, in “Students' Spirituality and ‘Big Questions’ in Introductory Religion Courses,” Barbara Walvoord summarizes a key finding from her forthcoming book, Teaching and Learning in College Introductory Religion Courses (2008, Blackwell). Walvoord emphasizes the differences between professors' purposes and students' expectations and desires in her extensive study of introductory religion and theology courses. A future issue of the journal will include a symposium of responses to Walvoord's book. “We had the experience but we missed the meaning,” T. S. Elliot wrote in Four Quartets. Underlying the scholarship of teaching and learning is the conviction that the more discriminatingly we probe pedagogical experience, the more likely we are to become more artful and effective teachers.