Teaching, Research and Scholarship Part 3

Today’s post will focus on the landmark Boyer (1990) work, Scholarship Reconsidered. For earlier posts in this series, see part 1 and part 2.

Boyer’s key definitions are found early in chapter 2. As he sees it, one big problem in the academy (at least in institutions seeking to be “research active”) is that “lip service [is paid] to the trilogy of teaching, research and service, but when it comes to making judgments about professional performance, the three are rarely assigned equal merit.” That was more than twenty-five years ago, and the situation has been exacerbated. The ubiquity of “data” and being able to count things have taken pre-eminence over more qualitative measurements.

Part of the problem has to do with the narrowing of what is considered scholarship/research. Boyer writes: “Scholarship in earlier times referred to a variety of creative work… and its integrity was measured by the ability to think, communicate and learn. What we now have is a more restricted view of scholarship, one that limits it to a hierarchy of functions. Basic research has come to be viewed as the first and most essential form of scholarly activity, with other functions flowing from it.” The intensifying teaching versus research debates in higher education punditry is partly a result of the advancement-and-reward system tied to the narrow definition of what counts as scholarship.

Boyer would like to widen the categories. “Surely, scholarship means engaging in original research. But the work of the scholar also means stepping back from one’s investigation, looking for connections, building bridges between theory and practice, and communicating one’s knowledge effectively to students.” He proposes a four-fold expanded definition. He also carefully notes that these four categories do overlap with each other in practice.

The first category, the scholarship of discovery, is the most familiar to academics. This is what we think of as “basic research”. There are many good reasons to engage in such scholarship. I won’t discuss them here and Boyer does repeat the favorable arguments. The second category is the scholarship of integration. He defines this as “making connections across the disciplines, placing the specialties in larger context, illuminating data in a revealing way, often educating nonspecialists… [not] returning to the ‘gentleman scholar’ of an earlier time, nor [a] dilettante, [but] serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together, and bring new insight to bear on original research.” Because of its close relationship and overlap with discovery scholarship, this mode is now becoming increasingly accepted as interdisciplinarity (another buzzword) has gained in popularity in recent years.

The third category, the scholarship of application, is trickier because of its overlap with that other nebulous area, “service”. Part of the problem is that service has become a catch-all term that may or may not include “serious intellectual scholarship”. Is there a clear line? The blurring of applied and basic work has led to arguments aplenty about what counts as scholarship with the two camps using different definitions to highlight and strengthen their own legitimacy. The issue of rigor in scholarship is another blurry line. What counts as being rigorous enough?

The fourth category is the scholarship of teaching. Boyer makes the point that one problem is that “teaching is often viewed as a routine function, tacked on, something almost anyone can do”, and that this is insufficient. Instead teaching is “a dynamic endeavor involving all the analogies, metaphors, and images that build bridges between the teacher’s understanding and the student’s learning.” No mention is made of the education specialists we see arising in some fields – certainly in math and science. A number of larger chemistry departments at larger institutions now have chemical education specialists. Smaller liberal arts colleges on the other hand do not, since it is an expectation that we all engage in thinking carefully about how to improve student learning. But is it rigorous? Do most of us have the time to engage it in rigorously while also steeped in trying to advance the scholarship of discovery? Perhaps that is Boyer’s point. A diversity of approaches, even within a single department, may enrich the community of learners – students and teachers alike.

I have come across Boyer’s categories often in higher education punditry so this was familiar territory. What jumped out at me in Boyer’s work was chapter 4 where he proposes the use of a creativity contract. First he sets the stage. “It flies in the face of all experience to expect a professor to engage in the same type of performance across an entire career, without a change of pace. Faculty renewal is essential. Yet, today, academic work is defined, all to frequently, in single-dimensional terms, with research and publications used as the yardstick by which success is measured. In such a climate, those who don’t publish with regularity are often considered ‘deadwood’, as if professional commitments are narrow and unchanging. Such a suffocatingly restricted view of scholarship leads frequently to burnout or plateaus of performance as faculty are expected to do essentially the same things year after year.” Amen to that.

Boyer provides a series of examples and data tables. I won’t repeat his arguments here but go straight to his suggestion. “Given personal and professional changes that occur across a lifetime, what’s needed, we believe, are career paths that provide for flexibility and change. Alternating periods of goal-seeking and reassessment should be common for all academics. Specifically, we recommend that colleges and universities develop creativity contracts – an arrangement by which faculty members define their professional goals for a three- to five-year period, possibly shifting from one principal scholarly focus to another.”

This sounds partly like my own varied trajectory, minus the actual contracts. As a new faculty member, my scholarship was mainly focused on the discovery mode. I did what “counted”, landing research grants, publishing peer-reviewed articles in my field, and involving students integrally in undergraduate research (being in a liberal arts college setting). While I made an effort to improve my teaching, this had mainly to do with learning new teaching tactics, classroom management strategies, and keeping my students relatively engaged (I hope) in learning the material. During my not-so-recent-anymore sabbatical, I got interested in more integrative approaches – so I spent my time learning much more broadly about origin of life chemistry. (The connection to my previous work was molecular self-assembly.) This led me to drill into a new specific discovery topic, which would then broaden as I started to see new web-like connections. In the midst of this, I took some time off to help start a new college, and this led me to think and read widely about the scholarship of teaching. I started to delve into research from cognitive psychology and the learning sciences. This made me think much more strategically about teaching (rather than on the small-scale tactical level). I’ve begun to integrate the teaching and research to a small extent, and am starting to visualize application ideas.

We’ll see where all this leads, but I do agree with Boyer, that my intellectual engagement has continued to be revitalized by being able to pursue my varied interests (thanks to a very supportive department). The starting of this blog was a result of broadening my ideas and intellectual framework. I’d like to continue working towards the same goal for my students!