• Introduction
• Taking Learning Seriously
• The Scholarship of Teaching
• The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching
• The Language of Teaching
• Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals
• The Character of Knowledge
• Expectation and Assessment
• The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching
• The Value of Moral Language
• A Common Public Language
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

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.

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