If you accept Shulman’s quasi-definition (Unit 1 A, page 1) , you will probably conclude that both situations in the previous frame DO represent scholarship because they satisfy all three of his conditions. As key reformers urged (Unit 1 B, page 7), the concept of scholarship is broadened to include useful contributions that do not necessarily conform to conventional scholarly forms in the disciplines. To be sure, scholarship of teaching and learning includes publication in journals, but it also includes other forms, as in the two previous examples, that contribute to the advancement of teaching and learning both directly and indirectly.

To survey possibilities for this scholarship, we exhibit several categorization schemes. First, we’ll consider Craig Nelson’s “Genres of SOTL.” Then we’ll look at “traditional and classroom research” and “qualitative and quantitative methods.” All of these schemes are messy and inconsistent. The genres, for example, sometimes seem separated by unit of analysis at other times by type of research design. And as we see from the two examples in the preceding frame, they are not necessarily inclusive of all possible forms of scholarship. Similarly, much good scholarship combines elements of traditional and classroom research as well as qualitative and quantitative methods.

Well, why do we even bother with the classification schemes if they are inconsistent? Because they give us valuable “points of possibility.” They may be thought of as topographical features that map the territory. The actual point at which one locates one’s individual deed of scholarship is usually somewhere between the “points of possibility.”