Scholarship on Teaching
Engineering professors, like professors in every field, have always experimented with innovative instructional methods, but traditionally little was done to link the innovations to learning theories or to evaluate them beyond anecdotal reports of student satisfaction. More scholarly approaches have become common in the past two decades as a consequence of several developments, including a change in the engineering program accreditation system to one requiring learning outcomes assessment and continual improvement, and the literature of the scholarship of teaching and learning in engineering has grown rapidly. Most published studies have used surveys and quantitative research methods, approaches with which engineers tend to be relatively comfortable, but studies that use some of the qualitative methods characteristic of social science research have also begun to appear. The challenge to engineering education is to make the scholarship of teaching and learning equal to the scholarships of discovery, integration, and application in the faculty reward system.
This article argues that good practice in teaching and learning in the English-speaking world may be compromised by structural changes in the higher education system. The impact of these changes is, however, affected by leadership practices and working cultures at the departmental level. These can, it is argued, assist in the development of 'deeper' teaching and learning practices even in a context which may be seen as unfavourable to them. Rejecting simplistic notions of transformational leadership and organisational cultural engineering, the article identifies activity systems at the local, departmental, level as the central loci of changes in approaches to and recurrent practices in teaching and learning. Desirable change is most likely to be achieved in collective and collaborative ways, which means that change processes are contingent and contextualised, and that outcomes are unpredictable and fuzzy. The data in this article come from in-depth interviews with academics in England and Canada; from one author's previous studies; and from literatures on faculty's work environments in English-speaking countries.
This essay will argue that the internet provides an “added-value” to education, providing resources for more effective teaching and enhancing the learning of the students. The internet emphasizes written communication, facilitating clarity of thought and serving as the basis for critical thinking. The internet emphasizes the social dimensions of learning, and the students’ own role in their learning. This essay will illustrate the value of the internet for teaching and learning through a case study of transforming a traditional introductory course on the Bible into a distance course.
A century ago, universities were primarily in the business of molding upper-class young men for the professions. The world has changed, and universities have been forced to keep pace by experimenting with affirmative action, curriculum overhauls, part-time degree programs, and the like. But at the core of the modern university establishment is an ingrained academic culture that has operated in the same ways for centuries, contends Robert Ibarra, and in Beyond Affirmative Action, he calls for a complete paradigm shift. Why does academic culture, he asks, emphasize individual achievement over teamwork? Why do so many exams test discrete bits of knowledge rather than understanding of the big picture? Why is tenure awarded for scholarly publications rather than for sharing knowledge in diverse ways with students and a wider community? Why do undergraduates drop out? And why do so many bright graduate students and junior faculty—including many minorities, women, and some majority males—become disenchanted with academia or fail to be accepted and rewarded by the tenured faculty? Ibarra introduces a theory of "multicontextuality," which proposes that many people learn better when teachers emphasize whole systems of knowledge and that education can create its greatest successes by offering and accepting many approaches to teaching and learning. This revolutionary paradigm also addresses why current thinking about academic systems and organizational culture, affirmative action, and diversity must be revised. Ibarra bases his groundbreaking proposals upon his own synthesis of findings from anthropological, educational, and psychological studies of how people from variouscultures learn, as well as findings from extended interviews he conducted with Latinos and Latinas who pursued graduate degrees and then either became university faculty or chose other careers. From his perspectives as a practicing anthropologist, teacher, researcher, and administrator, Ibarra provides a blueprint for change that will interest: * Administrators developing campus strategic plans * Boards, commissions, and agencies making policy for educational institutions * Students and faculty struggling to find ways that academia can serve multiple constituencies * Academic and career advisors to students * Researchers in cognitive psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, and ethnic studies * Businesses rethinking their organizational cultures and strategies (From the Publisher)