Engaging Faculty in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: a View from BRIDGE

Engaging Faculty in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A View from BRIDGE

Arlene Wilner, Department of English, RiderUniversity, Lawrenceville, NJ

Abstract

Introduction

This paper offers an overview of the benefits and tensions implicit in the BRIDGE model for fostering the Scholarship of Teaching 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 strategies 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 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 difficulty 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 peer review, thus confirming the scholarly nature of their work and motivating colleagues to build on it.

BRIDGEmight 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 or ten faculty members (seven or eight classroom researchers plus the Director and an assistant project-mentor), representing disciplines from all campus Colleges, participantsuse the accrued wisdom of the past (multiple aspects of expert thinking on cognitive and affective development in the college 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 feelings—and of the web of connections among all of these. More specifically, these faculty work individually and collaboratively to engage 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 within 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 thinking 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 and K. Patricia Cross’sClassroom 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 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 presentations, this year the Provost initiated anSoTL Luncheon Series—four 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 also posted on the BRIDGE website— 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 accepted 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 does 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 evidence they gather of students’ learning, and—most crucially—at 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 professor’s deepening perceptions of his or her discipline’s 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”—a pressure usually felt intensely in science courses directed at majors—professors 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 faculty 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-assessment is enabled (such as the biopsychology professor’s 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, 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 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 epistemologies 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 transformed—and very much 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, suggested by the professor’s 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 distinctions, this description of the teaching challenge dramatizes the degree to which methods and approaches are discipline-based. The course, he writes,

pose[s] 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 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 wedded 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 course—learning about critical schools (theory) and training students in the various modes of criticism (praxis)—doubles 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 course’s structure. 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 assignment 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 the 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 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 that 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 which 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 department have not made this sort of demand on students—or 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. 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 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:

1—Simultaneous with the development of meta-thinking about one’s discipline and the pedagogy of it, some themes that transcend 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 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 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: Handbookfor Teaching in a New 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, 1994

d) Theme: need to understand 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.

2—A range of disciplines offers opportunities for analogicthinking. I have come to realize that much 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 professor’s extensive redesign of her traditional lecture course to incorporate a series of highly 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 project 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 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 the following plan for his freshman-level Introduction to Politics class, in which many students typically struggle:

My problem was that a large number of freshmen found the course exceedingly difficult, with the result of an unusually high rate of failure. What I decided to do is an attempt at directed reading: Over the winter vacation I shall form [study guides] for the weekly readings, each containing 5 content questions, 3 analytical questions and 2 aiming at the linkage between the reading and the general material of the course -- how does it answer questions raised by earlier readings and what questions it opens. The sheet will contain lines that the student will be invited to fill in. The sheets will not be evaluated by me, but the students will be allowed to bring them to the exams. Whether and to what degree this will solve my problems could be tested by comparison with my other section. I will be interested to note whether the grades improve, whether participation will improve, and to what extent such a technique will improve the understanding of the linkage between the segments of the course.

This professor and others told me they were prompted to consider this kind of “scaffolding”—pedagogic elements designed to support students’ reading, critical thinking, and engagement in course topics—after exposure to their colleagues’ classroom research. Overall, the truly collegial listening and sharing that I have witnessed in BRIDGE is quite different from the often contentious atmosphere in my department (and in many others). Thus I am convinced that the “pedagogical solitude” lamented by Shulman(6) can in some ways be most effectively addressed in communities that transcend departmental boundaries. That is, the transformation of attitudes toward teaching, while ultimately grounded in disciplinary concerns, is markedly facilitated by multi-disciplinary collaboration.

3—Faculty become more aware of the larger community of their role within it. One of the most interesting aspects of BRIDGE has been our exposure to each other’s descriptions of classroom challenges and, especially, particular assignments. Typically confined within our own circle of professionals trained much as we were, and so thoroughly familiar with our field that it seems only natural to us, we are often surprised by the depth and complexity of the material that others are trying to teach. We are inevitably.in the position of novices vis a vis the disciplinary training of others. And, when it is our turn to be the expert, if our audience of mature faculty doesn’t understand us, we have to wonder how well we are communicating with students. The effect of this kind of community, then, is two-fold: First, we appreciate more deeply the complexity of our institution’s academic mission and the contributions to it made by dedicated faculty members whom we may barely have known from disciplines we hardly ever think about; second, we understand as never before the challenges faced by students who must contend simultaneously with four or five of us—with our separate subjects, approaches, expectations, and idiosyncracies.