Barbara Cambridge's Keynote Summary
Thanks to Donna Duffy for providing the following summary of Barbara Cambridge's Keynote address at the co-sponsored Carnegie COPPER Cluster and New England Faculty Development Consortium summer SoTL conference, June 2, 2006.
We’re Teaching But are Students Learning?
A Colloquium on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Main Points from Keynote by Barbara Cambridge
President, International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:
Cambridge invited conferees to consider four ways in which the scholarship of teaching and learning can affect the common good.
• Engaging students at any academic level in a changing society
• Enriching our disciplines by expanding the questions we ask
• Defining and accounting for higher education through increased knowledge about student learning
• Anticipating positively future non-human partners in knowledge making
Student engagement in a changing society
Student engagement has been positively linked to student learning; therefore, creating conditions that draw students into their own learning is essential. Two current conditions that affect engagement are the No Child Left Behind Act and increasing numbers of English Language Learners. With effects of NCLB including overuse of a single assessment instrument, the driving out of subjects other than reading and mathematics, and the narrowing of teacher choice, innovative practices and structures are necessary. The Internationals High Schools in NYC offer innovative structures and practices to counter NCLB and to affirm ELL students. The high schools include two-year institutes, community service requirements, and teaching of language and content by all teachers. Now school and college scholars need to study how the structural changes and novel practices affect learning outcomes.
Through research on its electronic portfolio project with incoming students, LaGuardia Community College has realized greater retention and more satisfaction among its first-year students who come from the largest number of ethnic backgrounds at any institution in the United States. In their eportfolios these students affirm their home cultures and their new college culture. Further scholarly work will delve into particular pedagogical and assessment practices that support this diverse academic community, affirming the wide variety of cultural roles they inhabit and helping them understand the influence of those roles on their learning.
Enrichment of disciplines through expanding ranges of questions asked
Asking questions about the how as well as the what of learning in a discipline enriches the knowledge base of the discipline. Curt Bennett and Jacqueline Dewar’s work in mathematics demonstrates the value of asking new questions about how students understand a good mathematical problem. Using multiple inquiry methods and a “proof-aloud” protocol for probing students’ thinking, Bennett and Dewar generated a mathematical knowledge expertise grid to trace developmentally learning in mathematics.
In addition to new questions about novice and developmental learning in a discipline, asking unexpected questions but using more traditional disciplinary-based methods to answer the questions also enriches disciplines. The book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything challenges individuals to ask unusual questions in order to understand the world in new ways. Questions that complicate our disciplines and demand alternative lenses enrich and expand our disciplines in a healthy way.
Accountability in higher education through increased knowledge about student learning
Defining and describing student learning outcomes for prospective students and their families, for legislators, for accreditors, and for other stakeholders of higher education benefits all these education stakeholders. The call for data is reasonable because higher education needs to be more transparent about its outcomes to counter calls like those of some Spelling Commission members for a single national test for college graduation.
Because not all student learning can be represented by quantitative data, however, we need to think of ways for quantitative and qualitative data to interact. An example of this possibility can be seen at Bowling Green University, whose summer 2005 study, controlled for background factors, indicated that students who used eportfolios had significantly higher grade point averages, credit hours earned, and retention rates than a matched set of students without electronic portfolios. Using results of research about reflection by campuses in the National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, faculty at Bowling Green can now do scholarly work on the ways in which increased experience with reflection can account for increased engagement and learning presumably yielding higher grades. Putting such information in forms understandable to various audiences unites quantitative data and results of the scholarship of teaching and learning in productive ways.
Anticipation of non-human partners in knowledge making
Joel Garreau’s book Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds. Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human argues that by 2029 “Of the total computing power of the human race—all human brains plus all the technology that the species has created—more than 99 percent will be nonhuman.” Although we will be able to buy long-term memory and reasoning, “learning still requires time-consuming human experience and study. This is how humans spend most of their day. . . The largest profession is education” (102).
In Garreau’s scenarios about the future, human beings are still very central in the world. But, they are central because they can learn and can generate knowledge. In other words, knowing how human beings learn becomes even more central than it is today. Knowing how human beings learn in all realms of their existence is what keeps the human race going. Doing the scholarship of teaching and learning, then, is foundational to human’s very existence.
We want to do scholarship of teaching and learning that supports student learning in our classrooms and on our campuses now, but we also need to consider the conditions of our society now and in the future that mandate a broader view, a view that situates the scholarship of teaching and learning as central to addressing societal problems and to assuring a future that nourishes human being, their non-human partners, and the society of which they all will be a part.