Celeste Sharpe, Sarah Calhoun, Melissa Eblen-Zayas, Iris Jastram, Kristin Partlo, Janet Russell
Learning often blurs curricular and co-curricular lines, and scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) needs to encompass learning in all the ways that it happens and in all places that it happens. At the same time, what constitutes teaching practice has increasingly expanded beyond the sole instructor model (Iannuzzi, 2007; Bernstein and Greenhoot, 2014). In our small liberal arts college context, groups like the learning and teaching center (LTC), academic technology (AT), and reference and instruction librarians (R&I) do reflective practice and assessment during, around, and in-between courses.
This poster will present three examples of the overlapping SoTL initiatives conducted, and the ways in which these projects are surfacing gaps and providing critical foundation for a more concerted, campus-wide effort. Drawing on the literature on connected learning and high-impact practices (Watson et al, 2016), we argue for an expanded understanding of SoTL that recognizes how teaching practices occur throughout the formal and informal curriculum. The LTC has focused on the question of supporting reflective teaching, with a range of programming spanning the curriculum. Together, the LTC and AT have explored high-impact practices, particularly digital portfolios as primary instruments, for increasing both reflective faculty teaching and student learning. The second example is the development of internship positions supervised by AT and R&I that draw on student learning in the formal curriculum and apply it in the areas of digital scholarship and librarianship. The third example is the long-term study of information literacy. For ten years, R&I have developed and used a rubric to measure evidence of information literacy in sophomore student writing (Hoseth, 2009; Jastram, Leebaw, and Tompkins, 2014; Leebaw, Partlo, and Tompkins, 2013) and have used both the data and the norming and reading experiences to reflect on R&I teaching (in classrooms, consultations, and online research guides) and inform understandings of where students succeed and struggle.
Together, our experiences and data suggest a growing need to shift toward a more integrated model of SoTL that accounts for our students’ connected learning experiences. Our institutional context as a small liberal arts college has allowed us to map many of the frameworks and practices that connect and expand beyond individual courses (reflective teaching and learning, high-impact practices in the co-curriculum, information literacy), and to begin work toward a sustainable and shared understanding of curricular and co-curricular teaching and learning.
