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1、Engaging Faculty in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A View from BRIDGEArlene Wilner, Department of English, Rider University, Lawrenceville, NJAbstractIntroduction This paper offers an overview of the benefits and tensions implicit in the BRIDGE model for fostering the Scholarship of Teaching
2、and Learning (SoTL). An ongoing faculty development project, BRIDGE (Bridging Research, Instruction, and Discipline-Grounded Epistemologies) draws on the insights of Thomas Angelo and K. Patricia Cross that effective classroom assessment techniques are also teaching strategies and that such strategi
3、es differ from institutional program assessment in their focus on the richness and complexity of particular teaching environments. Essential to the success of BRIDGE is its simultaneous focus on discipline-based classroom research and it multi-disciplinary workshop structure: While the former allows
4、 faculty to connect pedagogy with the epistemologies that underlie their own training, the latter confers a number of advantages that enhance both faculty satisfaction and the success of classroom research. At the same time, multi-disciplinarity helps to surface essential tensions, such as the diffi
5、culty of matching assessment strategies to teaching goals and the unresolved question of the relationship of qualitative to quantitative data in the scholarship of teaching and learning. By “going public” at the end of their BRIDGE inquiry year, faculty share their methods and findings and solicit p
6、eer review, thus confirming the scholarly nature of their work and motivating colleagues to build on it.BRIDGE might be considered a way of improving student learning by honoring both the ineffable art and the systematic nature of effective teaching. In a series of workshops that bring together nine
7、 or ten faculty members (seven or eight classroom researchers plus the Director and an assistant project-mentor), representing disciplines from all campus Colleges, participants use the accrued wisdom of the past (multiple aspects of expert thinking on cognitive and affective development in the coll
8、ege years and on how best to assess and assist learning) as a guide for deep analysis of selected details of our everyday encounters with students, texts, ideas, and feelingsand of the web of connections among all of these. More specifically, these faculty work individually and collaboratively to en
9、gage in the following iterative and recursive activities: reflect upon and articulate disciplinary epistemologies that are usually “transparent”: What are key questions about the nature of the discipline and subquestions within the discipline, both enduring and current? How does a practitioner withi
10、n the discipline frame pertinent questions or problems? What kinds of evidence and inquiry strategies count as acceptable in addressing pertinent problems? What kinds of argument are considered persuasive? design and implement a teaching strategy or set of strategies to foster the higher-order think
11、ing habits appropriate to the discipline and/or develop approaches for enabling students to more effectively practice complex skills assess the effectiveness of the learning experience in each case by choosing from or adapting suggested assessment strategies, such as those outlined in Thomas Angelo
12、and K. Patricia Crosss Classroom Assessment Techniques (Jossey-Bass, 1993) document their thinking and investigation in a case study format such as those in Opening Lines (Carnegie Foundation, 2000) share their findings for review by peers in one or more venues. This peer review can take one or more
13、 of several forms, all of which are considered a way of “going public.” One way has been to present summaries of the classroom inquiry projects at our annual Faculty Development Day in May to which faculty and administrators from nearby campuses are invited. To increase opportunities for such presen
14、tations, this year the Provost initiated an SoTL Luncheon Seriesfour luncheon meetings at each of which two BRIDGE participants, paired to illuminate a pedagogic theme, share their classroom research. An article or book chapter keyed to the theme is distributed in advance to attendees. Projects are
15、also posted on the BRIDGE websitewww.rider.edu/bridgewhere they can be reviewed and, we hope, serve as useful models both for SoTL and for creative teaching strategies that might be effectively adapted by others.It must be emphasized that BRIDGE is a bottom-up enterprise, starting not with an accept
16、ed body of knowledge from folks whose academic specialty is education per se, but from individual questions, interests, and concerns arising from everyday classroom experience. Like that of Writing-Across-the Curriculum, its structure can accommodate faculty from any discipline, but unlike WAC, it d
17、oes not promote any particular strategy for enhancing learning; rather it helps faculty “go meta” (to use a phrase favored by Lee Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), i.e., look more deeply and more systematically at their teaching practices, at the evidenc
18、e they gather of students learning, andmost cruciallyat the relationship between these. Why Discipline-Grounded?As a result of classroom inquiry, course goals themselves are commonly refined or even redefined. This redefinition is shaped by the professors deepening perceptions of his or her discipli
19、nes epistemologies and the pedagogies that affect them. It is also influenced by specific contexts such as the level of the course, its role as a general education course vs. a pre-requisite in a curricular sequence, and the class demographics. In courses where there is a great demand for “coverage”
20、a pressure usually felt intensely in science courses directed at majorsprofessors may come to relinquish a topic or two in favor of more in-depth understanding of material. To those who might object that less coverage penalizes students as they approach the next course in a sequence, these science f
21、aculty might well cite the evidence compiled by Craig Nelson (biology professor and a Carnegie Foundation U.S. Professor of the Year) that the imagined trade-off is illusory because students who are asked to think critically through exercises in which they actively participate and in which self-asse
22、ssment is enabled (such as the biopsychology professors impromptu review paragraphs and the group-work designed to foster application and inferential thinking in the biology class) actually learn more content and learn it better than students who are asked to somehow “get through” the book. Nelson,
23、in fact, makes a persuasive case that so far from competing with each other, critical thinking and digestion/retention of content are mutually reinforcing and reciprocal: “The steps that facilitate critical thinking also facilitate content acquisition. . . . The opportunities for rehearsing critical
24、 thinking also serve for rehearsing other content. A higher proportion of the class now masters difficult content. Furthermore, much of the content will be retained as examples of critical thinking processes” (“Persistence”).As compared with courses in disciplines such as science and law, the episte
25、mologies of the humanities may seem unnecessarily and self-indulgently arcane and abstract to outsiders. This year, for the first time, there is an English professor in BRIDGE, a junior faculty member well-versed in the manifold aspects of literary theory that have virtually transformedand very much
26、 complicated- the discipline over the last twenty-five years, theory we older professors did not study in graduate school (because it was just beginning to acquire currency as we were being trained). The thoroughness with which our training permeates all aspects of our practice is, I believe, sugges
27、ted by the professors description of his teaching “problem” in a gateway course for majors, Methods of Literary Analysis. In its use of terms that underlie the very subject matter of his course“doubling,” “paradox,” “meta-discussion”as well as its insistence on the need to erode fundamental distinct
28、ions, this description of the teaching challenge dramatizes the degree to which methods and approaches are discipline-based. The course, he writes,poses questions about foundational concepts of literary study: what does one do when one reads? What is an author or a text? The pedagogical problem that
29、 ENG 240 poses is how to convince students that such conceptual questions are worthy of examination. . . .In addition, ENG 240 serves as a practicum in types of literary criticism. . . .This training seems its greatest value, but again such training may appear infantilizing or esoteric to students w
30、edded to self-evident understandings of reading, authorship, etc. . . .However, the most complicated feature of Methods of Literary Analysis must be the fact that the two aims of the courselearning about critical schools (theory) and training students in the various modes of criticism (praxis)double
31、s the very theory-practice distinction that the course must erode in order to sell itself to resistant students. In short, its twin aims reinforce the very division that the course seeks to overcome. . . .Addressing this problem, of course, requires relatively open meta-discussion of the courses str
32、ucture. In addition,. . .the major assignment alteration for this course will be the demand that students discuss the ways in which literature applies to theory, reversing the conventional statuses, ideally, in order to circumvent the aforementioned practical contradiction.The newly invented assignm
33、ent he refers to was conceptually challenging in the extreme, requiring that students compose a conversation among critics, theorists, authors, or characters, with three options specified (see website for details). While the students responses revealed evidence of much struggle (more than half of th
34、e students received grades lower than C), the professor did notice a striking change in the quality of the more informal response papers required periodically throughout the semester. At a BRIDGE meeting he shared samples of both the created “conversations” and the response papers that followed. In
35、a progress report, he compared the writing (and thinking) of students on the exam with their analysis in the response papers after the exam, explaining how the latter reflected the kind of development he was seeking. He speculated on reasons for the apparent cause/effect relationship, suggesting tha
36、t an assignment that simply asks students to “critically engage the text” in some way (the sort he had begun with in the response papers) encourages a non-reflective “openness” that fosters bad responses; it enables them to express their own “opinion” before they have understood the viewpoints to wh
37、ich they are responding. In contrast, the invented-conversation assignment “channels the voices of others,” forcing them to “inhabit the critical/theoretical discourse of experts” before joining the conversation themselves. To my knowledge, older professors who have taught this course in our departm
38、ent have not made this sort of demand on studentsor at least not in as sustained a way; they have tended to rely more on the more conventional application of theory to text that that the younger professor, trained differently and with a somewhat different set of goals, finds it necessary to subvert.
39、 Thus, BRIDGE is not only discipline-grounded; it reflects individual needs, personalities, and teaching styles. Because the research is conceived and implemented by the researcher (as in the case of any scholarly inquiry), it is a program that serves the needs of particular individuals in specific
40、classrooms rather than vice versa. Why Multi-Disciplinary ?Organizing cohorts to include faculty from a wide range of disciplines has proven advantageous for at least three reasons:1Simultaneous with the development of meta-thinking about ones discipline and the pedagogy of it, some themes that tran
41、scend disciplines naturally emerge. Selected readings shared periodically with participants provide frameworks for developing pedagogic strategies. Some themes and readings that have been useful include the following:a) Theme: the difference between expert and novice thinking. Reading: “How Experts
42、Differ from Novices,” Part II, chapter 2 of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, ed. Bransford, John D., Anne Brown, and Ridney R. Cocking, Washington, D.C., National Academy Press: 1999. the pedagogy of any discipline, some of them seem more directly application to non-humanities
43、fields.) b) Theme: tension between coverage and critical thinking Reading: Nelson, Craig E. “On the Persistence of Unicorns: The Tradeoff Between Content and Critical Thinking Revisited.” In B.A. Pescosolida and R. Aminzade, eds., The Social Worlds of Higher Education: Handbook for Teaching in a New
44、 Century. Pine Forge Press. c) Theme: the challenge of helping students read course materials in purposeful ways. Reading: “Learning: The Teacher Wants Us to Be Self-Directing,”chapter 8 of In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Robert Kegan, Harvard UP, 1994d) Theme: need to understa
45、nd and acknowledge the cognitive and affective levels of students. Reading: Summaries of rubrics offered by developmental specialists such as William Perry and Benjamin Bloom, are readily available. 2A range of disciplines offers opportunities for analogic thinking. I have come to realize that much
46、cross-pollination occurs not despite the disciplinary differences, but because of them. In an unusually fruitful instance of this kind of crossover, a Business Policy professor was so impressed by a history professors extensive redesign of her traditional lecture course to incorporate a series of hi
47、ghly structured debates based on primary and secondary sources that she decided to abandon her preliminary ideas for a BRIDGE inquiry project and instead adapt the history debate model for her course in Business Law: In the early spring of her BRIDGE year, she wrote: “I have decided to change my pro
48、ject for the spring 2002 semester. Inspired by A.O., the history professor, I have revised two of my courses Advanced Business Law and Law and Justice Seminar, to include debates. Like A., I want my students to read primary sources and critically evaluate varying solutions to a variety of legal and
49、ethical dilemmas.” The effects were so positive that the business professor was nominated for a national teaching award in recognition of this curricular innovation. Other instances of “borrowing,” while perhaps less dramatic, have the potential to make significant differences. After a semester of considering a variety of CATs and hearing formal presentations from past BRIDGE participants, a political science professor decided upon th
