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>> Welcome everyone.
First of all, I'd like to see if this mic works
or would you prefer the other mic?
It's okay in the back?
Okay.
[ Silence ]
So my task today is to talk to one theme mainly.
And that's the theme of internationalizing --
further internationalizing SOTL and Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning as a movement.
And I guess the reason I was selected
for that is quite obvious.
I come from an American -- an American accredited university
in Europe which has history of engagement with Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union.
And I'm originally Polish.
Obviously, I live in Hungary
so internationalization has been a central theme of my life
and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has been something
that I have dedicated the past few years to developing
by running an international program
for scholars from Eastern Europe.
So I decided to put the little picture of a plane there
because I was trying to think
about how can SOTL travel further field?
And I was actually inspired about the stuff
by Mary Huber's essay which appeared
in the International Journal of Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning which was called Teaching Travels,
Reflections on the Social Life
of Classroom Inquiry and Innovation.
So this was my starting inspiration for this talk.
And the key words for this initially were travel,
obviously, but that's just a metaphor.
We have to go a little bit beyond that.
But I think it's a good starting metaphor when we think
about internationalizing, we actually having
to do quite a lot of travel with this kind of work.
And the travel of ideas and concepts is what we're concerned
with rather than just travel of people.
So I'd like to -- I have --
I will say a few more words about myself
and about my background, my program,
my whole story why I'm here in a moment
but as a brief introduction to the talk I just wanted to say
that it's going to concern in particular language
and the conceptual spread of SOTL or not and the issue
that I hope links what I have to say is identity,
academic identity of SOTL practitioner is actually one
of the writing groups that I participated in,
the collaborative writing group before.
So I have been immensely influenced
by this work even though I have prepared, you know,
this talk before I came here.
But this identity theme is actually also something that's
central to my research which is internationalization
of academic identities and practices.
And it's clearly central
to running an international SOTL program.
[Silence] Okay.
[Silence] Right.
Okay. Let me get myself together here a bit.
Right. So first of all, I want to acknowledge
that I wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for the scholars
who wanted to participate in this program.
I mean my whole role as a leader is essentially because of people
who work in Eastern Europe, in former Soviet Union who wanted
to do this research and this work.
One of them is actually here in the room,
Rima, she's over there.
You can waive your hand.
If you ever want to talk to a participant
and hear the real voice of the program, that's one of them.
The little -- the smaller woman
in the back was actually denied a visa to Canada to come here,
so this is another aspect.
I thought I was going to talk about this
in a metaphorical sense but it turned
out to be a very material experience about the problems
about internationalizing SOTL.
She's a graduate of my own university.
She's Russian and she's a political scientist dealing
with norms in international relations theory.
So obviously, you know, a very dangerous scholar
to come across the border.
Who knows what she would do?
But anyway, my scholars have been my inspiration
and so I kind of want to dedicate this talk
to them because, you know, they can't all be here
for the rather obvious reasons of material and geopolitical,
you know, difficulties
but in particular material difficulties.
So this is something that I want to acknowledge,
that we're not just talking about abstract things.
We're actually talking about quite embodied issues here.
Right. [Silence] So just a few words about the program
that I'm talking about.
The program is a developmental SOTL program.
It is unfortunately coming to an end this year
because our funding has essentially run out.
It has run since 2002 to 2012 and I just always used
to call it and I do call it a boutique program
because in my department this was one
of the two boutique programs we had
which means we only took five scholars from all kinds
of countries on board and they worked in a group
of ten incoming scholars, young scholars, worked with those
who were finishing their projects
to co design their research together.
I was one of the facilitators and the other was someone many
of you know, Dr. Richard Gale, who is the director
of Mount Royal Institute for Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning who has been the supporter of this program
since the beginning and one of the co- facilitators.
So he was the one doing the work of coming on the plane every --
and actually facilitating the workshop with me.
[Silence] I said a couple of words about my university,
Central European University, which is a graduate school.
It's both American and European.
We have accreditation from Hungary
and in the U.S. by middle states.
We are, as I said already, post graduate only social science
and humanities university.
The reason we have international programs
and a whole department dedicated to that is because one
of the mission or the mission of our --
one of the main facets of the mission of the university was
to sort of be a catalyst for transformation
of post-communist systems into open societies.
So that's the kind of the large scale idea
where this whole work came from, the work I have been doing.
[Silence] Okay.
But to give you more of a personal story,
how it came to be, this is also important.
Bettie Higgs wrote an essay about Carnegie Catalysts,
the Carnegie program, individual's scholars program
that was her catalyst for engaging with scholarship
of teaching and learning and starting programs
in her own institution in Ireland.
And I have to tell you about my catalyst.
So when I started work in this new department
which was dealing mainly at that time with issues of how
to help east European scholars
from other universities transform
or even construct the curricular in Social Sciences
and Humanities and to access resources
and to also construct meaningful courses.
As you know, social sciences were somewhat repressed
or underrepresented in the previous regime so we had
to do this work of helping people
out of accessing resources and we did quite a lot
of course based development.
So my boss, my dean, gave me a book
about six months into my job.
And I was a brand new educational developer.
I didn't actually know at the time educational development.
I knew -- I knew very well.
I knew about teaching methods in the sense of,
you know, interactive teaching.
I had background in teaching in a foreign language at that time.
And I had studied gender studies which has nothing to do
with interactive teaching necessarily.
But I thought from my background I knew about, you know,
how to help people teach more interactively
so that was my background.
I knew nothing about Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning whatsoever at that time and that was 2003.
So my boss gave me a little book
and this book sort of got me going.
She basically handed it to me and said,
"This looks like an interesting idea.
Do you want to do something about it?"
And I did.
Okay. So I'll just show you a quote from that book.
So -- and of course, this is from quite old now
but I find still very powerful coursework portfolio book
that Pat Hutchins edited and the quote
that really was my trigger was this specific quote
because it linked so well to what we were trying to do
in our department working around courses
but what we were missing.
And so we were missing this serious engagement
with student learning.
And it's actually a quote that's still very much alive today
because if you do think of SOTL as more
than just reflective practice, for example.
If you think of it as a form of research it gives you a hint
as to the complexity
of designing research methods for a SOTL project.
It doesn't have to be just about a coursework portfolio
as a format because you have to account for the design
of teaching and for its enactment of practices
of teaching, for what you actually did in your classroom.
And then most importantly,
for the analysis of student learning.
So I was really taken by the book
and I put together a very --
a pile of coursework portfolio project which we used
on grantees in one
of our existing coursework portfolio development.
It was called the coursework portfolio development program.
And we asked them if they would like an extension of the grant
and to try to write and do coursework portfolios with us.
And after that, it lead to me thinking
about starting a SOTL program on its own.
But I think they are all community --
of this community came -- was very important to me.
Because with this brand new idea --
brand new project with its first year of results,
I went to the then what we called London SOTL Conference.
We had a London SOTL Conference.
It was 2005 and I sat in a plenary just like this one.
It was probably the opening plenary but I don't remember.
It must have been.
And I happened to sit next to Pat Hutchins and of course,
as we do in educational development
and SOTL conferences, we have these engagement activities
and buzz groups.
My husband thinks that doesn't happen in any other discipline,
only in the education.
So as I happen to talk to her, I presented to her this idea
that I came up with and that I was running this program.
And she was quite supportive of it.
And in short, that lead to me basically inviting myself
over to Carnegie Foundation and I was accepted.
So I went over there and I had the short residency there.
That is how I met Dr. Richard Gale who then decided to come
on board with this project
and that is how the whole program started.
So by saying that, I just want to stress
that this is an extraordinary community
that you've just entered.
So ever since then, I've been coming to SOTL conferences,
well since 2006 except for the Sydney one.
So that's the story.
But now for sort of conceptual --
more conceptual part of the talk.
And in this -- in putting this together, I was inspired
by extraordinary recent, very recent special issue
of the Journal for Academic Development --
International Journal for Academic Development, the IJAD,
which talks about the political geography
of academic development.
And of course, I use it only by analogy here.
So, I want to move from thinking about just a program
and the practicalities of the program to what it means
to internationalize SOTL.
And of course, this is also following directly in my head
from that idea of the SOTL travels of Mary Huber's idea
of how does SOTL travel to new context and across borders?
But I thought we miss, we missed that point or I missed
that point, the geopolitical sort of analysis of this,
or political geography analysis of this.
So we have a very rich tradition from Becker and Traveler talking
about academic tribes and territories.
We have these anthropological terms which also have to do
with travel and movement.
And I thought this issue deals
with a very interesting aspect of it.
It basically deals with this idea
of using post-Colonial theory and using these other metaphors,
such as metaphors of migration and also the metaphors
of illuminality of being in between,
which really is what SOTL is about.
It is the state of, I suppose, moving into a new area.
And there are a lot of conflicts and there are a lot of borders
to be crossed, and you know,
a lot of identity work that goes into that.
So my question's to myself and I suppose those could be questions
for you -- for the -- for you to think
about this throughout the conference is about the journey
of SOTL and how you see yourself in it.
Okay. Where has SOTL traveled from and where it's homeland,
borders, territories, visa regimes, neutral countries.
There was also a concept of middle powers I think
or middle states -- middle powers, I guess.
That's an IYA [Phonetic] concept.
So these are -- these political concepts allow us
to be a little more critical of what SOTL is
and where this is going.
[Silence] Of course, it links us to the debates of what SOTL is,
what do we want to travel?
What do we want to move across borders?
If we do want to move it across borders?
Or what do we carry across borders?
What is our language?
And here, my first main linguistics sort of,
my social linguistics background long forgotten almost sort
of came to my mind and I decided
that also could we think already have a SOTL language
or do we have just a SOTL pidgin?
And by pidgin, I don't mean the bird for those of you
who are not linguists.
But I suppose, are there any linguists here?
Anybody knows the difference between pidgin and Creole?
Anybody wants to shout it out?
[ Multiple Speakers ]
If you -- sorry, I couldn't hear?
>> I said, a Creole is a pidgin
when it becomes the first language of new generation.
>> Exactly.
So a pidgin is that very nar -- very, I would say primitive form
of language that is used for trade between people
that don't know each other yet.
And oftentimes, colony -- the Colonial nations were the givers
of the main part of that language French,
Spanish, English, Portuguese.
And the way I remembered it
from my undergraduate social linguistics courses,
when mother starts to teach the language
to her children then we have Creole.
It becomes a language.
So this is something for us to think about.
What do we have?
Do we have language?
Do we have a pidgin?
And I also can't help but mention
when I wrote it I actually did misspell pidgin.
English is not my native language
and I did actually write the bird.
Which lead me to all kinds of associations with that episode
of Fawlty Towers, Basil the Rat.
I don't know if any of you know that but if you don't know,
you have to go and look it up because it's still hilarious
after all these years.
Basil the Rat episode of Fawlty Towers.
There was a bit of a confusion there with languages
and what pigeon and pidgin?
Okay. And also, talking about ourselves and our identities.
Who are we?
Where are we traveling?
Who are we?
Where are we traveling from?
Where are we traveling to?
Who do we want to be?
Are we international consultants,
discipline migrants, pathological tourists,
educational experts, mentors
or brokers using Mary Huber's concept of the trading.
SOTL is a trading zone.
It is an anthropological concept, of course.
So, I've been called a leader.
I always felt of myself of just a facilitator of a program.
And the people who ran the program always looked at me
as some kind of an expert, but it's mainly because I had access
to these resources and knowledge
that I was sort of a conduit for.
So I certainly had not done SOTL scholarship myself
at that point.
And I only started a project last year
so I'm a brand new SOTL scholar.
I'm quite an experienced leader now of a small program
but that's a different role as well.
[Silence] So on that point of language,
when I was preparing this talk I decided to go to my friends
and my collaborators for advice, and one of them happened
to be last year's -- one of last year's keynotes,
Torgny Roxa from Lund.
He was a co-keynote with Sherry Linkon
in a very related keynote last year
which was called Theorizing the Teaching Commons.
And I asked him for advice, what should I --
what should I do to make this a successful keynote?
And he wrote to me, remember
that you should have a one sentence message.
It should come up toward the start of the presentation.
And he wrote to me, one sentence only.
Full stop.
Really. Full stop.
I'm serious.
Full stop.
One. Full stop.
Sentence. Full stop.
So after that advice, here is my one sentence to you
in case you were wondering where it is?
Okay. So we need to develop our linguistic
and conceptual toolkit beyond aspirational concepts of SOTL
to construct a shared language.
We have an International Society
and we also have some amazing concepts
in particular, normative concepts.
I think we should celebrate them and we have to believe in them.
And what I mean by normative concepts is that people
who do SOTL don't do it just because just
because there's evidence of impact or just
because somebody's measured.
That oh yes, student's learning really does improve
if you do this one case study.
That is not quite how it happens.
People do it because they get passionate about doing this work
and I think we should divide the normative concepts from,
you know, the evidence stuff in some cases.
So we don't, for example, say that I go to class on time just
because there are studies of impact
on what would happen if I didn't.
We probably go to class on time
because we believe it's a good thing to do.
And SOTL, oftentimes, I think recently is kind
of is challenged that it can't produce enough evidence
that this really works and
improve student learning.
And I think that's an important argument.
But you can't put it in one sentence saying, you know,
people should care about it but as long as it produces impact.
So on the normative concepts, we have -- what do we have?
Well, I guess we have Boyer's original notion
of the four scholarships and the Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning being --
Scholarship of Teaching at that time being one of those.
That is an aspirational concept.
That's something we could aspire to having that kind
of academic life, if you will.
[Silence] We have the Big Tent idea
which is extraordinarily inspirational
because that says we should be like that.
And I think we have to really celebrate these aspirational
concepts but we need to move beyond them.
So aspirational, normative -- I mean concepts that have to do
with value, with what we value in SOTL.
What idea SOTL is based on as a kind of value.
Lee Shulman is, was, and has been a source of these teaching
as a community property is another one
of those concepts to me.
But I think we also need
and I think this is a slightly different argument
than what has been argued before.
We don't so much need to have the same theories
or the same methods of inquiry
but we do need generative concepts.
And by generative concepts, I mean concepts that will travel
across our cases and across our institutions.
Concepts that really somebody can do a study around,
can hang their work around.
And we have some of those already that are unique to SOTL,
I think, or unique to those parts of educational research
that are integral to SOTL.
And I would have to say, for example,
the Indiana University decoding discipline's model
is generative.
So is, for example, let me think.
Another example of generative concept would be threshold
concepts, for example.
So this is the kind of stuff I'm thinking about.
I think these concepts are more important really
than specific theories because they will allow us
to construct a language of this emerging field.
We also need descriptive concepts.
We need to know how to actually do this work.
In particular, in new context and in international context.
What are we actually able to package and sort
of carry across and trade?
[Silence] So practical concepts also relates
to this how do we do this work?
How can we do it internationally?
What do we need to do this work well?
So language is my sort of central theme but by language,
I also mean -- I mean basically the conceptual stuff.
How do we construct it so that we speak the same language
and hopefully not a pidgin.
Okay. But coming back to the notion of language,
we also have a small problem.
Meaning that, of course SOTL is not quite widespread --
as widespread as we might want.
And I would agree that we have an international society.
I think that it's a bit of an aspirational concept
that it is international.
So it is something that exists particularly
in English speaking countries if we were to really evaluate that.
That's anyway how I would look at it.
And when I looked at our SOTL website,
I came across this point.
It was a reference to the poverty of existing resources
to engage in English speaking countries in my understanding.
So it says this, Western Kentucky University's faculty
center for excellence in teaching offers a chart
of English variations in educational terms.
Specifically, in terms for persons in education,
organized groups, learning measurement and recognition
of learning in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland,
the United Kingdom, and the USA.
So there is one thing that connects these countries
and that is, of course, that they're English speaking.
Right. So what we need to do is we need to break
through this language barrier somehow.
And what I did to illustrate it to myself,
actually there was no one else planning it,
I decided to do something I had never thought of doing even
when I was designing a program and run Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning through Google translator
in my own native language.
I had never thought of doing that before.
My native language is Polish and here is what came up.
[Foreign Language] It basically means something like a stipend
or a bursary or a grant about teaching and learning
or to do teaching and learning.
Fellowship, but in the sense of --
oftentimes, would be understood as a kind of, you know,
you were given a bit of money
or you were given -- your fees were paid.
So you could go and do teaching and learning.
Of course, it has nothing to do with Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning.
So then I got very enthusiastic and I decided
to check some other European languages.
So here is Swedish.
I have no idea if this makes sense
but the Swedish table will nod.
Okay. It's exactly the same as in Polish.
Right. Different languages.
Well, in European but different subfamilies.
In Hungarian, I don't know if we have a Hungarian,
but I guess I can have a goal.
It says something like [Foreign Language] That's my best
Hungarian which is pretty horrible
but it means pretty much exactly the same thing.
Okay. And then I did Russian.
[Foreign Language] That is the best I can do in Russian.
It means exactly the same thing.
It means a bursary or a stipend, to do --
something to do with teaching and learning.
And then I actually got a little bit more enthusiastic.
I decided, what about a small language.
So I tried Maltese because it's actually based on Arabic
and it's a very small island in Europe.
And then I had this feeling that it actually is the same thing.
It's very strange.
So then I decided that why am I so kind of nationalistic --
why, let's avoid this nationalistic sort
of methodological nationalism so I went for Esperanto.
I mean, it kind of comes up as the same thing.
And finally, I decided I can't be so Eurocentric
and the only language I could think of that I had anything
to do during my linguistics
and social linguistics classes were Swahili.
Oh Swahili, doesn't come up?
And I have a feeling it means the same thing.
So this is just an illustration
and it might be more an illustration of the poverty
of Google translator than anything else.
Obviously, people in various languages have a way
of expressing the term scholarship
and it might not be the first term that comes
up on Google translator.
But I do think it illustrates the point that people
from non English speaking countries will not find it very
easy to engage with the concept
because they simply will not understand it
and it does not fit into the local language
and the world view in the sense.
It's very difficult.
One of my scholars had tried to do work around this --
essentially in the international university that's located
in Lithuania but is Belorussian.
And I think what they were trying to come
up with was a term that is called educologia [phonetic]
which would be something like educology.
That is what they were trying to come up with.
I guess to differentiate with from Pedagogy or
>> [Inaudible]
>> Sorry?
>> [Inaudible]
>> Science?
Sorry.
>> [Foreign Language]
>> I was talking about how they tried to translate the term.
So they came up with something like educology.
Okay. And what exist in those countries, of course,
are specific definitions of what Pedagogy is
and pedagogical research.
Okay. So it doesn't work very well and we have to think
about it but not about the language of it necessarily.
But about -- what are we creating?
What are we constructing and how can we explain what this
movement is?
It's obviously a very -- you know, it obviously kind of works
but I'm not surprised now that in the first year of my program,
we had such a range of applications I was puzzled
because I thought --
I told people in the call for proposals what this project was
about and I explained.
And there were all kinds of things turning
up which had nothing to do with teaching
and learning practically.
Studying mid Evil Latin something of that kind.
Nothing to do with the course.
Not even corsary design, not even anything,
not to mention studying or researching what you do.
So I think here is a task I'd like to give you to allow you
to think through some of these issues.
But moving away from language and going into what is SOTL,
what really SOTL means.
What does it mean for you?
You've traveled far to enter this field or perhaps
if you're very near the field,
maybe you're an educational developer and a supporter
of SOTL scholars like I have been.
Maybe you are a new SOTL scholar
or a very established SOTL scholar
so I want to give you a test.
I don't know if anyone has ever been tested in this conference
so you are going to have a diagnostic essay.
Please take out a pen and paper and a piece
of you know -- yeah a pen and paper.
[Silence]
I wanted to give you a general idea for what I want you to do
but I'm just going to change it slightly so.
Okay. So Mary Huber in her essay quotes McKinney saying this
argument, "SOTL represents a new form of knowledge production
for academics in disciplines."
If I remember correctly.
The exact quote is well still controversial
as seen among those who emphasize reflection
of a classroom research.
There's no question that inquiry has opened a new realm
of knowledge production to college and university teachers.
So SOTL is a realm of knowledge production.
I would like you to just come up right now with one argument
for whether you agree or disagree with this statement
if you are writing your essay.
You basically have to discuss it.
So you have to decide do you agree with this or you disagree
with this or maybe if you can't, you're confused.
Okay. So take three minutes quietly to write
down whether you are confused and write your argument
for why you are confused.
Just one argument.
You don't have to do the whole essay plan yet.
The one argument for why you agree based
on your personal journey into SOTL.
Okay. And after three minutes, I'd like you to discuss this
with other people sitting at your table
and to just see whether there is --
I want to see whether there will be agreement or not.
So just have a very brief discussion whether you agree
with this or not.
And this is really what we're here to do to talk
about what this means.
Now I'll shut up now and let you think.
[Silence] Come back together as a group
and can I ask the volunteers to help me.
I'd like to ask if -- there is one table where you agreed?
You in principle, you seemed to agree
with the statement in majorities?
Is there a table that agreed?
[Background Sounds] I say it would have been essay plan,
yes this is correct or not.
This -- yeah?
Correct? I guess nobody just wants to come forward.
This is that stage in the conference.
Okay. Was there a table that disagreed?
Okay. Thank you very much.
I'm going to come back to the agrees just
in case there are some shy people here.
[Silence] So can we just hear one of the arguments
for why you disagreed?
And if you could introduce yourself?
[Silence]
>> Did you mean did we all unanimously disagree?
[Background Sounds] Because that's not what I -- yes.
>> Okay. Could you give us one of the arguments
that were being discussed for or against?
>> Sure. So one argument against was that in the field
of education people have been working with teachers
on questions of teacher research and teacher action research
for a long time and that has some quite similar -- yeah.
Characteristics.
>> To SOTL?
>> I think that was just one of the arguments.
>> Which means that?
What does that mean?
>> Oh, so that would mean that it's not a completely new form
of knowledge production for academics because even
if academics in education may not have been doing SOTL
themselves, they are able to teach others to engage
in similar forms of knowledge production.
>> So the argument is that at least
in education this has been a research area
in some ways for many many years.
So it's not new to education?
Definitely.
Okay. Could we have -- is there an argument for?
[Background Sound] Not for?
Is there an argument for?
Anybody? Over there?
Yes? In the middle.
[Silence] Just share one argument with us.
And if you could just give us your name?
>> Hi. I'm Louela Manankil-Rankin
from McMaster University and I did say that I agreed
with that statement because if knowledge production equates
to knowledge generation then the whole process of engaging
in the scholarship of discovery lends itself to that very quote
of knowledge production.
So that's the reason from that perspective,
I agreed with this statement.
>> So would you say that SOTL is a form --
is a type of scholarship of discovery potentially?
>> Yes.
>> Okay. Right.
In disciplines?
In disciplines other than education as well presumably?
>> Absolutely.
Like, I'm using Boyer's, obviously, Boyer's concept
of scholarship of discovery and that engaging
in understanding the teaching and learning processes involved
in educating students, then indeed, you are engaging
in the discovery of, you know,
the impact of your teaching learning processes
on the development of students.
>> Okay. Could we have another another -- thank you so much.
Could we have another view for or against?
Which ever actually?
I just would like to hear another voice.
In the back over there.
Yes, the lady has been raising her hand.
[Silence]
>> Hi. Deb Currier from Western Washington University.
Our table basically was hung up on the word production
and our different connotations of that.
We went all the way from assembly line,
production of something and we realized that that was the word
after much discussion even though we had agreed
or disagreed at the table we all agreed
that that was the sticking point for us.
Because I'm a theater professor
so production means a play to me.
I mean -- so there were -- we were talking about and we came
up with discovery as well but that's not the word that's used.
So it was the varied interpretations of it
that made us a disagree.
>> Wow. Okay.
Thank you so much.
Well this is interesting because you've been really good students
and you went for the strategy of let's, you know,
let's dissect the actual quote before you answer,
before you come up with your idea
of how do you write that essay.
So I never even thought about some of these terms that you
as native speakers picked up.
I never picked up on the notion of production
and I've never thought about, you know,
new to whom when I was writing it.
I mean it just to me stated that Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning is a type of --
it's a new field that generates knowledge
about student learning primarily
in disciplines other than education.
And kind of in a way, if I had to hold my hands
up though I am -- I come from education.
I have a Ph.D. in education but I do believe
that potentially it's a very young field
but what is the most fascinating about the field to me is
that it potentially is a way of --
well, scholars in other disciplines inquiring
into issues of teaching and learning.
And the inquiry at one point actually does become research
so I have no qualms about it.
I see it as an emerging field of research and I am in agreement
with Brian Coppola who writes about that in an essay
in the recent International Journal Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning.
But I do know and you will move forward in this conference,
you will have to live with this complexity
that there isn't a single SOTL identity,
there isn't a single answer to that question.
And absolutely for many people this is a form of, you know,
research in education and through all this it's a form
of professional development of teaching.
To some of us it is just
about essentially a reflective practice
so there is not one definition.
Which in a way, makes it difficult to think
about how do we internationalize it
because what do we mean by it.
It's always a question that comes up.
But I think to some extent we have to be open to this idea
that we do not agree on that here.
Okay. So now, just a tiny little bit about ideas
of internationalization which I'm going to skip some of them
but I'll tell you a little bit.
So when we think about other systems and going
to other systems, we obviously have to engage a little bit
with the idea of doing comparative research
and understanding that different systems of education.
This is an example of different ones that exist in Europe.
That they really have also different values.
Some of them go to the Germanic system goes to Humboldt
and that actually has a notion of scholarship,
very strong in it
and specifically using the term scholarship.
But they have different systems, have very different values
and different accommodations and the most important thing,
the most difficult thing for me is that these systems are varied
in terms of how much pedagogical anatomy they allow teachers.
And that is a problem because we need resources
to internationalize this work and we need venues
to which people from outside can actually access
like this society.
And we need material results for them to access
but they also need to have a capacity
for pedagogical innovation and pedagogical change
which means they need to be autonomous.
A lot of people in that systems even
in Europe are not really autonomous.
They're often told things
like in this university you know 30 percent of the final exam --
30 percent of the grade has to be a mid-term exam.
It has to be an exam or you have to --
you can only give 10 percent for student's written assignments
but 50 percent is the final exam that has to be whatever format.
So in that case, doing an inquiry to teaching
and learning is really difficult.
And that's one thing that I found in any program
that that's a real sticking point.
And it's worse is if the system that people come
from is the chair system which is very hierarchal where,
you know, the full professor is gone on tour with the course
so he runs the course and the young scholars,
the young professors actually deliver seminars
and they have room with almost no capacity
to change any single aspect of the course.
I know this is talking about a completely different aspect
but this pedagogical anatomy is something I really struggled
with knowing how to help people design a meaningful inquiry
when they can't do that.
So we need that.
We need pedagogical competence as well
because until people have a certain amount
of let's say exposure to educational theory and so on
and so forth, you know,
that education development is important.
Without that, we can't have a meaningful inquiry
because people just have no language with which to address
if they are not from education.
So that is important.
Okay. Okay.
And about internationalization itself, I just wanted
to mention there are very different definitions
of internationalization.
They mean a lot of different things and there is a lot
of policy rising around it.
The one I particularly like and I have built some of my research
around is that it is a matter of changing identities of scholars
by virtue of scholars adopting elements of another system,
another culture into their identity.
And Terri Kim is a researcher who writes about this.
Actually Terri parallels to my Ph.D. We kind of took, you know,
we talked about similar things but different contexts.
So she was dealing with British academics who are, you know,
who are foreign born and she was researching that.
And her notion of that was
that they actually developed transnational knowledge capital.
And these were some of the characteristics
so this is a question of identity also
to become international, to learn to deal with other
and to have a customer orientation.
And there is a position of identity,
it's always in between.
It's always conflictual potentially.
This was essentially the same thing as I came up with
in my own research in internationalization
which I don't want to go into
but that is what I was interested in.
How is internationalization embedded into identities?
The only reason this matters, the only reason this matters is
because we could ask similar questions about SOTL.
How is SOTL embedded into identities?
Okay. And does it form a new identity or a hybrid
or multiple identities?
This is what we need to struggle with.
In my research, in one of my findings was that depending
on the narratives people tell about their lives
as academics some of them really thought of --
you know, you could say that there were partial --
narratives of partial internationalization.
They are just exposed but it didn't change very much
or was actually very problematic for them
because they suddenly have this huge competition out there
that they are against.
This international level that they couldn't access.
They were not on the international level
in their own understanding.
There were people that were talking
about significant internationalization
and that meant that basically they'd taken quite explicit
parts of international -- sort of values they had derived
from a different system,
exposure to another system into other practices.
Such as, for example, they really attributed an element --
one of their teaching practices
to something they had experienced elsewhere
and they took that on board but not all of their practices.
And there was still national based academics.
And there were these people who looked at themselves
and this is my term, profoundly internationalized,
who basically thought of themselves
as having double identities.
They were a Russian scholar and an American scholar.
And that meant that they actually oftentimes wanted
to research in both languages.
They were also thinking about where they should live,
you know, in Russia or should they live
in the U.S. or France or Germany.
So this was kind of interesting because I think there is sort
of an analogy here that people who engage with SOTL, you know,
you don't -- there are multiple ways to engage with SOTL
and the identities -- the change
of identities come on multiple levels.
Okay. And I did some other research with Torgny Roxa
which talks about how internationalization spreading
across the institution
and we basically found it is not spreading the practice
of internationalization are not spreading very easily at all.
So it's interesting really.
But this is -- I'm going to skip that.
Okay. So I'd like to invite you to think a little bit --
we are almost towards the end.
I know we started late.
But [Silence] a couple of minutes just to think
and then maybe you can drop me an email.
There is an email there SOTL@ceu.hu about what programs
and projects have you come
across that have successfully been engaging people
from other areas
and in particular non English speaking areas into SOTL work.
What have you seen around your institutions?
So this is kind of a question for later because I'd
like to hear and to be able to in some ways report
on what is actually going on.
My one little program is obviously not enough evidence
to talk about internationalization
of SOTL in other contexts.
So this is a very simple question, what have you come
across that might actually work and help
to move this work forward?
I'm not going to ask you now but in the question time,
you can offer that or you could offer that by email to me.
Okay. Well this is some of my practical concepts, just a list,
a list that I came up with.
What would we need to spread this work further?
We need developmental SOTL programs for people who are new
to the discipline and who do not have such programs
in their own home country.
We obviously need more research or dimensions of SOTL
or academic work in general.
We need all kinds of ideas for places where people can learn
and meet, institutes and so on, summer schools.
We need conference funding for people who find it hard to come
to these conferences and for eastern Europeans this is
extraordinarily expensive conference.
So that's like a couple months of somebody's salary literally.
So we need to think about that.
Is there funding that could be dedicated
to actually help people access these very important venues
where they could meet and be included
in this community and learn.
And I've heard of other formats,
twinning of educational development centers, online --
various online platforms.
We need international mentors though who will travel
to other places and this is kind of obvious.
We also need more openness from discipline based publishers both
with international voices and for SOTL and such.
And we are going to have a new journal so I hope
that that one is actually fulfilling one of these points.
Okay. So to leave you, this will be my kind of very practical
if I put a policy hat on it.
This is what we need to internationalize SOTL.
We need conceptual and material resources on the sort
of supply side means you know in the centers of SOTL work
and we need a strong community networks and venues,
physical venues, as well as online venues.
But we also need in each new system a certain capacity
for people to reach pedagogical competence
at which level they can actually inquire into student learning
and we need pedagogical anatomy.
So that would be my sort of --
my kind of answer to the question of what would we need.
And questions and comments?
>> Back to the problem, is -- I don't know how you feel about
but do you think that that point about working
with discipline specific societies isn't really the key
to get societies on board because for my society,
we're very international but we're not focused on SOTL.
But if they were more enlightened about SOTL,
that would be the way to get it in people's vocabulary.
>> Yes, I think that based on my own approach to SOTL
that I do believe is an emerging field of research
in the disciplines, it is something else for education.
But for noneducation disciplines,
the value in the disciplinary societies
and disciplinary journals, is you know, is extraordinary.
And that is where a big -- there's a big --
that's a big boundary in some disciplines.
Not in others, not in geography.
There are quite a few forward looking disciplines that have,
you know, reached that gap.
But, for example, when I look at let's say politics,
it's not great, that I'm familiar with.
History is doing really well and we've --
you know, there have been publications about the role
of disciplines already.
So I just think that we need to realize that this is something
that we are working on and we have
to continue to do more on it.
I don't have an answer as to how to do it
but I think it would have
to take really big publishing houses also
to accept publications
based on SOTL research.
And that's also part of that.
And of course with that we need to have certain quality
of research presented.
And so it's a developmental journey
because you know it takes seven years to write a Ph.D.
and it's only going to take one year to write a good SOTL paper
or searching for my scholars, it takes about two years
to really write a single paper.
So this is the same as in any other discipline.
This is not going to happen overnight.
It's a difficult field to enter.
But yeah, absolutely.
Disciplines are key.
[Silence] purple -- lady in purple.
I can barely see people -- it's so -- it's such a big room.
>> Carmen Werder [phonetic], Western Washington University.
I really appreciate your focusing us on language
and the way we talk about the work and I particularly
like the fact that you took us back to the language
of the course portfolio, design, enactment results or analysis
because I think that language is --
it opens up the work in a way.
I mean I still use it a lot.
Just those three terms.
I think we need that kind of shared language so I'm glad
that you reminded us of that.
>> Thank you.
Well that was what I was trying to get at with this notion
of generative concepts which takes us away from debates
about the method and the right theory
because I don't think we need to have one in the same theory.
But we need to account for how we teach
and how we analyze the results of it,
what type of analysis means in your field.
[Silence] Oh yeah.
I almost couldn't see over there.
Yes, the gentleman in the back.
Thank you for waving.
>> I guess I'm just -- I'm a bit lucky that I happened
to be members -- on editorial board of two journals
which belong to federally reputed societies,
the American Physiological Society
and the International Union Biochemists.
They both have journals.
One is called Advances in Physiological Education.
The other is called BAMBEd
and they have been publishing articles on teaching
and learning in an international setting for a long time.
And these are not half bad societies actually
because at least they've won a dozen prizes
so at least they are serious scientists.
And they do take teaching seriously
and they have published lots of articles on teaching
and learning in an international setting so it's not
that difficult to cross disciplinary boundaries
or maybe we'll just lucky.
I don't know.
>> Thank you for that.
That's very very hopeful and I hope there will be more
of those hopeful kinds of voices and examples
of how this has happened.
Because it is happening but I think part
of it is not necessarily that it's not possible
but whether people believe this is possible so a lot
of people just simply don't believe this work will
be valued.
Or they should spend the time on publishing this work
because it's not going to be in the top, you know,
for some disciplines, it's not going to appear
in the top journal at the moment and that is a concern.
And we have to enlarge it for some people it is a concern
but it is not impossible, I agree.
[Silence] Any comments from this side of the room?
[Silence] Yes.
Over in the back.
[Silence] More questions?
[Silence]
>> Martin Locke from Nottingham, United Kingdom.
We have an issue about this in the United Kingdom
which I'm sure colleagues from there will recognize which is
that it's subject specialist.
It's rather difficult for us to get recognition for research
that is outside the specialism in terms of the quality
of academic activity as measured by the standard measures
that are used to rank universities.
And so I think we have an issue in terms of the education
of the people that are doing the assessment to realize
that this is kind of research has an intrinsic value but also
that the people doing this kind
of research are subject specialists
and not educational specialists.
They are not members
of educational research departments.
They are members of subject departments.
>> Yes. Absolutely.
>> Martin Locke: I would like to know how we go about achieving
that recognition or suggestions for how we might convince those
who do the assessments that this is the case.
>> Well, I'm not sure that I can convince the assessors
at this point but I think there are two stages of it.
The one stage is to just believe and recognize that SOTL is
for discipline scholars and it is a process of development.
It's like acquiring a new academic identity
and new research field.
But Brian Coppola who wrote that essay I referred to is a chemist
and he basically says, this is an emerging field in chemistry.
Some disciplines have been really good at that.
Mathematics has had mathematics education as a sub-branch
of mathematics so there are other --
there are again, existing models.
SOTL is not the first form of that kind of work necessarily.
But I think the first thing is to recognize
that this is acquiring a new field.
It does not mean that you are necessarily having
to leave your existing field.
Some people will leave and that will make that decision.
Others will not.
Some people decide to balance and engage in both forms
of scholarship and that also happens and there is --
and it's nothing new because we deal
with these multiple identities all the time.
What I was trying to point
out with this internationalization focus is
that internationalizing academics constantly juggle
these different identities they've derived
and they've tried to come up with coherent whole,
you know who they are.
Where they live and how they can do their work
that they need to do.
So it's a choice.
It's an individual choice to engage in this research.
It takes time to develop.
It's like developing a new research field
but you don't have to leave your discipline completely
because to some extent you use the methods
that do derive from your discipline.
Okay. In terms of some disciplines it's easier
than others.
I mean, for social scientists it should not be difficult.
For humanities people, this is not impossible either.
I can't say all scientists but clearly there are a lot
of science based SOTL scholars out there.
So I would just encourage you
to just chat throughout the conference to people
from other disciplines and figure out what's going on
and how do they get this work recognized?
I have seen that yet -- in the back.
>> I actually -- I have the mic.
[Background Sounds]
>> You have the mic.
Thank you.
I've been challenged.
>> Thank you Joanna.
I want to bring us back to the issue though about language,
and pidgin versus Creole, because I love that metaphor.
But if Creole is when it becomes a first language
than it's what you are primarily using to talk to people within.
And if you're thinking more about pidgin
and putting it together in order to trade with other groups
who speak other languages
than maybe that's the goal we should have because we're
from different disciplines and we're from different contexts
and we're from different countries.
So do we want Creole or are we really aiming at pidgin?
>> That's a good point.
I think, you know, it was a metaphor
so I don't think I can empirically think
through all the implications right now.
But yeah, I think the trading zone, Mary Huber's
and Pat Hutchins 'ideas
about the Big Tent and the trading zone.
Is it a trading zone or something else?
Yes, I think it is a trading zone are about that,
are about people meeting and exchanging ideas.
The only difficulties are that of course we have to have more
and more conceptual complexity of this work to build up so
that is where I was going with this idea
of developing some kind of a language.
But maybe a lingua franca as a second language rather
than a new language that you, you know, you don't have to give
up your mother tongue to learn a new language and to learn
to speak with a new language.
Every form of science is a kind of language you learn anyway
so this exists as well or every form of scholarship
or discipline is a type of language as well.
And the type of our way of looking at the world
through that language.
I think David in the back was waiting for
>> David: This has been really enjoyable, really useful.
And I really like the form
of posing us a question was wonderful.
So I'm going to pose one back.
All the discussion so far have been about disciplines.
Maybe we're missing the point,
that maybe that's not what we're lacking [phonetic] should
be like.
Because there's another model which is women's studies,
ethnic studies, programs that see much more like this
in many ways, one of which not just that they are disciplinary
but that they start off with a moral vision and a sense
of social responsibility which most academic disciplines seemed
to have lost if they ever had it along the way.
And then from the very beginning I think probably almost
everybody in this room does what they do not as a form
of knowledge but as a form of social change,
as a form of moral commitment.
In some cases, a form of political commitment
to define very broadly.
And if we think only in terms of academic disciplines,
I think we miss something terribly terribly important
about the very core of what our endeavor is about.
>> I think that this is a very useful point and
I was considering whether I was going to talk about disciplines
into disciplines and into disciplinary fields.
So I mean anyway education is also an interdisciplinary field.
I mean, it's not just a single discipline
and gender studies is an excellent example of that.
So absolutely.
We don't necessarily have to be a discipline.
I think individual scholars will position themselves differently.
Some of them will be in the middle between the disciplines
and some will aim for sort of inculcating SOTL
into the heart of their discipline.
And I think these are equally valuable positions.
As a society and as a community, we are this --
definitely this in between so we will not form a discipline
but we might form an interdisciplinary field.
In fact, I think we are forming it.
So this is -- and of the political commitment, of course,
is a huge part of that.
And that is what I meant.
Also when I said that we do need to appreciate that we are --
we have normative concepts that underline this work.
And I don't think these are just concepts of impact.
These are slightly different concepts.
These are concepts of what we value in being academics
and in being in higher education
and what higher education is for.
So thank you.
[Background Sounds] Thank you.
Thank you for your contributions as well.