may09b.indd


Cara Bradley 

The
scholarship
of
teaching
and


learning

Opportunities for librarians 

University teaching development centers the world over are embracing a new 
movement called the scholarship of teach­
ing and learning (SoTL). International and 
regional conferences, dedicated journals, and 
funding opportunities attest to the way that 
this newly framed attention to pedagogy in 
higher education has captured the imagina­
tion of our teaching colleagues. It is time for 
academic librarians to learn more about the 
SoTL movement and to consider the many op­
portunities that it presents to their profession. 

Discussions of the SoTL often trace the 
roots of the movement to Ernest Boyer’s 1990 
book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities 
of the Professoriate. Boyer questioned the 
professoriate’s increasingly exclusive focus 
on research and publication at the expense 
of teaching, and instead called for a more 
holistic view of academic work that includes: 
“the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship 
of integration; the scholarship of application; 
and the scholarship of teaching.”1 While it 
seems obvious that this call for attention to 
teaching would resonate with students who 
expect quality teaching in exchange for 
escalating tuition fees, it also struck a chord 
with professors who had grown disconnected 
from teaching and learning, the love of which 
had drawn them to their profession in the 
fi rst place. 

The emphasis on teaching as scholarly 
work that was started by Boyer gained much­
needed momentum when Lee S. Shulman, a 
key thinker in the fledging SoTL movement, 
became president of the Carnegie Foun­
dation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

He provided much needed validation and 
funding to the movement by establishing 
the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship 
of Teaching and Learning. His own writ­
ing also helped to further define SoTL: 

The scholarship of teaching and learn­
ing invites faculty at all these levels to 
view teaching as serious, intellectual 
work, ask good questions about their 
students’ learning, seek evidence in 
their classrooms that can be used to 
improve practice, and make this work 
public so that others can critique it, 
build on it, and contribute to the wider 
teaching commons.2 

SoTL is not to be confused with “educa­
tional research”; the former is disciplinary­
focused, involves professors investigating 
their own teaching rather than participating 
in third­party studies, and, most importantly, 
aims to improve teaching and assign greater 
value to it. 

SoTL today 
A quick search of university Web sites indi­
cates that SoTL activities are typically coordi­
nated by the campus teaching development 
center (or equivalent). Many of these teaching 
centers offer small grants to faculty who want 
to pursue a specific question related to their 

Cara Bradley is distance education and outreach librarian 
at University of Regina, in Regina, Saskatchewan, 
Canada, e-mail: Cara.Bradley@uregina.ca 
© 2009 Cara Bradley 

276C&RL News May 2009

mailto:Cara.Bradley@uregina.ca


teaching; grants are variously used for materi­
als, dissemination of results, hiring teaching 
assistants, or teaching load relief that allows 
the professor to focus more closely on the 
SoTL project. Some teaching centers also 
offer workshops on SoTL in general, guid­
ance on methodological and ethical issues, 
or simply forums for SoTL researchers to 
share their interests and work. 

SoTL and librarians 
The SoTL movement provides excellent op­
portunities for librarians, both in respect to 
developing their own projects and for sup­
porting, and developing relationships with, 
faculty working on SoTL projects. Despite 
this potential, there has been very little writ­
ten about SoTL in the professional library 
literature. A thorough search uncovered just 
two articles: a “Webliography” of SoTL re­
sources,3 and an article in a regional journal 
that discusses a SoTL project undertaken by 
librarians.4 Each of these articles provides 
but a glimpse of the possibilities of SoTL 
for librarians. 

Librarian involvement in SoTL can fall 
into one of two broad categories: librar­
ian support of faculty SoTL initiatives and 
librarian development of their own SoTL 
projects. One of the most obvious ways that 
librarians can support faculty interested in 
SoTL is to direct them to relevant informa­
tion and resources. Teaching development 
centers will likely welcome library support 
in identifying key resources as they try to 
engage faculty in campus SoTL initiatives. 
Once interested faculty members emerge, li­
brarians can provide more discipline­specifi c 
support, helping to identify other relevant 
studies, methodology reports, and potential 
venues for dissemination of project results. 
Faculty who are comfortable searching for 
information in their research areas may be 
uncertain about how to find relevant infor­
mation about classroom topics that may have 
been published both within and outside of 
the journals in their subject areas. In addi­
tion to broader SoTL and post­secondary 
pedagogical journals, most disciplines have 

journals that focus on discipline­specifi c 
teaching issues.5 

Participation in campus SoTL initiatives 
also demonstrates librarians’ commitment 
to, and interest in, teaching and learning 
to campus colleagues who share (and are 
therefore perhaps more likely to be respon­
sive to) these interests. Opportunities for 
the librarian abound when surrounded by 
a community of colleagues who are open to 
innovations in teaching; my own experience 
has revealed a previously hidden group of 
faculty who are willing to involve me in 
their classrooms in new and creative ways. 
Some of these opportunities have emerged 
as a result of formal faculty SoTL projects 
involving information literacy, while others 
are simply the product of informal discus­
sions about the need for information literacy 
instruction in the curriculum. Regardless of 
which avenue led there, the result is more 
time with the students (both in the classroom 
and virtually), better integration of library 
resources in the curriculum, and a greater 
sense of participation in the larger academic 
endeavor. 

As previously mentioned, the SoTL move­
ment also provides librarians with new 
opportunities to ask questions about their 
own teaching practices and develop SoTL 
projects around them. Investigations of in­
structional practices and their effectiveness 
are of course nothing new to librarians, but 
framing them in SoTL terms does present 
new opportunities. Many teaching centers 
include funding opportunities as part of 
their SoTL programs, and these provide a 
previously unavailable avenue of support 
for librarians asking questions about their 
teaching. Campus SoTL programs also give 
librarians an opportunity to discuss and get 
buy­in on their projects from professors 
with an interest in improving the classroom 
experience for students. This buy­in is es­
sential (it is, after all, usually their courses 
whose time we need to both instruct and 
study students), and it can be difficult to get 
without this type of “in.” It also opens the 
door to faculty involvement and feedback, 

May 2009  277 C&RL News 



something that McNeill and Haines, authors 
of the only published report of a librarian 
SoTL project, found invaluable.6 

Conclusion 
The SoTL movement slightly reframes, but 
in large part reaffirms and validates, the type 
of research that many librarians already do. 
We teach, we change and modify our teach­
ing techniques, we assess effect on student 
learning, and we share our fi ndings with 
colleagues through a variety of mechanisms. 
We are sure to benefit from this renewed 
emphasis on teaching and learning, which 
have always been cornerstones of academic 
librarianship. There will likely be tangible 
benefits as SoTL challenges traditional reward 
systems that all too often base promotion and 
tenure decisions on research output at the 
expense of teaching. But there will also be the 
more intangible benefits of more meaningful 
discussions and partnerships with faculty, 
better integration of library resources and 
services into the curriculum, higher profi le 
on campus, and ultimately—what is most 

important to all SoTL scholars—a benefi t to 
student learning. 

Notes 
1. Ernest J. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsid­

ered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Princeton, 
NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement 
of Teaching, 1990), 16. 

2. Lee. S. Shulman, forward to Into the 
Classroom: Developing the Scholarship of 
Teaching and Learning, by Thomas Hatch 
(San Francisco: Jossey­Bass, 2006), ix. 

3. Musa Abdul Hakim, “Navigating the 
Web of Discourse on the Scholarship of 
Teaching and Learning,” College & Research 
Libraries News (July/August 2002): 502–5. 

4. My institution’s list at www.uregina.ca 
/ctl/resources/sotl/publishing­sotl­work.html 
may serve as starting point for librarians and 
faculty new to SoTL. 

5. Kitty McNeill and Beth Haines, “Scholar­
ship of Teaching and Librarians: Building Suc­
cessful Partnerships with Faculty,” Georgia 
Library Quarterly (Winter 2003): 4–8. 

6. Ibid. 

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