Woodhouse-Hype or Hope?

Woodhouse, Rosamund. "Hype or Hope: Can the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Fulfill Its Promise?" International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. 4.1(2010): 1-8. Web. 11 Sept. 2011. http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl.

This article assesses the value of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning over the last decade or so based on looking beyond "this is something we should do" to the evidence that it has been effective. The author uses Hutchings and Shulman’s “The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments” (1999) as a basis for the start of this research field, and pins it as a branch off of Boyer's Reconsidering Scholarship (1990). She pinpoints two reasons why SoTL has not been able to produce anything useful in pedagogical practices: epistemic and educational.  Essentially, classroom based research and the inability to make generalities based on the evidence is being challenged, and teachers are expected to learn and put the findings into practice by reading published research. She suggests workshops, collaborative approaches and new media usage to help solve the educational problem. The epistemic problem, the author posits, will remain unsolved; however, research that cannot be generalized still has a place in that it sparks new research that can be. At the end, Woodhouse brings SoTL as defined by Hutchings and Shulman back under the umbrella created by Boyer in order to get rid of the debate over the appropriation of the scholarship of teaching and learning, before giving a summary of what needs to be done in order to create a new model of SoTL.

I was actually glad that Woodhouse brought it all back together (Hutchings & Shulman with Boyer) because when I first started reading, I wasn't sure why they felt the need to branch off into a whole new field of study under the "Scholarship of Teaching." I agree with the author that it should fall under the larger blanket of Research because Boyer's argument specifically supported the idea that the four areas of the Professoriate are linked together and overlapping. The new model that she proposes seems to try and marry the traditional academic standards of research with the SoTL research, thereby making SoTL research valid in academia.