We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old "teaching versus research" debate and give the familiar and honorable term "scholarship" a broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work. 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 (Boyer, p. 16). 

a) the context of public discourse on teaching 
b) the gap between student expectations and faculty ideals 
c) the development of a language of the scholarship of teaching. 

The scholarship of teaching was initially defined as communicating one's knowledge effectively to students. It took its place in the 1990 Carnegie Special Report Scholarship Reconsidered alongside the scholarship(s) of discovery, integration and application as defining the priorities of the professoriate. "When defined as scholarship," the Report says briefly, "…teaching both educates and entices future scholars for...Teaching is the highest form of understanding" (Boyer, p.23). Five main characteristics are then identified, which cover three central themes: how teachers create a common ground of intellectual commitment, what teachers do as learners transforming and extending scholarship, and how they deliver honest and intelligible accounts of new knowledge. 

Taking Learning Seriously

Boyer's original formulation is being impressively widened by the new President of the Carnegie Foundation, Lee Shulman, in his paper "Taking Learning Seriously" (1999). The ideas are worth a short recapitulation for those who are unfamiliar with the topic and the pace of its development. Shulman takes the notion of "professing" (and being a professor) as one of taking learning seriously. 

Moving beyond behaviorism, he argues for a constructivist concept of learning, a "dual process in which, initially, the inside beliefs and understandings must come out, and only then can something outside get in...Any new learning must connect with what learners already know…..so to take learning seriously, we must take learners seriously" but learning "is most powerful when it become public and communal." (p. 12). 

He then describes what he calls the "epidemiology of mislearning" -- a vocabulary unsurprising for a former medical educator, isolating three distinct pathologies: amnesia, fantasia and inertia. Of amnesia (that students forget what they have learned) he argues that "if we take learning seriously, we must take responsibility for the ubiquity of amnesia. We need to re-examine much of what we teach, and how we teach it" (p. 13). Fantasia, unlike amnesia, can be dangerous. "It is that state in which students are absolutely confident that they understand something, but they don't" (p. 13). Such misconceptions become land mines for further learning. The problem is that fantasia is endemic in the student population. Inertia represents "those states of mind where people come to know something but simply can't go beyond the facts, can't synthesize them, think with them, or apply them in another situation" (p. 14). 

Regrettably, he continues, people seek solutions to these three problems in nostalgia, the view that if we only went back to traditional ways of doing things, each pathology of mislearning would disappear. Not so. Rather he stresses the principles of activity, reflection, collaboration, and passion, combined with generative content and the creation of powerful learning communities as the basis for instructional design. 

The scholarship required is one that renders one's own practice the problem for investigation. For, he claims, there is an unavoidable unpredictability in teaching, as anyone who teaches the same thing to three different classes knows perfectly well. We are therefore not looking for empirically-based generalizations as theory to support practice. Rather, we are looking for the understanding of connections between the character of a discipline and what Shulman has called the "wisdom of practice." On this view of the scholarship of teaching we can combat the pathologies, develop a literature we currently lack and produce powerful pedagogies. Right now "we just don't know what our colleagues have done before or what our colleagues elsewhere have done. We don't even document or analyze our own efforts" (p. 16). 

Yet this must only be a beginning. For example, he anticipates work being developed on "the disconnection between intellectual learning and moral or civic learning in higher education" and the "troubling absence of intellectual passion and commitment to ideas within our student populations" (p. 16). His paper concludes with a description of the Foundation's joint initiative with AAHE -- the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). 

The Scholarship of Teaching

More recently Hutchings and Shulman (1999) have elaborated on developments arising from their summer 1999 work with visiting scholars in CASTL. First, they press a distinction between excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching. Unlike excellent teaching, and like research in general, scholarship has the three features of: 

a) being public "community property" 
b) being open to critique and evaluation 
c) in a form others can build on 

Not all faculty will engage in this scholarship, but all can learn from it. It is long-haul and high-risk in terms of conventional norms. It faces problems of credibility, they conclude, and a need to be open to different methods of inquiry, including investigating the process of inquiry itself. It is capable of representation in multiple genres, not merely published papers. Finally, it faces problems of sustainability through a culture and an infrastructure needed to foster it. 

The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching

Whatever individuals in American higher education do to improve themselves as teachers, they often distrust the public institutional context of talk about teaching. For the context is often one of faculty assessment by students, not scholarship. However much privately or in small promotion and tenure committees individuals pour scorn on a Scantron system (and often the substance) of student evaluations, they remain the primary bureaucratic criterion of teaching quality. We acknowledge this banal practice because it has power, not because it has merit. 

Highly intelligent people sometimes find themselves talking a language that they know is pure Jabberwock: comparing two candidates for a position or for promotion, one can hear such comments as "she sustained a 4.8 whereas he hovers between 4.3 and 4.6." Comments like this assume that such numbers reflect a stable reality, rather than the inevitable unpredictability to which Shulman draws our attention. Department chairs, feverishly trying to justify giving a higher merit increase to one member of faculty over another, will play up (or play down) numbers of this kind which are manifestly bogus. Such a context of assessment positively undermines the atmosphere of scholarship and serious reflection envisaged by CASTL and its adherents. 

No claim is implied here that university teachers are somehow beyond assessment of quality. Indeed we have a moral and professional obligation to the public, however described, to deliver an account of what we do in classrooms. But at least three changes are needed, if the scholarship of teaching is to be respected and nurtured and a coherent form of student evaluation of faculty introduced. 

The Language of Teaching

First, there must be a common language for all discussions of teaching. While Hutchings and Shulman are right to distinguish excellent teaching from the scholarship of teaching, the language of teaching quality and the language of scholarship must be internally coherent. How you assess excellence in teaching, in other words, should not be conducted in a different language from that used by scholars of teaching. If students are to contribute to that assessment, they too must share that language, with major implications for contemporary practice. The context is one of partnership and collaboration, not suspicion and distrust. 

Second, the language will become further complicated by being different in respect of different disciplines. One of the most depressing features of the system of student evaluation is its systemic inability to distinguish in any depth between disciplines, fields of study or areas of interest in respect of the ways in which they are taught. Although Shulman writes about such general skills as synthesis, application and analysis, he recognizes that these terms must mean different things in different disciplines, with major influences on the teaching that follows. 

For example, the language will be different in discussing the teaching of science and the teaching of history because the content is different. If a historian "analyzes" the causes of the American Revolution, he or she will not in any respect be doing the same thing as the chemist called to "analyze" the constituents of a plastic bomb. The scholar "analyzing" Mansfield Park is doing something methodologically different from the psychologist "analyzing" data on recidivism in juveniles. The content, in brief, leads to dramatically different "mental skills." Content also shapes teaching and the learning activities a teacher designs to embody the discipline's methodology. 

Finally, in his rejection of behaviorism and his embrace of a constructivist view of learning, Shulman is embracing this epistemological complexity and how it plays out in different disciplines. That complexity will constantly show up in any cogent pedagogy or pattern of teaching, and thereby in any respected system of assessment. The common language must celebrate such differences, not attempt to override them for bureaucratic ends. Not only must there be a common and increasingly complex language shared, but institutional assessment of individual teacher quality must respect the struggle of striving for excellence, of experiment, of trial and error, of failure, of imagination in the practice and in the scholarship of teaching. That is a quest trivialized for teacher and learner alike in a five-minute end-of-course exercise with a B pencil. 

Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals

The language of educational thought and practice has been dominated in the twentieth century by behaviorist psychology and the ease with which its pseudo-technical language has come to permeate the educational conversation. Feedback and reinforcement (formerly used of vomiting cattle and concrete in buildings) are now in common use to describe aspects of learning. 

With the huge expansion of educational opportunity, we use the behaviorist/industrial language of "processing" students through a "system" as opposed to engaging them in the moral and intellectual purposes of the community. This has led to a conventional set of assumptions: about students themselves, and the complex connection between grades, student motivations, attitudes to learning and public accountability statements that "learning has been achieved."

My impression (and it is very much an impression) is that a large number of faculty see the typical George Mason undergraduate student in this way. His/her intellectual quality is reflected by the University's position in the league tables. Though enrolled full-time, the student is working and therefore de facto part-time. S/he reads only what is required and rarely, if ever, outside the chosen major. Student motivation is sometimes found to be intrinsic (driven by a serious interest in the subject) but is mostly extrinsic or instrumental (driven by career expectations). 

Instrumental motivation makes the grade much more important to the student than the quality of the work, understandably for those whose grade point averages determine such matters as the retention of financial aid. So faculty are not surprised by a rise in the number of complaints about grades, about the needs to be precise about how points are awarded, facts that reflects the instrumental motivations of students. 

If correct, is this the student's fault? Many of them enter universities utterly confused by the question of why education has value. They have continuously had mixed messages -- "You need this to get to college" (the instrumental) and/or "This is interesting, good for you, fun" (the intrinsic). More importantly many have been enslaved by anti-intellectual learning experiences they have had in schools where picking up information rather than playing with ideas (in any discipline) can be the rule. Information is forgotten or mis-remembered. Ideas tend to stick. 

The anti-intellectualism of many public school practices which E. D. Hirsch Jr. (1996) deplores arise not because, as he argues, teachers are devotees of romanticism, but because their practice is dominated by a model of instructional design, built on behaviorism, and driven by objectives which can be measured and graded. The student experience of learning in school, not college, is at the root of the pathology Shulman describes: viz., the absence of commitment to ideas among students. Information, not ideas, drives that experience. 

Yet ideas are, surely, what a university teacher would most treasure. 

The Character of Knowledge

This instructional design-by-objectives model is clearly antipathetic to the kinds of instructional design Shulman has in mind. For the model, and the institutional organization that supports it, carries the pervasive assumption that everything to be learned is a topic for mastery, not for speculation or reflection. The true character of knowledge (its messiness, confusions, uncertainties, and contradictions) is hugely distorted. 

Students come to treat everything they are taught as information, as a bunch of certainties to be mastered. Moreover, if they don't get the information (in the various senses of "get"), it is the fault of the teacher. Under this model, there are no poor students, as Solzhenitsyn wrote of Soviet schools, only poor teachers. Typically, when presented with a conflict, students will not relish it, but (instrumentally) demand to know who's right, or, more important for the grade, whom the teacher thinks is right. 

Scottish educator Lawrence Stenhouse articulates the problem wonderfully well: such a model of instructional design "…..gives the school" (or teacher, or system) "an authority and power over its students by setting arbitrary limits to speculation and by defining arbitrary solutions to unsolved problems of knowledge" (p. 86). The teacher is then seen by the student primarily as an examiner to be thwarted, not as a critic whose judgement is trusted. 

Moved by the scholarship of his or her discipline, the teacher would like to be seen as a critic: institutional norms determine that s/he be seen as an examiner. Trying to teach a discipline coherently, the teacher is encountering the contrary student expectations developed through a doctrine of instructional design into which the student has been socialized over years of compulsory schooling. 

Expectation and Assessment

How is this conflict of expectation mediated? Student assessment of faculty is a bureaucratic, not an educational exercise. An immense bureaucratic system of managing faculty's assessment of students is installed. Both reveal an absence of trust. There is no trust because there is so little in common between the perspectives of scholars in a discipline and students educationally socialized in the way I have described. (Historians may connect the development of this apparatus to the conflicts of authority in the 1960s which drastically changed paternalistic norms into norms driven by due process.) 

Yet not only is trust a casualty, so also is the way in which we publicly understand teaching and learning quality. For the purposes of both excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching, a fascinating paradox then arises, pointed out by Stenhouse. "The more objective an examination" (or assessment pattern) "the more it fails to reveal the quality of good teaching and good learning" (p. 95). In other words, the forms we presently use to assess students may actually serve to conceal from us the quality of good students and the weaknesses of poor students and, of course, the quality of their teachers. 

The student evaluation of faculty may do the same. A teacher who is a critic or who makes students struggle with ideas may not be assessed "well" by students precisely because he or she is challenging both their background and their motivation. A student who appreciates being critically taught is reduced to a mere statistic. The quality of our practice then becomes framed by what the students like in terms of a teacher-learner relationship hooked into their immediate motivation, not by what they need educationally in being shown other motives. Unsurprisingly, an early review of the student evaluation process, according to George Mason University psychologist Bob Pasnak, found reliability only in the way it told us whether there was teacher-student rapport. 

The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching

It is important to note that the language implied for the scholarship of teaching in the two articles with which I began is in direct contrast with traditional forms of educational research rooted in empiricism. This language (Shulman, Hutchings and Shulman) has three ancestries: 

a) the influence of medicine (as in pathologies) 
b) Schon's work, influenced by Dewey, on an epistemology of practice (as in reflection and inquiry) 
c) moral language (as in collaboration, passion, learning communities from Shulman, and honesty and other terms out of Boyer) 

Schon's articulation (1983) of how we might understand professionals-in-action through the idea of reflective practice takes us back to a language of inquiry that is epistemological. Several scholars, such as Tom (1983), Goodlad et al. (1990), Hansen (1998) and myself (1993), have argued that since teachers and learners are in a moral relationship, the language of morality is a necessary part of the language of ends and means in teaching. Teaching, therefore, as the practice to which this scholarship is directed, is centrally seen as a moral, not a technical activity. 

The Value of Moral Language

If we examine the pathologies Shulman has identified, we can see how moral language sheds a different kind of light on each. Shulman himself is uncertain about the significance of amnesia. That is no surprise because memory, though useful, is epistemologically trivial and morally irrelevant for teaching. Why is fantasia a morally important defect? Holding one's beliefs in such a doctrinaire way, which includes being committed to misunderstandings, is an ethical not a technical lapse. 

It ignores what such scholars as Antony Quinton have described as the ethics of belief (1987). The question "Ought I to believe what I believe?" is a moral question at the heart of intellectual life. It draws attention to the significance of our paying attention to evidence and the way in which better evidence should alter what we believe, if we are to hold our rationality as of moral significance. The fantasia student believes in mastery, not a speculative stance to the truth. S/he is committed to mastery, even if it is wrong. 

Inertia is an epistemological problem driven by a stress on facts and information. This pathology is one where people know things, but can't go beyond the facts into synthesis, application etc. Yet it would be surprising if it originated in universities. Presumably no university teachers worth their salt think that their subject can be taught by a) first teaching the facts, and b) then teaching the synthesis (or application or whatever). For in teaching (a) at university levels, the teacher is unavoidably teaching (b), and can't logically teach (b) without (a). "Facts" and "mental skills" are so epistemologically integrated that even to define them as conceptually separate does harm to the integrity of any discipline. 

But recall Messrs. Gradgrind and M'Choackumchild in Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Too frequently in K-12 schools, teachers transmit a bunch of "facts" (information) about history, say, without ever having children try to see the world historically. Science is mistaught as information where children never experiment or work out a hypothesis. So combating inertia demands understanding the epistemological core of a subject by teachers at all levels and how that is reflected in how they teach it -- what Shulman and his followers have elsewhere described as pedagogical content knowledge. 

Yet people grow worried by the use of the word "moral" partly, I suspect, because it is assumed that there is a connection with religion. That apart, we can assess one another's actions as moral or immoral, i.e. make evaluative judgements about each other's thoughts or actions. Second, were we anthropologists, we could describe the morality of a group, not to pass judgement on that group, but simply to give an account of what the group saw as its moral norms and conventions. Finally, we can use the word "moral" to describe that form of thought and practice in which we discuss matters like what we ought to do, what we think is good, how we should treat people, and so on. 

Opening up the moral language, i.e., trying to think about teaching with moral language, carries no judgements about the morality or immorality of other frames of language to describe teaching. It is simply to look at the phenomena of teaching and learning within a moral frame. 

A Common Public Language

One pragmatic advantage of regarding the moral as the basic language of teaching is that it already is a common public language across disciplines. That is, people usually can talk about effort, determination, laziness, deceit, concentration, fairness, the whole catalogue of moral and intellectual virtues and vices. Such concepts are not fixed by the Greeks (or whomever) but they are, as MacIntyre (1967) pointed out, in constant flux -- witness the impact of feminism on our moral thought and language. 

Nevertheless, the temptation must be resisted to base this language in a deficit or assessment perspective and to see teaching questions as circling around moral lapses. Beating our breasts, we could ask "How have we failed to have students become sufficiently morally and intellectually autonomous that they can be open about their beliefs? How have we so distorted our disciplines that students see it as a bunch of information? Why do we ignore the student as a citizen with moral and intellectual responsibilities? How have we failed to engender a passion for things intellectual in our students?" Putting questions like this assumes a vocabulary of deficit and neglect and a context of justification. 

That seems to me a mistake. A more sophisticated approach to moral inquiry within the scholarship of teaching is to sharpen the moral language we possess, not in justification, but in description and explanation. Take the principle of fairness. There is immense room in the scholarship of teaching to develop this concept both in subject-matter and in the complexity of student relationships. For example, the time we spend with individuals, the space we give to student questions, the fairness with which we handle students' halting attempts to say something and the teaching integrity with which we handle challenges to our own positions are not matters of "comfort" or "rapport" between teacher and learner, but the place where the moral and the epistemological meet in excellent and scholarly teaching. 

Most interesting to me is the potential contained in the notion of courage (once one has abandoned its association with physical courage set out in Plato's The Laches). For there is more than just an etymological accident between that virtue and the terms encouraging and discouraging. Teachers who see these as moral acts (as opposed to such technical terms as reinforcement and punishment) can struggle with the task of how does one stimulate students to take risks (i.e. be brave) with ideas. How far do one's deliberate or accidental classroom actions sap the student's will, and so discourage them? If we could describe our teaching in a richer moral language, we would be able to understand our work with much more subtlety, finesse, and in a scholarly way. 

Thus when Hutchings and Shulman write of a long haul and a pattern of inquiry, the fundamental concerns seem to me to be how we can develop existing moral concepts to describe and explain our teaching. Along the way, if we have not already done so, we will need to ditch such encumbrances as the supposed separation of fact and value, the separation of theory and practice and other legacies of positivism enshrined in behaviorism. 

Conclusion

It is a rare mercy to read papers with as much vision as these that do not invoke technology as the elixir for the improvement of teaching. Yet the assumption of much present activity, especially at George Mason, is that enhancing our technical expertise will impact our teaching dramatically. Huge resources at George Mason are thus being poured into technological enhancement. We might test the value of that by taking any of the pathologies Shulman identifies and ask exactly how technological enhancement could influence them. Technological enhancement, in my view, can only be robust if it welcomes many kinds of instructional design and if it has a strong conceptual framework congruent with that of the scholarship of teaching. 

What additionally might be done to foster teaching excellence and the scholarship of teaching which "takes learning seriously," and thereby change the culture? 

1) The gap between the teacher and the learner has to be bridged by the development of a common language about teaching which is sophisticated and not in thrall to a particular model of instructional design or to a system of student evaluation. 

2) Much more room and resources for alternative designs for teaching are required. We need to experiment with teaching outside the box of the doctrines we have come to think of as somehow fixed. 

3) We need to scrap our present method of student course evaluations and take the long haul to develop a system that can combine intellectual respect with our responsibility for public accountability. 

4) We need both liberation and permission to explore from our employers and administrators. Yet we also require liberation and permission from those of our colleagues who act as guardians and gatekeepers for particular kinds of dogmas about effective teaching written into bureaucratic requirements for the development of curriculum and syllabi. 

5) We need to figure out how technological enhancement can support new conceptions of excellence in teaching and in the scholarship of teaching. 

6) We cannot just start alternative systems without resources for a) our own development as teachers, b) devising means of accountability which match the language of the scholarship of teaching, and c) working on the scholarship of teaching ourselves. Nor can we do this without protection from accountants outside the walls and institutional inertia within them. 

Conservative teachers -- the nostalgics of Shulman's paper -- will misunderstand what is being said in this paper if they think it is some kind of plea for less rigor or lower standards. It is absolutely the opposite. Present systems actually permit, if not promote, less rigor for precisely the reasons Stenhouse adumbrates: we cannot effectively assess the true strengths and weaknesses of students within present patterns of evaluation. Nor can students evaluate their teachers in an intellectually respectable way. 

Whether I have got these right or not, these are the kinds of issues that should underpin the agenda of the George Mason Senate Committee on Effective Teaching. This would be a first small step to changing the "culture and infrastructure" which is demanded if George Mason is to be an institution committed not just to excellence in teaching but to its scholarship. 

Notes and References

(1) I am grateful to Pamela LePage-Lees and Diane Wood for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Boyer, Ernest L. (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. (Princeton: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching).

Goodlad, John I., Soder, Roger, and Sirotnik, Kenneth, (Eds.). (1990). The Moral Dimensions of Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hansen, David. (1998). The Moral is in the Practice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14.6, 643 - 655.

Hirsch, E. D. Jr. (1996) The schools we need and why we don't have them. New York: Doubleday.

Hutchings, Pat and Shulman, Lee S. (1999 September-October). The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations. New Developments. Change, 11 - 15.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1967). A Short History of Ethics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Quinton, Anthony. (1987). On the Ethics of Belief. In Graham Haydon (Ed.), Education and Values (pp. 37 - 55). London: London University Press.

Schon, Donald. (1983). The Reflective Practicioner. London: Temple Smith.

Shulman, Lee S. (1999 July-August ). Taking Learning Seriously. Change, 11 - 17.

Sockett, Hugh. (1993). The Moral Base for Teacher Professionalism. New York: Teachers College Press.

Stenhouse, Lawrence (1975). An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London: Heinemann.

Tom, Alan. (1983). Teaching as a Moral Craft. New York: Longman.

Hugh T. Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu) is Professor of Education at George Mason University (GMU) working in the Department of Public and International Affairs of the College of Arts and Sciences. Before coming to George Mason in 1987, he was Dean of Education at the University of East Anglia (UK). He was Director of the Institute of Continuing Education at the New University of Ulster based in Londonderry from 1975-1980. At GMU, he was founding director of the Center for Applied Research and Development (CARD) which was merged into the Institute for Educational Transformation (IET) which he also directed from 1991 - 1998. He resigned as Director in February 1998 and joined the Department of Public and International Affairs in July 1999. He has published numerous articles and four books, including The Moral Base for Teacher Professionalism, published by Teachers College Press in 1993. With Pamela LePage-Lees, he has recently completed a book entitled Educational Reconciliation: A New Vision for Educational Controversy. In 2000 he expects to complete The Epistemological Base for Teacher Professionalism which will include a chapter on the Scholarship of Teaching. He is joint editor of Transforming Teacher Education, a work in progress with contributions from faculty and teachers about the work of IET.