The scholarship of teaching and learning has been a primary motivator and focus of faculty learning communities. This chapter reports on the strategies, processes, and activities that foster this scholarship in FLCs. (Contains 1 table and 1 exhibit.)

If the college faculty of the future is to reflect diverse talents and perspectives, it is important to find a way to include a diversity of people in graduate programs. To do so, higher education needs to value and nurture alternative voices and different ways of knowing and scholarship. (Author)

Offers insights regarding the lack of broadly acceptable definitions for the scholarship of teaching and scholarly teaching. Discusses whether and to what extent it is something all academics can practice and whether publishing in peer-reviewed media is a necessary characteristic. Provides examples of how teachers can acquire the knowledge and…

In higher education, there is distinction between what is valued as scholarship and the pragmatic needs of the larger world. In the dominant view of scholarship, research and theory are superior to practice. An alternative view is that, in many fields, knowledge emerges from the complexity and rigors of practice. (Author/MSE)

Faculty learning communities have many attributes that can contribute to the successful preparation of graduate students as future faculty members. (Contains 1 table.)

The narrow research focus that graduate education has taken since World War II has resulted in research-trained Ph.D.s finding that, as they enter the professoriate, their main occupation is teaching undergraduates, for which they are unprepared. A greater emphasis on teaching in graduate schools is encouraged. (DB)

A broader conception of scholarship would include four types of scholarship: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. If this broader conception can be incorporated into graduate education and if colleges and universities will hire and reward the graduates of those programs, new faculty will be better prepared. (Author/MSE)

A means of documenting exemplary college teaching is the teaching portfolio, which offers a wider range of evidence than single measures. A proposed faculty development program has teachers prepare portfolios individually, discuss teaching issues as a group within the academic unit, and design and test a system for evaluating teaching. This…

One educator's experience suggests that having graduate teaching assistants use classroom assessment techniques (CATs) in structured assignments is a good way to develop teaching assistants' ability to look beyond their classroom survival concerns in that it provides a safe way for them to engage students in dialogs about learning. Examples of…