Expanding Our Vision of
University’s Research Mission: The
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
George E. Walker, Vice President for Research
and Dean of the
This text is the slightly modified version of the talk given to
the American Association for Higher Education,
DC,
It is truly a pleasure and a privilege to be here this morning.
I’ve been in higher education for more than 30 years, and it
seems to me that quite frequently something wonderful like
this initiative occurs that makes me very proud to be part of
the academic community. The institutions represented here
have a special commitment to excellence in learning, making
it a particular honor for me to be with you.
I would first like to briefly acknowledge the leadership that
my colleagues at
Andrews, Eileen Bender, Barbara Cambridge, Ray Smith,
and Samuel Thompson) have provided in the area of the
scholarship of teaching. The scholarship of teaching
steering committee at
pivotal role in our local initiative in this area. They have
identified scholars in this area and have publicly
encouraged their work. They have realized that scholars
need different kinds of help such as mentoring, resources,
and adequate time for research, and have worked to
provide the appropriate support. They have recognized that
this scholarship is central to the mission of a research
university and have begun a series of public occasions that
provide information and platforms for discussion. My hat
goes off to them for their outstanding contributions.
This morning I want to talk a little bit about my personal
experience in teaching and research, which has led to my
belief that the scholarship of teaching is very important to
our institutions. I will mention some ways we are working
at
interested in the scholarship of teaching, as examples of
how each of us, as Presidents, Provosts, Vice Presidents,
Deans and Faculty, can work together internally to facilitate
that activity.
Let me start first on a personal note. When I was a little
boy, I was an only child in a rural community, and one of
things that I would do to entertain myself before I went to
sleep was to daydream. Every night I’d decide which of my
ongoing daydream stories I was going to “watch,” and for a
half hour or 45 minutes before I went to sleep, I would
continue that story. It was as though the daydream had a
life of its own, with characters who developed
independently of my will. Believe me, it wasn’t worth
publishing, but to me it was exciting. It was my way of
entertaining myself when I was a very young child, and it is
something that I remember very fondly in terms of my
development.
I also remember as a young child being intrigued by the
difference between humans and animals. Whenever an
animal would do something, people would say, “that’s
instinct,” and when people would do things, they would
say, “that’s learning, or, that’s intelligence.” I always
wondered if what I myself was doing was instinct or
learning, and how I might understand the difference. I
decided as a youngster that if I could do something
differently, or if I could take something that my parents
said, such as, “Don’t you know what it means to behave,
George?” and think about it and apply it in a different way,
then that would probably mean it was not just instinct. And
that was the little rule that I made for myself: you have
learned something when you can apply it in a substantially
different way.
The daydreaming and application habits have been the
basis for my scholarly career. I’m a theoretical physicist, and
like most of you, I’ve spent most of my life outside of
administration as a researcher and a teacher. One of the
things I found very early in my own personal learning was
that if I tried to memorize things, I couldn’t use them
effectively in the creative process. It was as though what I
memorized fell into a different part of my mind. I could
repeat the things I memorized in physics, but I couldn’t
really use them or adapt them or solve problems with them.
The way I found that I could learn things and make them
my own was to make models of them, or to make analogies,
and to create mental pictures of all these things. I admit
that some of these pictures are pretty surrealistic—I
wouldn’t want the public to ever see what’s going on in my
mind—but that was the only way that I could make physics
my own.
Since, I wasn’t very sophisticated, the kind of pictures and
models and analogies I made were relatively
straightforward. But in the process of creating them, a very
interesting thing happened: I could start the picture or the
model going, and it would do new things! In other words, I
was using my personal learning technique in the creative
process.
The other idea, that I have to use things in an entirely new
way in order to know that I’ve learned something, also
stood me in good stead; because that process led me to
further analogies and encouraged me to try to do things in
new ways. I found out very quickly that in order to have a
rich storehouse of analogies and models, I needed to try to
know as many different things as possible about a lot of
different fields. So I’ve come to know a little about quite a
few things; I have found that very fascinating and
enjoyable, and I have found it to be incredibly useful in the
learning process in terms of my scholarship in physics.
And there is a bonus. When I started teaching and had to
communicate my learning or facilitate learning in others, it
turned out that the very analogies, stories and models that
I used to facilitate my own learning and be creative in
research, were the same things that appealed to both
undergraduate and graduate students. Perhaps I had to
use a slightly different vocabulary and the jokes were a
little different, but the analogies or models were very
similar. So the creative process was helping me facilitate
the learning of others.
Let’s suppose for the moment that we didn’t have the
words “teaching” and “research.” Suppose we had never
thought of those words; we might actually be a little better
off. There are times when we are limited because we don’t
have certain words in our vocabulary, but at other times I
think we are limited because we do have the words and we
are bound by the limitations we associate with those
words.
Suppose we were concerned only with facilitating our own
individual learning. We might do a variety of things to
achieve that goal. We might do experiments, we might
contemplate a question or daydream about it, or we might
invent models or make up stories. And then we could go on
to apply this to facilitating other peoples' learning. The first
effort—facilitating our own learning—would be “research” in
the traditional sense. The second effort—facilitating others’
learning—would be “teaching.” It’s not that these two
efforts merely complement each other; at the molecular
level, so to speak, they are the same thing, because the
very habits of mind, the very “dance steps” I learned in
order to be a good researcher, are the same habits and
“dance steps” that also facilitate my teaching. I just wear
different “clothes” when I do one or the other.
I’m not certain whether this learning/teaching/research
process works the same way for other people. It may be
quite idiosyncratic. I don’t know for sure if it works the
same way in other disciplines. But I suspect there may be a
good deal of carryover and a good deal of similarity in other
fields. This is why, for me, the supposed teaching/research
dichotomy has never really been an issue. Both are ways of
facilitating learning and developing a learning community.
I know as I look out here that there are people who are far
more knowledgeable about this and are more sophisticated
than I on this topic. I’m not just preaching to the choir, I’m
singing country music to opera singers! So please bear with
me if I don’t say it quite right or use the words with their
correct technical meanings. I mean well and, in the end,
perhaps the most useful thing is that a “Vice President for
Research” is here and passionately believes that the
scholarship of teaching is important and is a high priority
area for investment in higher education. Indeed, the
scholarship of teaching and research in teaching are very
important, and we must develop ways to facilitate them
both internally and externally.
I have never done research in teaching, but I have done a
little bit of informal reflection on teaching. Some of us,
following Jules LaPidus, the president of the Council of
Graduate Schools, have a back-to-basics way of
distinguishing between research and scholarship. This may
not be the way we traditionally use these words, but for
Jules and for me, research is what you do and scholarship is
what you think about what you do. Scholarship is more
reflective. Research can be essentially learning to use big
widgets to obtain certain kinds of data, or learning certain
kinds of techniques—learning to use a hammer. Scholarship
is the kind of thing that keeps you from seeing everything
as a nail, once you’ve learned to use a hammer. There is a
reflectiveness associated with scholarship that
complements or goes beyond research, but the two are still
very tied together. Others might tie them together
differently, but that’s how I see them.
In my several decades as a Professor, I have taught a
variety of physics courses. I recall when I first started
teaching, people would tell me what “our kind of people
do.” And I wanted to be “our kind of people” because I
wanted to be respected and promoted and tenured. For
example, since I was a theoretical physicist I found that
some felt that our kind of people didn’t teach
undergraduates. Equally insightful was the idea that our
kind of people didn’t use computers. What you have to do is
to take these supposed pieces of wisdom with a grain of
salt. They may not even apply to you. I’ve always loved
talking about my discipline, and so I particularly like working
with undergraduates. They’re open and honest about what
they don’t know. By the time you get to be a graduate
student you’re almost a faculty member, where you feel you
have to know everything, and so you have trouble
admitting, even to yourself, that there are things you still
need to find out.
We are starting on a pilgrimage together toward
developing a scholarship of teaching. I want to make the
point that when we mentor other folks starting out on their
scholarly pilgrimages, we shouldn’t overly limit them. We
need to be careful that we don’t take the baggage that we
carry and transfer it to the people we are mentoring. Part of
the problem is that we often don’t recognize our own
limitations, so we are inadvertently limiting the next
generation of scholars. We need to be careful about that
and keep it in mind.
In addition, it’s important when you, yourself, are starting
on the scholarly pilgrimage that you pack a wide variety of
tools in your suitcase. These will allow you to have a longer,
safer, and more wonderful trip, and will also enable you to
do a better job of helping others along the way. It’s
important not to be self-limited, and I believe part of the
challenge in thinking about the scholarship of teaching is
some self-limitations that we’ve inadvertently put in place.
I’m not worried, incidentally, about the scholarship of
teachingBBit’s going to take place. It’s just a question of
time. Is it going to be something that is a mainstream
activity in institutions of higher learning in the short term, or
in the longer term? I believe it’s inevitable that as we
become wiser, as we become more experienced, that we
will give greater importance to this area. So don’t worry
that it won’t happen, we just want it to happen as soon as
possible at our institutions because students and faculty
will benefit greatly from it.
When I teach I use a variety of gimmicks or techniques to
get students interested in physics and to help them sustain
that interest. I’m going to mention some of themBBthey are
probably the kind of things many of you have also
usedBBand I want to distinguish between these gimmicks
on the one hand and research in teaching. The gimmicks
may play a role in helping one become a more effective
teacher, but that’s significantly different from research in
teaching. Research in teaching promises to help us all,
collectively and individually, to be better teachers, and it’s
not at all the same as gimmicks. But gimmicks are useful.
When I was teaching beginning physics, I would tell my
students, “I’m going to show you ways that physics can
reveal to you whether your girlfriend or boyfriend really
cares about you.” This would get their attention. And the
students would laugh, but they would write it down. Later,
when they graduated, they would come back and say, “You
know I remember that part about centripetal force, that if
the girl slides toward you and the car is going this way, she
should slide the other way, and the fact that she doesn’t
might mean something.”
I often had as many as 50 or 60 students show up for one
session of office hours. The problem was how to handle
this, especially since many of the students had the same
question. So we set up a strategy at the start of the hour,
a group approach to problem solving. I would work with
certain students, and then they would work with all the
other kids out in the hall. It was very helpful, the students
enjoyed it, and it allowed me to get to more students than I
could have otherwise. It had an added benefit since, as we
know, one of the best ways to learn something is to be
involved in teaching it to others.
When I taught physics for elementary school teachers, I
learned that the course was the most frightening thing
these folks had ever encountered. They thought they had
planned their entire career so that they would never have
to take a physics course. But the School of Education and
the state decided that elementary school teachers needed
to take some science. I had 89 students in my first class of
future elementary school teachers who were taking
beginning physics from me. They were very concerned. I
tried my best bedside manner, I tried to be winsome and all
of that, but they said, “Well, we know you seem like a nice
person, and we’re going to have all these fun classes, but
then there’s going to be a test and you’re going to strip us
of all dignity because we know that physics is an art form
and we are not that kind of artist.”
Their math anxiety was also incredible. I could say “is” and
it was all right; if I said “equals,” there was a real problem.
So I made a deal with them that for each class session I
would write down five main principles. For example, instead
of the equation saying “F equals MA,” I would write on the
board “Force is the same as Mass times Acceleration.” They
liked that, and they would write that down. I told them I
would give them the five principles and we’d talk about
variations of them. I knew if they felt uncomfortable with
the way mathematical concepts were explained in class,
they were going to feel really uncomfortable with them on
tests. These future teachers are going to interact with our
children first, before we ever get them in high school and
college. If they go away hating science and with heightened
math anxiety, we are in deep trouble.
I tried using open book, unlimited time, one-week
take-home problems with my more advanced students. On
their final exam I had them pose their own questions and
answer them. And then as we got further along with my
group of research students and the faculty, we would have
two kinds of seminars. The first seminar was called the
Pea-brained Seminar. The Pea-brained Seminar was where,
coming into the room, you must not have thought carefully
about anything you were going to say. This was very easy
for me. The idea was that you left your title at the door.
Professors and graduate students would come in and just
shoot from the hip all kinds of physics ideas. Every once in a
while the students would see a professor saying, “Oh yeah,
I forgot momentum is conserved, so that’s a silly idea.”
They would see that you can have this kind of interplay and
daydream type of activity, and it leads to new ideas and
new ways of looking at things. One of the troubles that may
plague us after we have been in our disciplines for a while
is that our critical ability begins to exceed our creative
ability, and we sometimes take existing paradigms too
seriously and thus limit ourselves without realizing it.
As an aside, one time students were speaking about the
Pea-brained Seminar when we had a visitor from Argentina.
During his talk, the professor from Argentina said, “I can’t
wait to meet Professor Pebrun, from whom all of these
ideas have come.” So you do have to be careful.
After the Pea-brained Seminar came the Snake Pit. The
Snake Pit was what we did after going through the
Pea-brained Seminar quite a few times, and it was used
before someone was going out to give a talk. There is a
story told that John Wooden, when he was basketball
coach at UCLA, was asked what was the best team that his
team had ever faced during the years when UCLA was
winning the national championships. I am told coach
Wooden said, “the second team.” In other words, the
second five players on the team were essentially the
toughest group that the first five faced, and they faced
them every day in practice. Our thought was, we wanted to
make sure, before any of our students and faculty went out
and represented the university and gave talks, that we
grilled them in practice with constructive criticism harder
than anyone would from the outside world. So, they had to
get up and talk and endure a Snake Pit. We would try to
find a hole in everything they were saying. It turns out that
if you have the right kind of collegial relationship, faculty
members can do this to each other and still talk to each
other later. Everyone understood why we were doing this:
we were trying to build strength.
These ideas may have been useful in teaching and learning
of various kinds, but none of them is applicable to research
in teaching. Formal scholarship or research doesn’t happen
until you have a certain method of approach and reflect on
it, until you carry out certain experiments and compare the
results with a standard of some sort. And that means
assessment—assessment both of the new approach and of
the “placebo” effect, or whatever you would call it. Then, of
course, you have to reflect on the results and interpret
them. After you have reflected and interpreted, you need to
write up the results because it is in the act of writing that
an important part of the creative process takes place.
These are elements of the process we call scholarship. It’s
not just informal little ideas. It’s not even one big formal
idea. It’s a general approach. Informal ideas that we all
have are wonderful and may help us with our teaching, but
they’re not, by themselves, the scholarship of teaching. Of
course, what we need now is quality scholarship of
teaching.
Recently, here in Washington, I was part of a discussion
about distance learning involving the Department of
Education, and a discussion about science teaching and
learning with some folks at the NSF, including Rita Colwell,
the director. A common theme was the need for more real
research on teaching at all levels, focusing on various
teaching techniques and technology, distance learning, and
classroom learning. We need to carry out solid,
peer-reviewed research that is worthy of publication in such
journals as, for example, the American Journal of Physics. I
see signs the federal agencies are currently interested in
funding programs to improve teaching, and the funding
available is expected to increase in the future.
You probably all know about the Preparing Future Faculty
(PFF) program that has been a partnership between Pew,
the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and
CGS. You are probably familiar with the various initiatives
that this program provides to broaden the education and
teaching experience of graduate students. This is a
wonderful start, and more focus on this area is needed. It
will come as no surprise that there are still graduate
students who come to me as Graduate Dean to say they
are afraid to admit they are interested in becoming better
teachers. They say that they would like to be part of the
PFF program, but they are afraid to tell their thesis advisor
because they think that if they do, they will be treated in an
inferior way. They feel that their thesis advisor is training
them to be a specific kind of researcher (not scholar) and
would disapprove if they were to show an interest in other
things, particularly an interest in teaching at an institution
that’s not a Research I institution. I am informed that the
vast majority of the academic jobs today are at
non-Research I institutions, and the majority of the
students from Research I institutions who get tenure-track
academic jobs find them at non-Research I institutions. So
we still have work to do in this area, and we should be
willing to be helpful in any way that we can.Of course, I’m
not in any way advocating that we should diminish
disciplinary research; in fact the scholarship of teaching
initiative will make disciplinary research better: there is a
synergism that should arise between disciplinary and
teaching research. Not for a moment would I condone
diminishing the importance, intensity and the quality of
disciplinary research. Furthermore, the same high
expectations that we have for disciplinary
research—research in theoretical physics, for example, or
our many other disciplines—should be required of our
scholars engaged in the scholarship of teaching. If we hold
to those expectations, I think we will not only enhance our
research reputation, we will make this community even
richer and more vibrant, an even better community of
learning. We will also do a much better job of mentoring
and training both undergraduate and graduate students,
who will be the next generation of intellectual leaders.
There is already a considerable amount of funding available
for the scholarship of teaching. The Pew Charitable Trusts,
the Department of Education, and NSF are just a few of the
places where there is interest right now. At Indiana, in
cooperation with the scholarship of teaching steering
committee and others who know best how to disseminate
this information, we will create a Web site where current
and anticipated funding opportunities for the scholarship of
teaching are available, from the private sector, the
government, and from Indiana University.
Among the efforts we are making at Indiana University, our
Sponsored Research Services staff is providing workshops
and working with the faculty to develop proposals. The
Research Office is only one administrative area, and we
need to work closely with others, for example, school
deans, academic affairs, and other academic and support
units. The Research Office is a team member, but support
for these activities should not and cannot come from one
unit alone. However, the Research Office is able to
participate in and provide resources for some initiatives. We
are also working with our Human Subjects Committee to
prepare guidelines for research on teaching and learning.
There are some incentives the Research Office can provide.
For example, matching funds for external funding received
from federal, private, and individual donors for research on
scholarship of teaching. I have instructed our office to make
sure that this is a high priority and in no way is given
second place to the matching funds that we provide for
research in other areas. Second, we are expanding our
Summer Faculty Fellowship areas to fund research in
teaching project.
The Academic Affairs Office has made changes in our faculty
annual report forms to enable faculty to describe their
research on teaching and learning activities. I am also
working with the schools to encourage them, even though
we know that money is very, very tight, to expand the
opportunities for departments to work on pedagogy
training for Ph.D. students and junior faculty. IU has a
Research Design Working Group that has a goal “To lay a
foundation of continuing collaboration and support for
faculty contemplating or engaged in research on teaching
and learning.” In the fall of 1999 they sponsored their first
seminar, “Jump-Starting Your Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning Research Projects: Researchable Questions,
methods, and Resources.”
For many of us, this is a new area, and we want to carry
over the same high standards we have in our disciplinary
research into the research on teaching. These efforts are
just a beginning.
Let me conclude by offering a quotation, from former
Indiana University President John Ryan’s report of several
years ago. It was focused on the winners of teaching
awards:
“What makes a great teacher? Of course, there’s no simple
answer to that question. The qualities of great teachers are
as various as their personalities. When we think of great
teachers, we think in terms of what they give. We think in
terms of the hard work and organization that go into a
well-planned lecture, the clarity of explanations, the wealth
of knowledge. We think of humor combined with
scholarship, of excitement and challenge brought to a topic
we might have expected to be dull; of insight that cuts to
the core of a problem. We think of the discipline of
objectivity, of energy, enthusiasm, warmth, and honesty.
These are a few of the gifts of great teaching. But anyone
who has had the good fortune to encounter a great teacher
knows that the essence of great teaching goes beyond
these. It lies not just in what a teacher has to give, but in
what the teacher encourages the student to give. A great
teacher is a motive force, demanding more than we knew
we had in us, making us aware of new strengths and
interests, changing what we expect of ourselves. A great
teacher is someone who brings out the best in us, someone
whom we remember years later as having made a
difference in our lives. Indiana University rejoices in the gifts
of its great teachers.”
If we rejoice in the gifts of great teachers, and I believe we
do at Indiana University, then it is all the more
important—in fact, it’s essential—for us to learn more about
great teaching. And that requires research, and then a
body of research and reflection. The scholarship of teaching
and learning is the means to that end, and therefore is a
vital endeavor for a great university.
So, the good news is that there is broad interest nationally
in the area of scholarship of teaching and learning, and
there are unlikely partners at your institution that can help
with resources and credibility and ideas (but you have to
ferret them out). The better news is that this issue is so
important to our society that the scholarship of teaching is
going to flourish, it's just a matter of how long it will take
and whether or not it will be on our watch. The best news
is that you personally as scholars and mentors are going to
have a profound and satisfying positive influence on
generations of learners by your efforts in this area. Long
after your specific teaching, research, and administration
has ended, the mentoring you have carried out in this area
(when you didn’t even know it and thought you were doing
other things) will, without time and limitation, profoundly
affect those who come into contact with you. Thank you for
your leadership.