Scholarly Teaching: Suggestions for a Road More Traveled

Excerpt: Most academic disciplines throughout the world have been in the higher education curriculum for hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years. Teaching itself has certainly been around as long as the earliest of any given discipline. After all, without teaching no profession is possible. How else would a core set of knowledge be taught to those interested in the theoretical constructs, conceptual frameworks, and the successes/failures of those who have worked previously in the discipline? Unfortunately, the concept of consistently teaching from a base of scholarly activity is relatively new. What happens, then, when the very concept of how to teach disciplinary knowledge at the university level is questioned for the lack of having a scholarly basis? There is certainly a professional discipline of “Education,” but much of that literature is not consulted by those teaching at the university level, perhaps based on an assumption that the bulk of the scholarly work is predominantly on instruction at the primary grades. The issue I raise here is how are we to convince faculty members, both new and experienced, that our work as higher education educators within the framework of teaching should be based solidly on a professional body of scholarly work. It would seem to me imperative that all faculty members should anchor every instructional and curricular aspects of their work on some form of scholarship