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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008H7RodrigoWhat Counts? The Changing Realities of Scholarship Chair: Lisa Ede, Oregon State University, Corvallis Speakers:
Ede introduced the panel with questions about the what, how, and where of scholarship and whether or not it “counts” in the academy. She then facilitated Q & A at the end of the session. Catherine Gouge Gouge used the MLA report on scholarship and tenure to situated problems with the scholarship and tenure processes. She then used Boyer’s expansion of the term “scholarship” to help situate her own project within the Scholarship of Teaching. By presenting her own project of building materials for a professional editing class, she focused on the question: How do we situate the boundary of the scholarship and scholarly teaching? Gouge first discussed a review of literature distinguishing between scholarship and scholarly activity. She then moved into discussing her course. The difficulty of making the course completely online was the need to have students practice traditional copyediting. She built flash animation tools to provide students with activities that allowed for three different levels of practice. Gouge wondered, should this work count? If so, how does she present it as scholarship in her tenure and promotion packet? First, I was surprised that Gouge didn’t include Shulman’s short article “From Minsk to Pinsk” in her review of literature. I think it includes one of the shortest explanations distinguishing good teaching from scholarly teaching as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning. Similarly, I also thought Gouge could benefit from the various works of computers and writing scholars who published in either Kairos’s special issue on digital scholarship or the special issue on tenure and technology. At first I was thinking, “no” this is not scholarship. But you know what they say about glass houses, right? Since I’m a scholar at a community college, I know I’ve already argued that our scholarship is slightly different based on the context. So at first I was thinking, can Gouge consider this creative work, like the creative writers in English departments, or other artists over in the various fine arts departments? I then remembered the book that followed Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered, Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff’s Scholarship Assessed. In an attempt to help scholars assess and present different types of scholarly work, Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff present very clear steps to conducting and assessing scholarship:
I then realized, as long as Gouge was following, and documenting, these steps, she should be able to make the case that her project was more than good or scholarly teaching, but the scholarship of teaching and learning. Laura Brady Brady started with discussion of recommendation forms that ask for ranking students applying to graduate programs, discussing how the actual letter of recommendation allowed the recommender to situated the numbering process on the recommendation form. She then compared these forms to the Faculty Workload Forms that currently do not allow for some type of self-reflective narrative to support the numerical rankings on the form. Ultimately, these yearly self-review forms as a genre are less clear then the letter of recommendation genre that we all know and can work within and around. Brady claimed that faculty evaluation processes need to become more savvy about accountability. She argued that we need to focus on outcomes, not individual listings of what everyone does. To illustrate her point, Brady argues that department chairs should meet with individual faculty at the beginning of the evaluation term, set up expectations, and draw up a contract type document that outlines expected outcomes. At the end of the evaluation term, faculty members could then submit portfolios and self-reflective faculty narratives as documentation proving they achieved those outcomes. Brady argued that different faculty has different roles and responsibilities within the department that fluctuate the amount of teaching, research, and service the faculty member needs to accomplish. She claims that departments need to make decisions and expectations more collaboratively and transparently, and that we need to provide maps for departments’ movement as whole as well as how individual members work within the department. This type of process would take into account local institutional culture as well as compliment a variety of strategies for meeting individual and department outcomes. She concluded with showing a document that her department adapted from an MLA chart/map of scholarly activity and service. Ultimately I really like Brady’s suggestion that yearly evaluations should be based on achieving outcomes that are agreed upon in advance. This method emulates the assessment process of Glasick, Huber, and Maeroff outlined above—start with goals! Of course, I have no idea how this would be implemented in a manner that didn’t add lots of work to the department chairs; however, starting with the idea is important. Nathalie Singh-Corcoran Singh-Corcoran concluded the panel with a discussion of the use of narrative genres in scholarship. She described narrative scholarship as something situated in experience and using experience as evidence. Singh-Corcoran discussed how the rhetoric and composition field at large ignores narrative because it is considered amateurish. She then pointed to Writing Center scholarship as the exception. Specifically, Singh-Corcoran asserts that The Writing Center Journal supports narrative scholarship because she observes at least one or two articles using narrative as evidence within each issue. Singh-Corcoran claims that other disciplines outside of English, especially within Education departments, validate narrative as scholarship because it encourages:
Singh-Corcoran concluded that the larger field of rhetoric and composition should allow narrative methods of scholarship to come out of the basements (where writing centers are traditionally housed) as an accepted form of scholarship. Again, as a scholar at a community college I could not agree more! Many pieces published in TETYC also use narrative as a form of evidence. When you are teaching a 4/4 or 5/5 teaching load, you are in the classroom enough to legitimize a claim about a trend you may be seeing. What I imagine we then need to do is outline a method for critical narrative reflection as scholarship. I’m sure we can look to scholarship on methodologies published in Education, maybe also guidelines published in relation to self-reflective qualitative methods in the social sciences. |