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The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning History Comes of Age: A New International Organization and Web Site/Newsletter1
David Pace and Keith A. Erekson
Indiana University
| IN THE FOUR DECADES since the creation of this journal, historians in North America have seen a steady increase in the materials available to assist them in more effectively sharing the fruits of their discipline with their students. In the 1990s this effort was a given new intensity by the introduction into academia of the concept of a "scholarship of teaching and learning" (SOTL). This notion helped bring to the exploration of pedagogical issues some of the prestige and resources that had previously been concentrated on more traditional research. Historians took part in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and in history caucuses at the meetings of the newly formed International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL). They produced programmatic essays that emphasized the responsibility of professional historians to contribute to our understanding of learning in our discipline, the need to develop a more systematic understanding of these issues through studies that build upon one another, and the need to support conclusions with convincing evidence.2 The time has come to provide institutional support for these efforts and to link this work with that of historians throughout the world who are engaged in the study of teaching and learning history. Two new institutions are currently being created that will fill these functions: an international society for the scholarship of teaching and learning history and a web site and electronic newsletter (http://www.indiana.edu/~histsotl/). |
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In the past even those historians in the United States most interested in improving teaching have often been completely unaware of important work being pursued in other nations, just as their counterparts in other parts of the world have often remained ignorant of our work. In the United Kingdom a group led by Paul Hyland of Bath Spa University and Alan Booth of the University of Nottingham has produced crucial scholarship of teaching and learning history and has brought together scholars from around the world in an annual conference on History in Higher Education.3 Important work in the field is also being done by historians and educational researchers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia. An international society for the scholarship of teaching and learning history will link all those working in the field through meetings, publications, educational efforts, work with national historical organizations, and, perhaps, even publications. |
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Plans for such an organization were discussed at the ISSOTL meeting in Vancouver in November 2005 and at the conference on History in Higher Education at Oxford in April 2006, and the idea has been strongly endorsed by these groups and by the American Historical Association. A working committee chaired by Geoff Timmins of the University of Central Lancashire was formed to flesh out the details of the organization. This group will present a progress report at the ISSOTL meeting in Washington, D.C. in November 2006 and the organization will be launched at the annual conference at Oxford the following April. (For more information on this organization consult the web site described below.) |
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To support this new organization and to foster and support scholarship in this field, a web site has been created with funding from the Indiana University Dean of Faculties Office. Operated through the History Department at Indiana University Bloomington, the site and an accompanying electronic newsletter will introduce the field to historians who are unfamiliar with this work, make research on teaching and learning history more readily available, link scholars with one another and with professional opportunities, and facilitate the integration of this field into the institutional structures of academia and publishing. Eventually, the site is expected to include:
- Descriptions of the field (links to essays on SOTL relevant to historians), and short histories of the development of this work in different countries
- A bibliography of works in the field with space for readers' comments
- A list of crucial questions that arise in teaching and learning history (e.g., What contexts outside the college classroom have an impact on the learning of history? How do factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, and class affect the learning of history?) with links to studies that address each. (We hope that the absence of studies responding to some of these questions will be an impetus for future work.)
- Links to other web sites that deal with the scholarship of teaching and learning
- A "notes and queries" page where historians can pose questions, find others interested in particular aspects of the field, and plan for conferences or joint publications
- Space for descriptions of and materials from works in progress in the field.
- Information about conferences, journals open to submissions in the field, and possible publishing opportunities
- Lists of historians (with brief C.V.s) who are willing to serve as outside reviewers for journals, publishing houses, and tenure, promotion, and salary committees, or to present talks on particular aspects of the field
- Information about and links to history departments that have included pedagogical training in their graduate programs
- Access to a free electronic newsletter that will provide updates on events and materials that have been recently added to the site.
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It was decided at the outset to focus primarily on higher education, although some research into learning at the secondary level that is particularly relevant to college teaching will be included. Nonetheless, it is hoped the web site might make a small contribution to healing the great wound which divides secondary and higher education in many countries by providing easier access for those teaching on the secondary level to work done by those in higher education and by better informing those teaching in colleges and universities about some of the important work being done on learning history at the secondary level. It has also been necessary to generally limit bibliographical references to those works which most clearly match the criteria of the scholarship of teaching and learning (i.e. that place the research in the context of a broader literature on the topic and that provide clear evidence of the validity of the conclusions).4 This relatively narrow definition will exclude a great deal of material that would be useful to many classroom historians, but it helps define the field and makes the site more manageable. We hope that readers of The History Teacher will visit the site at http://www.indiana.edu/~histsotl/ and contribute to the development of this important resource. |
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Notes
1. Special thanks to Alan Booth, Geoff Timmins, and Paul Hyland for their assistance in gathering material for this article.
2. Lendol Calder, William W. Cutler III, and T. Mills Kelly, "History Lessons: Historians and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," in Mary Taylor Huber and Sherwyn P. Morreale, eds., Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Exploring Common Ground (Washington, D.C.: American Association for Higher Education and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2002), 45–67; David Pace, "The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 4 (October 2004), 1171–1192.
3. See, for example, Alan Booth & Paul Hyland, History in Higher Education: New Directions in Teaching and Learning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) and The Practice of University History Teaching (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Alan Booth, Teaching History at University: Enhancing Learning and Understanding (London: Routledge, 2003) and Geoff Timmins, Keith Vernon and Christine Kinealy, Teaching and Learning History (London: Sage, 2005); Alan Booth, "Rethinking the Scholarly: Developing the Scholarship of Teaching in History," Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 3 (2004), 247–66. For more on the activities of this group see http://www.hca.heacademy.ac.uk/.
4. The definition of "evidence" is a tricky one. While we will not be imposing rigid quantitative criteria borrowed from the social sciences, we will seek out articles that provide some clear evidence for judging the results of interventions in the classroom and that can make claims sufficiently credible for other scholars to build upon, just as historians do in more traditional fields.
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