TP Msg. #1139 Tenure Reconsidered (a Bit)
Dear community-engaged scholarship colleagues,
We thought this posting would interest you!
For information on work we're supporting to advance
community-engaged scholarship through changes in the faculty promotion, tenure
and development systems, please visit these websites and stay tuned for a
forthcoming theme issue of the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and
Engagement!
Thanks!
Rahma Osman
Program Assistant
Community-Campus Partnerships for Health http://ccph.info
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"This work must be recognized and rewarded in
systems of faculty evaluation if it is to influence what larger numbers of
faculty (not just heroes, saints and martyrs) see as possible and desirable to
do in their roles as teachers, citizens of their institutions and disciplines,
and contributors to knowledge," the book says.
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TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(sm) eMAIL NEWSLETTER http://bit.ly/sPK6qV
Sponsored by
Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning
The posting below looks at the varying degrees of
progress made in counting the scholarship of teaching and learning in research
contribution considerations. It is by Scott Jaschik from the August 31, 2011,
issue of INSIDE HIGHER ED, an excellent - and free - online source for news,
opinion and jobs for all of higher education. You can subscribe by going
to:
http://insidehighered.com/.
Also for a free daily update from Inside Higher Ed, e-mail
[scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com]. Copyright ?2011 Inside Higher Ed Reprinted
with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
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Tenure Reconsidered (a Bit)
Scholarship was reconsidered. Tenure, not so much.
That's the conclusion of a new book, The Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and
Impact(Jossey-Bass), http://bit.ly/s0tteY,
the latest in a series of examinations by the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching of the impact (potential and
realized) of the late Ernest Boyer's 1990 work,
Scholarship Reconsidered.
The new book is full of examples of the impact of
Scholarship Reconsidered
-- in the work of faculty members at all kinds of
institutions. Further, the new book argues that the ideas of Scholarship
Reconsidered could dovetail nicely with the assessment movement, given that
both focus on student learning outcomes. But the work being released this week
finds mixed results when it comes to applying Scholarship Reconsidered to the
tenure and promotion process -- and acknowledges that this reality may be
holding back efforts to institutionalize Boyer's ideas.
Boyer's central idea in the book was to question the
dichotomy of teaching and research as separate, largely unrelated functions. He
promoted the idea of "the scholarship of teaching" in which the
rigors of controlled experiments, peer review, and sustained research would be
applied to pedagogy -- from the redesign of courses to developing entirely new
curriculums or rethinking a classic textbook. Central to his thinking was that
colleges and universities needed to reward such contributions -- and to do so
not just in the teaching and service portions of the teaching/research/service
split of promotion criteria. Rather, Boyer and his supporters have argued,
these contributions should be seen -- just as a lab breakthrough or a monograph
might -- as research contributions to a discipline.
But that's not happening with any consistency, the new
book says.
"[T]here remains a troubling gap between rhetoric
about teaching's value and the realities of teaching's recognition and
reward," write the three authors, Pat Hutchings, director of the Carnegie
Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning; Mary Taylor Huber, a
senior scholar emerita at the Carnegie Foundation; and Anthony Ciccone, a
professor of French and director of the Center for Instructional and
Professional Development at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
Even amid widespread interest in applying the ideas of
the scholarship of learning, they write that progress will be held back, and
careers will not be rewarded appropriately, without change.
"This work must be recognized and rewarded in
systems of faculty evaluation if it is to influence what larger numbers of
faculty (not just heroes, saints and martyrs) see as possible and desirable to
do in their roles as teachers, citizens of their institutions and disciplines,
and contributors to knowledge," the book says.
Within the faculty reward rubric, the authors write,
Boyer's ideas have contributed to a more systematic approach to evaluating
teaching. But there has been very limited adoption of his ideas in the
evaluation of research (for those who wish to count such contributions as research).
Even with some policies that encourage faculty members to do so, the book says
that "campus leaders are quick to point out that recognition for the
scholarship of teaching and learning as research is by no means yet
assured."
The book calls for campus leaders to develop specific
policies and timelines to assure that this changes, but the book acknowledges
that change could continue to be slow.
In an interview, Huber, one of the authors, stressed that
she did see real progress in considering the scholarship of teaching and
learning with regard to evaluating teaching. Boyer's ideas have resulted in
reviews of teaching that are "so much more than student evaluations,"
she said.
Counting these contributions as research is more
difficult, Huber acknowledged. She noted that, in many cases, colleges have
general policies, and leave it to academic departments to define how to carry
out those policies. "Until recently, you could easily have committees
where very few people other than the person under consideration for tenure was
knowledgeable about these approaches," she said.
Huber said that she is hopeful that change will spread,
and that more faculty members will be awarded tenure or promotions on the basis
of their scholarship of teaching. "But the progress is uneven and
difficult to track," she said. One goal for the book is to encourage more
discussion of these issues, so that the progress may be less uneven in the
future, she said.
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