The SoTL Guide: (Re)Orienting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Center for Engaged Learning Open Access Book Series

Series Editors: Jessie L Moore and Peter Felten

The SoTL Guide is a practical, accessible, and engaging book that explicitly guides readers through clear steps to develop their own scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project. The book is applicable to readers from across disciplines, nations, career stages, and familiarity with SoTL through clear language, defined terms, uncovered assumptions, and practical, illustrative examples. The authors invite readers to share an expansive and inclusive view of what "doing SoTL" might mean, which they see as beginning before even thinking about a project and extending well after a project is "finished."

The book is also more than a step-by-step manual for doing SoTL; it will help readers more broadly understand what SoTL is and does, and why. The book explores the important, intermediate aspect of improvement in SoTL: the improvement of oneself as a professional academic teacher, of one's teaching practices, and most importantly of one's students' learning. The authors argue for the important "going public" part of SoTL as an act of goodwill and generosity-as potential for collective improvement.

"Whether you're new to the scholarship of teaching and learning or an old hand, this book should be on your (virtual) shelf. Shaped by the experience of three of the field's most thoughtful-and welcoming-practitioners, it brings together examples and insights from the last several decades while also holding up an ambitious vision for future work, work with the potential for changing the culture of higher education itself. In short, The SoTL Guide is a gift from the field to the field, and a great pleasure to read."- Pat Hutchings, Senior Scholar, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), and Senior Scholar, Bay View Alliance (BVA)

"The SoTL Guide is much more than a manual-it is an invitation to rediscover the human, ethical, and transformative essence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Chick, Felten, and Mårtensson weave wisdom, humility, and relational scholarship into a generous roadmap that connects inquiry, identity, and community. This book reorients SoTL toward its deepest purpose: to cultivate meaning, dignity, and public good in higher education. For those of us in the Global South, it resonates as a call to make SoTL a collective act of care and justice." - Oscar Jerez Yañez, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences Education and Director of the Teaching and Learning Center, School of Medicine, University of Chile

"The authors have adeptly threaded the needle of providing rich content that will appeal to both SoTL-curious readers and to deeply SoTL-embedded scholars looking to reflect on their methods, assumptions, and practices. As authors from different cultural and institutional contexts, they highlight how these contextual factors have shaped their own SoTL journeys and practices, and by highlighting a wide range of scholars across contexts and countries, they have meaningfully broadened the SoTL author "set" that is commonly featured in SoTL dialogue." - Sarah Bunnell, Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and Associate Professor of Psychology, Elon University