SOTL has an originary moment and a well-rehearsed history. It has been constructed as an approach to understanding teaching and learning with a focus on reflective practice to improve practice and student learning, but it excludes sociocultural influences. This paper argues that by concentrating on the ‘classroom’, and cognitive measures of success, SOTL conforms to a Western view of what is valuable in education. This instrumentalist perspective allows the process of SOTL to seem universally applicable. It is argued that this instrumentalist approach is a black-box perspective, analogous to the black box of the mind seen in behaviourism. Using Chakrabarty’s notion of “provincializing Europe”, some structural elements of SOTL history are analysed with an eye to provincialising SOTL. Following this, a personal teaching experience across two cultures is described to demonstrate the inability of SOTL to comprehend the behaviour of students across different cultures without providing more contextual information. Differences between East Asian and Western views of cognition are presented to suggest that cultural differences in conceptions of learning have a significant effect on what happens in the classroom. In conclusion, if SOTL is to be meaningful internationally, it needs both to embrace and be explicit about sociocultural influences and, crucially, it needs to be decentred from Western hegemonic practice. How to cite this article: LOOKER, Peter. Contextualising contexts – Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and cultural difference. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, v. 2, n. 1, p. 112-128, Apr. 2018. Available at: http://sotl-south-journal.net/?journal=sotls&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=32   This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) began in 2004, constituted by 67 scholars, mostly from english-speaking countries located in the West ern hemisphere. Since then, the world has become increasingly global and borderless, and students' movements across continents in search a good education have meant that today's classrooms are, in varying degrees, heterogeneous. yet SoTL discourse-the metaphors employed, the issues identified, and SoTL methods or approaches to classroom practice-have remained largely West ern in orientation. This paper describes three types of exclusions of asian participants and perspectives in mainstream discourse on the SoTL: geographical isolation, methodological solipsism, and ideological exclusion. Through a review of the dominant scholarship, we argue that an international association like ISSOTL must take active steps to consciously acknowledge the need for alternative voices that are located outside its immediate realm and that the differences in practice, participants, and the politics of culture in locations outside the West need to be taken into consideration, or ISSOTL will risk losing relevance for a greater part of world. Or to put it more positively, ISSOTL has much to gain by paying attention to and not denying the existence of such enriching, if less familiar, perspectives.

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Seventy per cent of participants rated the lecture on the highest scale for usefulness and interest. There was a significant post-lecture increase in clinical confidence in seizure identification (p < 0.0005). Open-ended questions showed that videos were most useful (81/149) and interesting (109/149), and that the presentation of the syndromal classification provided a useful approach (114/149). Focus group discussion, lecturer and peer observation cross-validated these findings and highlighted the importance of expert commentary to the videos and the clinical relevance of material.

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