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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

ISU's Involvement in the CASTL Campus Program
Barriers to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Barriers to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University include:

  1. Lack of sufficient publication outlets.
  2. SoTL in teaching refereed publications would not count at all or be devalued compared to disciplinary research in evaluation processes. It might be more valued if connected to the discipline.
  3. The Annual Salary, Promotion, and Tenure (ASPT) system is a barrier. "SoTL is nice, but it won’t get you anything." "Some colleagues don’t consider pedagogical research to be as rigorous as disciplinary research." "If you read the ASPT document, it says balance of teaching and research is valued, but it’s not." "It’s because the audience is teaching practitioners, not other researchers." It could depend on the committee and the department and college.
  4. Good teaching is assumed, but not sufficiently rewarded. People would do more SoTL if it were adequately rewarded. Faculty at ISU care about teaching.
  5. Teaching performance at Illinois State needs to be evaluated in more varied and better ways.
  6. The University Research Grant program, perhaps with the exception of College of Education, does not value proposals related to pedagogy.
  7. Time is a huge barrier. "Who has time when just teaching, putting out fires, doing research, and service are key?" "SoTL can only be done with release time/reduced teaching loads. We try to be like big research universities, but we aren’t given reduced teaching loads and other help." "We are in competition with land grant universities." "We have a split identity—we want to be known for teaching and research."
  8. The values of the academic community are on research. The thought is that "institutions get prestige from research, not from teaching."
  9. "There needs to be a top down commitment, like there has been with diversity." Administration should provide funding,then people will do SoTL.
  10. "Faculty must do SoTL because they want to do it. There are few rewards."
  11. "I don’t have time to reflect on teaching. I have to financially support myself for three months out of the year by working outside of the university."