The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Challenges and Opportunities

1. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Challenges and Opportunities Susan Wharton Conkling, Ph.D. Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York Carnegie Scholar in Performing Arts in the Pew National Fellowship Program for Carnegie Scholars sckl@mail.rochester.edu

2. PRESSURE Service Learning Teaching with Technology Problem-based Learning

3. How much “know-how” does this take to implement? • How much funding will this take--and from where will the funding come? • How do I weigh the risks vs. rewards for my career?

4. Will this foster long-lasting learning for all students? • In my discipline? • In my institutional context?

5. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

6. A Brief History... • In Scholarship Reconsidered (1989) Boyer suggests that the whole range of faculty work should be recognized, and he introduces the terms: Scholarship of Discovery, Scholarship of Integration, Scholarship of Application, and Scholarship of Teaching. • “When defined as scholarship, teaching both educates and entices future scholars” (Boyer, p. 23).

7. A Brief History... • “Teaching, in this view, is not simply a matter of method and technique, but a matter of selecting, organizing, and transforming one’s field .” (Huber, 1998, p. 31). • Design (syllabus) • Outcomes (enactment of course) • Assessment (“testing” outcomes against expectations) • Analysis and Interpretation (altering course content, or delivery of instruction)

8. A Brief History... “Scholarly teaching is teaching that is well grounded in the sources and resources appropriate to the field. It reflects a thoughtful selection and integration of ideas and examples, and well-designed strategies of course design, development, transmission, interaction and assessment….We develop a scholarship of teaching when our work as teachers becomes public, peer-reviewed and critiqued, and exchanged with other members of our professional communities so they, in turn, can build on our work.” (Shulman,2000, p. 50)

9. CASTL • Begun in 1998, an initiative of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching • Carnegie Higher Education Scholars • Campus Program • Scholarly Societies • Addition of K-12 Scholars in 1999

10. CASTL • Foster significant, long-lasting learning for all students • Enhance the practice and profession of teaching at all stages and levels.

11. Important Shift • From scholarship of teaching to scholarship of teaching and learning. • Accountability for student learning is the predominant focus. • “Learning can and often does take place without the benefit of teaching--and sometimes even in spite of it--but there is no such thing as effective teaching in the absence of learning.” (Angelo and Cross, 1993, p. 3)

12. In every case, scholarship of teaching and learning begins with a question about practice

13. Examples of Essential Questions • What counts as difficulty and how do learners experience it? Is difficulty a constitutive part of learning? (Rhetoric and Composition) • How do students experience and define interdisciplinarity? (American Studies)

14. Examples of Essential Questions • Does an electronic environment promote more recursiveness? (An historian) • Do “at risk” students benefit from being placed in collaborative teams in a General Chemistry course?

15. My Questions: • What does it mean to become a professional musician? • How can the conservatory or school of music adapt its curriculum and/or pedagogy to better develop students’ professional identities and practices?

16. The Project • Re-design the curriculum of the performing ensemble so that: • The participants enrolled in the ensemble are equipped with the skills and dispositions necessary for professional musical practice • Each participant establishes a sense of professional identity

17. What does the discipline say?

18. When in doubt, ask. • Interviews with 20 professional musicians. • Broad representation, including instrumentalists and vocalists; symphony, chamber, and solo performers; jazz and classical musicians. • Interviews in person or by electronic mail.

19. Interview Questions • Describe your career to date. • What roles have you taken on in your career? • How did your education prepare you for your career? Where did it fail you? • What suggestions do you have for the preparation of musicians in the 21st century?

20. Professional Musicians Have access early in their lives to professional standards of performance through their relationships with family members and/or significant teachers. Many develop their own professional practices, being paid for professional work, while they are still in high school.

21. Professional Musicians Maintain ties to a community of professional practice throughout their undergraduate years. Examples of communities of professional practice include: regional symphony orchestras, student-led chamber ensembles, and jazz combos. The students’ participation in the professional community exists outside of conservatory or school of music curricular requirements. Professional musicians report that this extra-curricular work was most influential in shaping their professional identities.

22. Professional Musicians Use early professional performance experiences as “laboratories” in order to investigate the limits of their own knowledge and practices. By doing so, they are able to push at the boundaries of established practices, and to define communities of professional practice in new ways.

23. The Values of the Profession Include • Excellent performance • Technical precision and mastery • In collaboration with other musicians • In collaboration with the audience • Flexibility • Facile in the performance of several types of music • Ready to adopt many roles related to performance (arranger/composer, businessperson, conductor, educator, manager, producer, publicist)

24. New Practices in the Women’s Chorale: A Constructive and Collaborative Model • Excellence in performance through collaboration with other musicians. • Growing familiarity with several styles and traditions of music-making. • Opportunity to take on different roles related to performance. • Empowering students to examine, and therefore to transform, their own practices.

25. What happened? • Collaborative processes took time to establish, but eventually took root. • Feelings of destabilization--being “pushed out of a comfort zone” in order to try out new music and new roles. • Intentional effort to connect with the local community--musical performance serving a larger purpose. • Relief escaping the practice room and becoming part of the professional community--“I was a part of what was happening outside.”

26. What does the evidence mean? • Professional musical identity is a complex cloth, woven of both a sense of competence and a sense of connection. • A sense of competence means familiarity with technique and with the roles that one must play as a musician. • A sense of connection requires engagement with other performers, with the social and cultural contexts in which musics are conceived, and with the audience. • Helping student musicians to develop their professional identities should be the primary mission of the conservatory or school of music.

27. A word about methodology... Classical Model: discover cause and effect relationships through experimental research or develop strong correlational studies and, based on that research, tell practitioners what to do.

28. A word about methodology... • Before we make recommendations for change, classroom contexts and teaching practices need, as Eisner says, “to be known in the Old Testament biblical sense: by direct, intimate contact.” • Scholarship of Teaching and Learning requires us to become connoisseurs and critics.

29. Getting started • What puzzles you or makes you curious about students’ learning in your field? In your classroom? • Is this issue unique to your course, or does it have more far-reaching implications? • What will you count as evidence of student learning? • How will you represent design,outcomes analysis? • Where is the audience for your work?