What‘s It Really All About? The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as an Authentic Practice

Excerpt: For this inaugural issue of International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, Alan Altany asked me to contribute a short essay on ‘some aspect of, or approach to, SoTL that is significant internationally today’. This assignment invites numerous possible responses given that significant issues in relation to higher education pedagogy abound. For starters, it is widely acknowledged that the challenges of the twenty-first century require higher education institutions to prepare not only discipline specialists but independent thinkers, productive citizens, and future leaders (e.g., Baxter Magolda and Terenzini, 1999). In this context Baxter Magolda (1999) argues that students need to develop a certain intellectual (as well as intra- and inter-personal) maturity to deal adequately with the various challenges of our times and suggests that higher education pedagogies should be designed such that they promote what she calls student “self-authorship”.