Getting started in SOTL: a personal reflection
Katharine Terrell
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) sounds straightforward on the surface: it is focused on our teaching and learning practice. Every day we “do” teaching: we design and give lectures, we feedback on work, we facilitate seminars, and so on. It’s the “scholarship” part of SOTL that might harder to define. Felten and Geertsema (2023) argue that we should focus on “recovering the heart” of SOTL and not let ourselves be pulled into what Said refers to as the pressures of professionalisation. Instead, Said argues for the figure of the intellectual as “exile and marginal, as amateur, and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power” (cited in Felten & Geertsema). Suddenly, I feel as if we have moved from something local about reflecting on what works in our everyday teaching, towards something much bigger. An amateur is someone who does something for the love of it; an exile is someone outside of the mainstream who therefore has a different perspective. What would SOTL look like if we followed these principles?
For Said, being an amateur is about care and about moral values. For me, this translates into SOTL in the widest sense: talking, reading and writing about teaching not as a dry, technical matter of improving scores, but getting to what matters. Why do we teach in the first place? Not to transfer some objective knowledge from a master to a beginner, but to connect with other people to develop ideas that have value in the world. This might sound like grand, but really, why else do we teach? Whether it’s differential equations or aesthetics or lab techniques or moral philosophy, we believe that it matters, and it is worth our time and our students’ time. And this is why SOTL is important: because teaching and learning are important and worthy of our time and energy.
What does this mean for early career academics finding our way in SOTL? For me, it was about figuring out what mattered and what I cared about. At first this felt like a huge undertaking, but when I started to break it down into smaller chunks, it felt more manageable. For example, I care about creating an inclusive teaching environment, part of which is developing compassionate, constructive feedback. I started paying more attention to my feedback and thinking about what questions I needed to ask to improve it. I questioned the assumptions around feedback: what is it for? Why do we approach it this way?
I talked with colleagues about it, asking them about their approach to giving feedback and the problems they encountered. As well as discussing it with colleagues at the University of Glasgow, I made connections through a professional organisation (Scottish Higher Education Developers, SHED, as this aligns closely to my academic role). These connections helped me to further develop my thought processes and challenged me to see different perspectives on feedback. Ultimately, it has helped me to develop a SOTL project with a colleague from a different institution on something that we both care about and believe in. I also got the confidence to share works-in-progress with colleagues through various networks: I presented my thoughts on using zines in teaching through the Creative HE community, which led to writing an article for a special issue on creative pedagogies for the Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice (JPAAP), coming up in December 2024. And of course I took the opportunity to present work at the annual Learning and Teaching Conference, as well as opportunities such as this SOTL advent calendar!
In this way, I began to see SOTL as integral to every part of my academic role. Each small reflection, each mistake that I learned from, each conversation with a colleague over a cup of tea became embedded in my day-to-day practice. This does not mean it is always easy: after all, it is still work, and we all have increasingly busy days and growing to-do lists. However, what helped me was resisting the idea that SOTL was something else on that to-do list, a neat task that can be tied up in a bow. Instead, I now see it as a practice of caring, of asking questions and challenging mainstream assumptions about teaching and learning.
References
Felten, P., Geertsema, J. (2023). Recovering the Heart of SoTL: Inquiring into Teaching and Learning ‘as if the World Mattered’. Innovative Higher Education 48, 1095–1112 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-023-09675-4
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