Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal
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Converging Spaces? Re-Imagining the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) as the Subject of Transdisciplinary Research
Get PDFFrom the big tent foundations that are a rich part of SoTL’s story, this essay posits the desirability of creating transdisciplinary space(s) focused on the study of SoTL and what it might look like if the perspectives and approaches from SoTL scholars, educational developers, and higher education scholars converged on a shared research agenda or agendas
Strengthening Connections: The Developing Relationship Between Educational Development and Assessment
Get PDFGetting the Faculty Back into Faculty Development and Assessment
Get PDFValencia College Faculty Development maintains the principle that assessment is a tool for learning. This practice guides authentic measurement of learning and creates a culture of evidence—at Valencia, the learners are students, faculty, and staff. Faculty Development Instructional Designers (FDIDs) are integrated into faculty teams to support the assessment cycle while maintaining the vision of professional development by faculty, for faculty. Strong partnerships between assessment professionals, faculty development, and faculty manifest when findings translate into meaningful improvements. Though Valencia cultivated an assessment culture for years, by 2018 many faculty had become disengaged, and assessment was inconsistently producing actionable results. Rather than developing learning strategies, faculty frequently concentrated on improving the assessment instruments. A collaborative design team was convened and discovered (a) actionable results emerge from assessment close to the learner; (b) a biennial timeline establishes an assessment year and an improvement year; and (c) while faculty are subject matter experts, most need assistance developing assessments and distilling insights from results
Meaning and Manifesto: Embracing Transdisciplinarity in SoTL
Get PDFThis critical reflective essay works to provide a framework of transdisciplinarity in SoTL (the meaning) which considers how this foundational value can be further conceptualized and integrated across multiple facets of SoTL scholarship, people, and practices. We make the case that through the power of dialogue, we can transform, even transcend, prior norms of academia (the manifesto) through the fostering of diverse ways of knowing (scholarships); the forging of transcendent and boundary-less connections (communities) and the propagation of knowledge through open, inclusive, and burgeoning co-creation (pedagogy)
Connecting Faculty Development to Assessment: A Case Study on Improving Student Reflections on Applied Learning
Get PDFIn this article, we discuss the relationship between assessment and faculty development through campus-wide adoption and implementation of applied learning practices at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW). Reflection was a critical component of both pedagogy and assessment of applied learning at UNCW, and our assessment results indicated positive changes in multiple student learning outcomes associated with their engagement in applied learning experiences. We utilized assessment results to develop faculty development efforts aimed at improving reflection prompts and reflective practice as both pedagogy and assessment. Our development of a faculty learning community led by fellows from across campus helped our efforts to connect assessment and faculty development and contributed to a culture across campus that values the integration of this work even beyond the initial time period in which we focused these efforts
“Dear Author": A Transparent SoTL Peer Review
Get PDFThis epistolary article is written as an extended SoTL peer review. It contains two sections: my preparatory work as peer reviewer and my actual review. In the first section, I remind myself of the function and processes of the SoTL peer review, what the author expects from a SoTL peer reviewer, and how I see my role as a peer reviewer in SoTL. In the second section, I write my review, focusing on three common feedback areas in SoTL: how the author brings in existing scholarship, how the author describes their SoTL project, and how the author demonstrates its importance. My review concludes with some advice for navigating the potentially conflicting reviews that are not unusual in SoTL
Leveraging AI for Innovative Authentic Assessment and Enhanced Learning in Political Science
Get PDFA salient question for us as educators designing their assessments in the time of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is: Does using a tool such as ChatGPT enhance or inhibit student learning in political science and international relations? The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) presents new avenues for pedagogical innovation. This paper explores the integration of an AI model, ChatGPT, in assessing student learning in a political economy course. The research aims to investigate the efficacy of using AI as an authentic assessment tool aligned with the course\u27s primary learning outcomes. Grounded in the current educational literature on equitable assessment practices, the study employed a reflective case study methodology coupled with a qualitative survey. Findings from the study highlight the promising utility of ChatGPT in increasing student engagement, fostering critical thinking, and enabling authentic assessment. Students were able to critically analyze and improve upon the AI-generated outputs, thereby fulfilling course objectives. The paper concludes with this pedagogical innovation\u27s potential gains and limitations, recommending future directions for incorporating AI in educational assessments
The SoTL Scholar’s Individual and Collective Journey: Navigating a Cognitive and Emotional Transition
Get PDFThe article examines the dispositions that grow out of, and help navigate, the journey of the SoTL scholar from individual practitioner to collective participant in SoTL communities of practice. This transition, both cognitive and emotional, re-configures SoTL scholars’ research across the constitutive disciplines, epistemologies and methodologies of the field. Underpinning the process is a relational, non-performative SoTL culture which counters the negative effects of the neoliberalization of higher education. The analysis of dispositions derives, in part, from our individual and collective SoTL research. However, we have also woven in theoretical and empirical research from SoTL, decolonial and feminist studies, and social learning theories to explore the dialectical relationship between such features of the SoTL journey as; the cognitive and emotional, SoTL in the North and the South, performativity and caring, and disciplinary and transdisciplinary
From Silos to Synergy: Integrating Assessment and Educational Development for Institutional Effectiveness
Get PDFHigher education institutions strive to enhance student learning and success. Traditionally, the roles of educational developers who support faculty and assessment professionals who evaluate student outcomes have operated in separate spheres. However, a growing body of literature suggests that the boundaries between these domains are blurring, with integrated approaches gaining traction. This paper chronicles a firsthand faculty journey over 13 years at a Hispanic-serving community college, highlighting the pivotal interplay between the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, and faculty members. It traces the evolution in perspectives regarding assessment, moving from an administrative burden to a meaningful process that improves practices. The reflection details how synergistic partnerships, especially during accreditation, solidify frameworks like institutional effectiveness that embed collaborative efforts. Thus, the fusion of educational development and assessment underscores that these realms are "better together" in nurturing cultures of continuous improvement and furthering student success. This firsthand account offers insights for institutional leaders and policymakers seeking to foster such integrative paradigms within their unique contexts
“We Don’t Do This Work Alone”: Assessment as Community Act, or What Total Loss Teaching Offers to Contemporary Assessment and Evaluation Practices in Higher Education
Get PDFAssessment and evaluation are often highly individual and comparative practices, but what if we radically transform assessment to support a community-based pedagogy? This article explores this question by examining assessment practices experienced in Total Loss Teaching, a pedagogy practiced at a small, church-related liberal arts school from 1994 until 2014 within a working group of teachers across three departments. Historical documentation of the pedagogy is interwoven with its impact on alumni, including the author, and explores the possibilities of considering assessment as a community act, integral to pedagogy, for contemporary higher education