Reading for Humanists & Teachers @ UCI
A starting place for conversation on Monday 15 October:
- Arum, Richard. Academically Adrift Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
- “Decoding the Disciplines – Improving Student Learning.” http://decodingthedisciplines.org/.
- “Learning in Higher Education » Measuring College Learning Project + Resource Center.”
http://highered.ssrc.org/projects/measuring-college-learning-project/. - Pace, David. The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm: Seven Steps to Increased Student Learning. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
- Roksa, Josipa, Richard Arum, and Amanda Cook. “Defining and Assessing Learning in Higher Education.” SSRC Learning in Higher Ed, 2016.
A bibliography from the desk of Nancy Chick:
SoTL for Humanists: Issues & Illustrations
The Humanities & SoTL: A Primer
Bass, Randy, and Sherry Lee Linkon. “On the Evidence of Theory: Close Reading as a Disciplinary Model for Writing about Teaching and Learning.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 7 (2008): 245-261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474022208094410
Bloch-Schulman, Stephen. “A Critique of Methods in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Philosophy.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 4.1 (2016): 1-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.10
Bloch-Schulman, Stephen, and Sherry Lee Linkon. “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the Arts and Humanities: Moving the Conversation Forward (Special Section Editors’ Introduction).” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 4.1 (2016): 1-3. http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.7
Bloch-Schulman, Stephen, Susan Wharton Conkling, Sherry Lee Linkon, Karen Manarin, and Kathleen Perkins. “Asking Bigger Questions: An Invitation to Further Conversation.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 4.1 (2016): 1-7. http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.12
Calder, Lendol, William W. Cutler III, and T. Mills Kelly. “History Lessons: Historians and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Exploring Common Ground. Ed. Mary Taylor Huber and Sherwyn P. Morreale. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2002. 45- 68
CELatElon. “Controversies, Debates, and Tensions in SoTL.” Online video clip. Youtube 17 Sept. 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkkoJ2iVbGs
Chick, Nancy. “Difference, Privilege, and Power in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The Value of Humanities SoTL.” The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines. Ed. Kathleen McKinney. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 15-33
— . “Holding It Up to the Light: Looking at Learning through the Lenses of the Arts and Humanities.” The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 6.2 (2015): Article 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2015.2.3
— . “‘Methodologically Sound’ Under the ‘Big Tent’: An Ongoing Conversation.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 8.2 (2014): Article 1. http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/vol8/iss2/1
Conkling, Susan. “Looking In on Music: Challenges and Opportunities for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 4.1 (2016): 1-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.11
Grauerholz, Liz, and Eric Main. “Fallacies of SoTL: Rethinking How We Conduct Our Research.” The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines. Ed. Kathleen McKinney. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 152-168.
Holmes, Trevor M., and Kathryn A. Sutherland. “Deconstructive Misalignment: Archives, Events, and Humanities Approaches in Academic Development.” The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 6.2 (2015): Article 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2015.2.11
Hutchings, Pat, and Mary Taylor Huber. “Placing Theory in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 7 (2008): 229-244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474022208094409
Jaarsma, Ada S. “On Being Taught.” The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 6.2 (2015): Article 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2015.2.6
Manarin, Karen. “Exploring Common Ground?” SoTL Canada 11 Feb. 2015. https://sotlcanada.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/exploring-common-ground/
Pace, David. “The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” American Historical Review 109.4 (2004): 1171-1192. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/530753
Perkins, Kathleen. “Down the SoTL Rabbit Hole: Using a Phenomenological Approach to Parse the Development of Student Actors.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 4.1 (2016): 1-10. http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.9
Poole, Gary. “Square One: What is Research?” The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines. Ed. Kathleen McKinney. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 135-151.
Potter, Michael K., and Brad Wuetherick.”Who is Represented in the Teaching Commons?: SoTL Through the Lenses of the Arts and Humanities.” The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 6.2 (2015): Article 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2015.2.2
Annotated Illustrations of the Humanities in SoTL
Barton, Keith C. “Bossed Around by the Queen” in Linda Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Researching History Education: Theory. Method, and Context. New York: Routledge, 2002: 159-82. http://www.iub.edu/~tchsotl/part3/Barton%20Bossed.pdf
and
Barton, Keith C. and Linda S. Levstik, “‘It wasn’t a good part of history’: National identity and students’ explanation of historical significance,” in Linda Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Researching History Education: Theory. Method, and Context (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 240-272. http://www.iub.edu/~tchsotl/part2/Barton&Levstik%20Good%20Part%20of%20History.pdf
Abstract: These two related articles examine the intellectual and ideological preconceptions that American elementary school students often bring to the history classroom. “Bossed Around by the Queen” focuses on the conflict between the complex social models that are present in history even on the elementary level and the atomistic and individualist models of human behavior that many students in the United States. “It wasn’t a good part of history” examines different mismatch between the kind of history as produced by professional historians and master narrative of American history shared by teachers and students in most secondary school classes in the United States.
Annotation by David Pace (from The ISSOTL Arts & Humanities Interest Group’s Annotated Bibliography): I have chosen these two articles as useful places to begin thinking about doing SoTL in the humanities for four reasons:
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- I want to emphasize the continuity of teaching and learning in primary, secondary, and tertiary education and the opportunity of those doing SoTL at the college level to build on the rich literature being produced on learning in the lower grades.
- Conflicts between the ways of thinking that students bring into the college classroom and those required in academic disciplines has been explored extensively in several natural sciences, but they are at least as important in the humanities, where they have been less studied.
- These articles raise the ideological nature of much that we have to teach in the humanities and the tension between the complex world views of our disciplines and the more simplistic narratives that are common in the general public.
- Both articles provide models for reconstructing the world view of students, and the second is particularly interesting in its use of visual assessments to make explicit student forms of thinking.
Bloch-Schulman, Stephen. “A Critique of Methods in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Philosophy.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 4.1 (2016): 1-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.10
Abstract: The goal in this article is to offer a vision for a scholarship of philosophical learning that philosophers find plausible and helpful and that utilizes our disciplinary skills and knowledge to produce useful insights into how students learn philosophy. Doing so is a challenge because philosophers typically and historically conceive of our work as being properly done in the proverbial armchair, that is, done without being tied to empirical data. To begin, I look at three common types of philosophy pedagogy research and I show ways that each can be done well and the limitations of each. Ultimately, I argue that, while useful and revealing in some ways, the techniques typically fail to illuminate where philosophy students are in learning the habits, dispositions and skills that are most typically associated with the discipline. Arguing that to understand students in these ways requires observation, and thus, non-armchair methods, I briefly explore the use of think alouds, arguing that they offer one viable path to a scholarship of learning in philosophy that would allow philosophers to both observe and to use our own disciplinary skills to make the thinking of our students visible in ways that will help us be clearer about how student and expert thinking differs so we can better determine how to help them improve.
Annotation by Nancy Chick: In the context of considering what SoTL for philosophers might look like, Stephen Bloch-Schulman frames an example (starting on page 8) with an explanation of how the think-aloud offers philosophers a method for doing effective SoTL: it “allows us to learn about philosophical thinking philosophically in two ways: first, in asking participants to do philosophical tasks, and second, in the method of interpretation” (emphasis added; 8). The care with which he explains the alignment of think-alouds with his discipline is helpful in considering other disciplines, but his example is particularly powerful. He provides the transcript and the video of both a student and a philosophy professor, as well as a careful analysis of their texts. His lens is focused on the richness, complexity, and contrasts of just two people. In SoTL’s effort to understand (Hutchings’s “what is?”), Bloch-Schulman’s example here shows how manageable and rich one way of doing humanistic SoTL might look like.
Chick, Nancy, Holly Hassel, and Aeron Haynie. “Pressing an Ear Against the Hive: Reading Literature for Complexity.” Pedagogy 9:3 (Fall 2009), 399-422. https://faculty.unlv.edu/nagelhout/ENG714f10/ChickPressinganEar.pdf
Abstract: “This essay emerges from a collaborative research project responding to the challenge of teaching students to acknowledge and appreciate complexity through (and beyond) literary texts…. This essay documents a study based on a particular lesson designed to address these problems in teaching and learning—and, we hope, a lesson that introduces students to the pleasures of di.culty, complexity, paradox, ambiguity, and the multilayered meanings in literary texts. Our lesson also taught us, as instructors, about our own pedagogical practices and about the need to make our values more explicit for students who are not yet experts” (401).
Annotation by Sherry Linkon (from The ISSOTL Arts & Humanities Interest Group’s Annotated Bibliography): In this article, the authors describe strategies for encouraging students to engage with the complexity of literary texts, focusing on a single lesson, and identify several insights based on their analysis of students’ responses to those strategies, including comments on what happens when students work in small groups, the value of making the complexity of texts literally visible, and the limitations of a single lesson in transforming students’ learning . The essay does three things that make it an especially strong model for SoTL. First, the authors position their case in the context of an ongoing conversation among English professors about how to help students embrace rather than resist complexity. Second, they not only describe what they did and how students responded, they also show and analyze students’ responses. This is part of what makes this article an example of SoTL, not just an example of literature professors writing about how they teach. Finally, they are explicit about using the methods of literary study to analyze student learning. As they write, “Consistent with our disciplinary values, then, our methodology of close reading, textual interpretation, and critique is also consistent with the goals of this project regarding reading complex texts for complex meanings.” They thus demonstrate something that I keep saying: it is absolutely possible for humanities scholars to do research on student learning without having to become pseudo-social scientists.
Ciccone, Anthony A., Renee A. Meyers, and Stephanie Waldmann. “What’s So Funny? Moving Students Toward Complex Thinking in a Course on Comedy and Laughter.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 7 (2008), 308-322. http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/7/3/308.short
Abstract: This case study involves investigation of freshman students’ abilities to engage in the pursuit and appreciation of complex thinking though their study of comedy and laughter in a Freshman Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We offer an analysis of students’ reflections on their confrontation with complexity as they attempt to formulate theories of these phenomena, and describe how this confrontation changes the students’ understanding of both the subject matter and their learning process. In investigating these changes systematically, we demonstrate the value of a methodology of close reading supported by theories of learning (e.g. John Dewey’s) for course design and evaluation, and seek to add to our growing understanding of the place of theory in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Annotation by Pat Michaelson (from The ISSOTL Arts & Humanities Interest Group’s Annotated Bibliography): Process is the key here. Ciccone et al focus not only on the process of student learning, but (perhaps even more importantly at this early stage in the development of SOTL in the humanities) on their own process of finding analytical tools to make sense of the evidence. Working primarily with a corpus of students’ reflections on their own learning, the authors develop a taxonomy of complex thinking, from “recognition of one level of meaning” to “starting to think like a humanist.” It is also interesting that the authors find Dewey’s 1934 framework the most useful for their work; it suggests that humanists may not be well served by more recent, more “social-sciency” education research.
Fallon, Dianne. “‘Lucky to Live in Maine’: Examining Student Responses to Diversity Issues.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College. (May 2006): 410-420. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ752067
Abstract: Examining student responses to a class assignment leads to a richer understanding of how students process and respond to diversity issues.
Annotation by Nancy Chick (from The ISSOTL Arts & Humanities Interest Group’s Annotated Bibliography): This is an article I come back to over and over, so I finally reread it and realized that it belongs in our list of model SoTL articles in the humanities. I like this article for a variety of reasons, but for now, I want to highlight her attitude toward student texts as one of honor and respect, acknowledging their complexity. She reads student writing with the same seriousness as she reads a literary text: there’s more to it than a quick or plot-focused reading will reveal, and there are probably multiple things going on at once. As she notes, “So why, then, did some students whose presentations demonstrated an understanding of the complexity of diversity issues ‘fall back’ into more simplified positions? And were these apparently ‘simplified’ or ‘reductionist’ positions as simple as they might seem?” (412) In the same way that we assume an intelligence and richness in literary language, she stops herself (and others) before dismissing student work with simplified, denotation-based interpretations. She claims, “When we examine student learning, however, nothing is as obvious as it might seem” (413). Yes. Students and their language choices are complex, multivalent, and meaningful–and should be read (“unpacked” [413], a common metaphor for literary reading) with an engaged, rigorous, and layered approach. How does she do this? She sees how students’ seemingly regressive moments are part of a pattern of “fluctuation,” a “metastable state where they are striving for complexity,” but the difficulty of this cognitive shift sometimes makes them seek something comfortable or “less challenging” for awhile (413). This is very different from the typical rhetoric describing students’ resistance, giving up, rejection, and failure to learn.
Hassel, Holly, and Joanne Giordano. “Transfer Institutions, Transfer of Knowledge: The Development of Rhetorical Adaptability and Underprepared Writers.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College (2009): 24-40. http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups/TYCA/Transfer_Instruct.pdf
Abstract: “This essay describes the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning project examining the transition of underprepared first-year writers at an open admission institution as they struggled to translate their first-semester instruction into second-semester success” (24).
Annotation by Nancy Chick (from The ISSOTL Arts & Humanities Interest Group’s Annotated Bibliography): I like this article as an example of humanities-based SoTL, even though it comes out of composition, which can sometimes be methodologically less like the humanities and more like the social sciences. Part of its humanities influence is from Hassel, who is also a literary scholar and has heard me talk often about using our disciplinary approaches to research, evidence, and knowledge-construction. (She was also a co-author on the article above.) While Hassel and Giordano are explicit about their disciplinary approaches to their research (pages 26-28), I selected this essay for how they handle their students and the students’ evidence of learning (or mislearning) through these careful case studies (pages 29-35). In these sections, Hassel and Giordano select specific passages from the student texts–without worrying about achieving a “large N,” demonstrating number patterns, and showing charts/graphs–and closely read them for their notion of “rhetorical adaptability,” dwelling on the students’ language and syntax as meaningful. They also draw significant and useful conclusions from the students’ work (36) without claiming pure generalizability (28).
Manarin, Karen. “Interpreting Undergraduate Research Posters in the Literature Classroom.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 4.1 (2016): 1-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.1.8
Abstract: This essay explores the use of undergraduate research posters in English literature classrooms; at the same time, it argues for a scholarship of teaching and learning responsive to how meaning is constructed in the arts and humanities. Our scholarly practice requires interaction with texts and with each other, yet the undergraduate research paper typically does not involve much interaction between peers. The posters disseminate preliminary interpretations of research projects to peers; they are a way to make visible some of the cognitive, affective, and aesthetic aspects of literary research. This essay analyzes student reflections on both the process of creating and the process of presenting research posters before providing “close readings” of several posters. Reading the posters reveals key elements of students’ interactions with literary texts: close reading, integration, negotiation, theoretical generalization, and aesthetic judgment. As the students explored a less familiar genre, disciplinary processes of knowledge creation were defamiliarized and made visible.
Annotation by Nancy Chick: This essay (like her earlier “Reading Value”) illustrates the humanistic interest in the processes of learning, not just the products of learning. Her adoption of this unfamiliar genre of research posters might initially give pause, but she introduces the unfamiliar intentionally–to shake up the traditional privacy of students’ learning in literature classes. She says the posters “allowed [her] to see aspects of the research usually hidden in the conventions of the research paper” (12): her students have to step outside of their writing routines to articulate their research processes and discuss them with each other. Finally, as an article documenting a SoTL project, she doesn’t simply summarize students’ learning or gloss over the work they did; she includes a few of the posters, the students’ accompanying reflective writings, and her close reading of them. I think we crave this presence of student work–their voices, their thinking, their learning made visible–in SoTL writing.
—. “Reading Value: Student Choice in Reading Strategies.” Pedagogy 12.2 (Spring 2012): 281-297. https://www.uni.edu/provost/sites/default/files/documents/reading_value_0.pdf
Abstract: “This article is based on a research project undertaken in fall 2009; I asked students in two sections of a general education course on critical writing and reading how they read a variety of nonfictional texts in an effort to better understand what reading strategies students select when dealing with assigned texts. Before I discuss their choices in reading strategies, I explore some of my own assumptions around reading fostered by a disciplinary tradition of close reading of literary texts and a theoretical tradition of reader response. I then expand this discussion of reading to include educational research into reading strategies. I describe how this research affected my course design and the research project. Finally, I offer observations about which reading strategies seem most popular, regardless of efficacy, which elements of the course seem to foster student learning, and which obstacles remain” (282).
Annotation by Nancy Chick: I love this study and this essay about the study–and not just because it’s about reading. Karen Manarin includes the right moves for reporting a SoTL study (e.g., a description the specific context and student population, details about how she collected and analyzed evidence of the students’ learning–both of which aren’t the kinds of things we’re used to describing in our scholarly work), and her “lit review” integrates a continuum of experts ranging from relevant disciplinary scholars to K-12 researchers who look at student reading processes. I found myself nodding as she analyzed her students’ reading choices: she makes no claim of generalizability, but the patterns she describes are familiar, even though most of my teaching contexts have been very different from the one she describes. (Lee Shulman’s 2013 ISSOTL keynote in Raleigh spoke to the significance of such situated studies.) Ultimately, this essay effectively illustrates a) the kinds of questions about student learning that deeply interest us, b) a SoTL process that draws on our expertise, and c) a study design that fits the rhythm of our regular and frequently heavy teaching loads.
Pace, David. “Assessment in History: The Case for ‘Decoding’ the Discipline.” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 11.3 (2011): 107-119. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ956748
Abstract: In this reflective essay, Pace identifies the difficulty in coming to consensus about assessment in a humanities discipline like history. He argues that rather than mimicking social science methodologies, historians should consider how to decode their disciplinary skills and attitudes for novices. He uses a freshman seminar as an example and describes the different class assignments designed to foster particular skills. He describes how he assessed their disciplinary skills but also questions the meaning of those assessments.
Annotation by Karen Manarin (from The ISSOTL Arts & Humanities Interest Group’s Annotated Bibliography): I like this article in part because it is a reflective essay. It recognizes the difficulty of reducing the complexities of assessment to a single measure. Although I am not a historian, this article provided me with a lot to think about in terms of my own discipline.