The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is scholarly work that is focused on the practice of teaching. It is practiced by academics in all disciplines, although the research strategies are often rooted in the social sciences and education.

The IU South Bend campus has a strong tradition of interest in SoTL. Soon after Boyer published Scholarship Reconsidered in 1990, a group of faculty and administrators formed a reading group to discuss its merits and implications. The Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (JoSoTL) was founded by three IU South Bend professors in 2000 and was one of the first open-access fully online academic journals. The first annual Midwest SoTL conference was held on our campus in 2000, after UCET staff organized a consortium of local institutions of higher ed. This conference is held in early April each year.

Because SoTL lies at the intersection of teaching and research, it is uniquely suited to a campus such as IU South Bend with a strong tradition of both teaching and research. On our campus, faculty have successfully used SoTL work to support either teaching excellence and research excellence.

UCET offers a SoTL Institute each fall. Participants are supported as they work plan and complete a SoTL project in the fall and submit a proposal for the Midwest SoTL Conference.

There are several guides to conducting SoTL research. One of the most useful is Bishop-Clark & Dietz-Uhler (2012) Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Its workbook format is particularly helpful if you are working on your first project.

The following pages in this module are adapted from the UCET SoTL Institute. However there are a number of excellent websites available with information. Here are a few: