Seven faculty and one undergraduate from Elon presented at the October 22-25 conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL). This is the premier conference on SoTL, including faculty from 15 countries and plenary speakers from three continents this year.
Elon participants in ISSOTL 2009 were:
• Stephen Bloch-Schulman (Philosophy) organized and participated in a featured panel titled “In Search of the Humanities in (IS)SOTL” which brought together an interdisciplinary group of 7 scholars (including Randy Bass of Georgetown University and Tony Ciccone of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) to explore what humanities brings to the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Bloch-Schulman also chaired the roundtable, “Asking about the Roles of Theory and its Relationship to Evidence and Validity in Humanities SOTL Work.” Along with Mary Huber (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), Sherry Linkon (Youngstown State University) and Nancy Chick (University of Wisconsin-Barron County), Bloch-Schulman led a discussion about what role evidence plays in humanities work, and, in particular, in the work of humanists’ investigations of teaching and learning. Bloch-Schulman, along with Nancy Chick and Pat Michelson, has also organized a humanities interest group for ISSOTL.
• Jessie Moore (English) presented “Student Perceptions of Service-Learning: Measuring the Impact of Redesigning with Students.” Reporting on two interconnected SoTL research projects, her presentation examined learning outcomes and student perceptions of service-learning in an Introduction to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) course that was collaboratively redesigned by Jessie and her students.
• Sang Nam (Communications) presented two posters. “Promoting Creative and Critical Thinking in Graphical Software Application Classes” analyzed evidence of student learning in software application classes to generate more intellectually engaging projects that develop students’ creative and critical thinking processes. “Pedagogical Comparison and Contrast Between Asian and American Approaches to Music Prodigies” used Glaser‘s grounded theory to comprehend different pedagogical approaches to music prodigy in Asia and America based on interviews with piano prodigies.
• Nina Namaste, Mina García Soormally, and Yumika Araki (all in the Department of Foreign Languages) presented a poster entitled “Pre-review Faculty Developing a Departmental Culture–Through SoTL?” In the pilot study, seven pre-review faculty in three different departments at Elon were interviewed or filled out a survey about the culture in their particular departments.
Some of the emergent themes suggest that 1) increased (and positive) socializing in a department often leads to better working relationships, 2) pre-review faculty have more interactions with fellow junior faculty than senior faculty, 3) the opportunities that exist for pre-review faculty to collaborate focus on teaching and service (not on research), 4) pre-review faculty see good mentorship in their professional growth and would like more mentorship. In the next year, willing pre-review faculty in all the departments on campus will be interviewed and the results coded in order to see larger-scale patterns.
• Christopher Manor (Elon ’11), Jessie Moore, Stephen Bloch-Schulman, and Peter Felten were part of a poster presentation on “Student Voices in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” The poster documented the work of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Student Voices Institutional Leadership group. The poster complemented the group’s new book, Engaging Student Voices in the Study of Teaching and Learning (Stylus, 2009).
The 2010 ISSOTL conference will be Oct. 19-22 in Liverpool, United Kingdom.