MRU Institute for SoTL

The 7th annual SoTL Commons Conference submission period is open

The submission period for the 7th annual SoTL Commons Conference is open and will endDecember 1, 2013. Information on submitting proposals and registration is available at http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sotlcommons

All proposals will go through a blind, peer-review process by the SoTL Commons Review Board consisting of faculty located at various colleges and universities around the world who are knowledgeable about the scholarship of teaching and learning.

The 7th annual SoTL Commons Conference will be held March 26-28, 2014 in Savannah, Georgia (USA).  The conference brings together people engaging in SoTL and anyone wanting to improve student learning outcomes in higher education today. The conference epitomizes that college teaching is intellectual work that is enhanced both by disciplinary scholarship and the scholarship on teaching the disciplines.

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CoP on advancing your SoTL practice – next meeting Nov 1

A group of faculty, who have either been through the Nexen Scholars program or have conducted a SoTL project, are working as a Community of Practice this year to support ourselves in furthering our SoTL work.  For those who are interested but can’t make our meetings, we’ll post brief summaries here.

As a group, we decided that one of our goals was to explore different methodologies in order to expand our perspectives on what kinds of research questions can be asked in SoTL.  At our second meeting on Oct 18, Michelle gave us a nice “big picture” summary of qualitative research which included examples, interests, disciplines, and common terms and features.  I particularly enjoyed how she summed up her presentation as follows:

Empirical Qualitative – the truth is out there
Naturalistic Descriptive – rich description, researcher needs to be keenly observant
Interpretive the context is the story
Critical Theory – interested in power, emancipatory goals
Post-modern, Post-Structuralist – the jazz of qualitative research

Thanks Michelle!

We had such a great discussion that we didn’t quite get to discussing data analysis yet, so to get ready for our next meeting, Michelle has suggested this reading:

Title:  Analyzing Qualitative Data
Author(s):  Margaret D. LeCompte
Source:  Theory into Practice, Vol. 39, No. 3, Getting Good Qualitative Data to Improve Educational Practice  (Summer, 2000), pp. 146-154
Publisher(s): Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/1477546

See you next week, Friday Nov 1, at 2:00 in T195.

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do you know about predatory journals?

Karen and I have both recently received invitations to submit/review for what we think are likely “predatory journals” (actually, I’m sure mine was!)

When you are looking for a journal to publish in, please be careful and be aware that there are many bogus journals out there.  Be sure to check out a journal that you are not familiar with, as to the quality of papers they have published.  Other clues include promises of extremely fast reviews, no vetting of reviewer qualifications, and the same editorial board for all journals the publisher publishes.  Fortunately, someone has already done much of this work for you.  Beall’s list is a comprehensive and evolving (and long!!) list of suspicious publishers, which will be useful for a first step in checking out a journal:

http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

As an example, I received an invitation from Higher Education Studies, published by the Canadian Center of Science and Education which is on Beall’s list.  I was suspicous before I even checked the list though, because the invitation from the editorial assistant said that after reading one paper of mine, she could “tell from [your] work that [you] are an expert in the field of education”.

Definitely suspicious!

** Update: Beall’s list has been criticized by some for being biased against Open Access.  Perhaps the main message should be – be aware!! For more info see Margy’s more recent post here: http://blogs.mtroyal.ca/isotl/2014/03/13/update-on-predatory-journals/

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Reading Through Connections: A phenomenographic study of student connections to scholarly text.

Thanks to Margy for sharing information about her presentation at the ISSoTL 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC earlier this month.  Margy received a Going Public Award for presenting this work:

The presentation focused on findings of the project which illuminated how students were reading a text while making connections.

Presentation: http://www2.mtroyal.ca/~mmacmillan/conf/ISSOTLreadingconnections.pptx

Handout: http://www2.mtroyal.ca/~mmacmillan/conf/issotl13.docx

Margy’s summary:

The presentation outlined a research project that sought to understand how students could connect their prior knowledge/experience to reading an academic article in their field. As making connections while reading is a central part of academic practice which is often unseen, and unknown to students, but which faculty expect them to do as part of their academic reading, I wanted to know what kinds of connections students could make to an academic text. Student responses to an in-class activity were analyzed using a phenomenographic approach.

While I found that students could and did make connections to both academic and personal knowledge, a more significant finding was that the connections revealed how students were reading the text and their varying focus between words and meaning. Some connections revealed a surface reading of the text while other demonstrated a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the words. These deeper connections provided evidence of deeper reading and understanding through the creation of analogies, through integration with professional practice and through critique of the article as an artifact of communication.

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CoP on advancing your SoTL practice

A group of faculty, who have either been through the Nexen Scholars program or have conducted a SoTL project, are developing a Community of Practice to support themselves in furthering their SoTL work.  For those who are interested but can’t make our meetings, we’ll post brief summaries here.

At our first meeting last month, 4 main themes emerged from our discussion about what kinds of support everyone was looking for:

  • sharing expertise on conducting collaborative projects
  • exploring methodologies
  • strategizing personal trajectories and developing research programs
  • being a sounding board for members to discuss their current projects

We decided our next meeting would begin with a brief survey (courtesy of Michelle Yeo) of 4 qualitative research paradigms: “empirical” qualitative, interpretive, critical and postmodern.  We thought a discussion of these paradigms might help to broaden our perspectives of what kinds of research questions can be asked in SoTL.  We’ll also be discussing the following article:

Kanuka, H. (2011). Keeping the Scholarship in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 5(1).
http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/int_jtl/252/

Looking forward to seeing where this discussion takes us!

Reminder: our next meeting is Friday Oct 18 at 2:00.

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The SoTL Exchange presentation series

The Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is happy to announce a new presentation series, the SoTL Exchange, which will host presentations on a variety of topics intended to facilitate SoTL at MRU.  The first presentation of the year will survey the current developments and debates in the wider SoTL community, and invite discussion and feedback about a new “definition” of SoTL for MRU and new Institute initiatives.

SoTL at MRU – What’s next?
Oct 23, 12:0-1:00 in Y324

Both new and experienced faculty interested in engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning are invited to attend.  In particular, faculty intending to apply for the 2014 Nexen Scholar’s Program will find the October and November presentations useful.
http://blogs.mtroyal.ca/isotl/2013/09/20/call-for-applications-for-the-2014-nexen-scholars-program-deadline-dec-1/

SoTLExchange

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another good year for MRU at the ISSoTL conference!

Congratulations to the all the faculty (and former faculty!) who presented last week at the ISSoTL 2013 conference:

Assessment Practices in Higher Education, Michelle Yeo & Jennifer Boman

Critical Reading in General Education, Miriam Carey, Karen Manarin, Melanie Rathburn, & Glen Ryland

Impacts of Group Dynamics on the Effectiveness of Term Project in Helping Students to Connect Theory with Practice, Israel Dunmade

Who Speaks for SoTL?, Kelly Hewson & Lee Easton (Sheridan College)

From Classroom to Lobby? A Roundtable on Advocacy by ISSoTL, Kelly Hewson, Diana Gregory (Kennesaw State University), Katarina Martensson (Lund University), Jennifer Meta Robinson (Indiana University)

Reading Through Connections: A Phenomenographic Study of Student Connections to Scholarly Text, Margy MacMillan

Reaching out to the Wider (Disciplinary) Audience, Pat Michaelson (University of Texas – Dallas), Mary Huber (Carnegie Foundation), Nancy Chick (Vanderbilt University), Karen Manarin, Christina Hendricks (UBC)

Troublesome and Transformative Transitions: On the Yellow Brick Road to SoTL Identity, Nicola Simmons (Brock University), Earle Abrahamson (University of East London), Jessica Deshler (West Virginia University), Barbara Kensington-Miller (University of Auckland), Karen Manarin, Sue Moron-Garcia (University of Birmingham), Carolyn Oliver (University of British Columbia), Joanna Renc-Roe (Central European University)

Original Undergraduate Research & the English Major: An Epistemological Transition? Karen Manarin

Transitioning into SoTL: Decoding SoTL while Identifying Bottlenecks and Threshold Concepts, Niamh Kelly (UBC), Janice Miller-Young, Dik Harris (McGill), Gary Poole (UBC), Bettie Higgs (University College Cork)

Developing Critical Skills in General Education: Critical Writing, Mathematical Literacy, and Integrative Learning, John Draeger (Buffalo State College), Susan McMillen (Buffalo State College), Melanie Rathburn, Glen Ryland

The Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University, Jim Zimmer & Janice Miller-Young

 

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