The Most Beautiful Theories

Abstract

Two centuries of scholarly practices have transformed the way research is done. The modern research group, as a relatively recent advance, provides faculty advisors and students with a mutually beneficial relationship, namely, taking on large and complex scientific problems in exchange for scholarly professional development. An argument for understanding the scholarship of teaching and learning is made by defining, and then broadening, a basis set of four characteristics of scholarship in research.

Advancing STEM teaching and learning with research teams

“…By studying and describing the characteristics of scholarship that we understand so well from research, we can then quite literally read how the tenets of scholarship suggest what is needed to advance teaching and learning. In the following statements, which were originally a set of four characteristics of scholarship in research (Coppola, 2007), I have used the "Bass substitution strategy" to generate statements for the characteristics of scholarship in teaching and learning:…”

“…In my department, building teaching groups started by following the Bass substitution strategy: the things we do to promote professional readiness for research already exist (Coppola and Roush, 2004;Coppola, 2007). Over the past ten years, if the question was, "How do we handle this for doing teaching projects?"…”

Creative Chemistry Teaching

“…Topics in chemistry education might include understanding how students learn chemistry, how best to teach chemistry and how to improve learning outcomes by changing teaching methods and appropriate training of chemistry instructors, within many modes, including classroom lecture, demonstrations and laboratory activities (Wiki). Dr. Robert L. Lichter, then-Executive Director of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, speaking in a plenary session at the 16th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (recent BCCE meetings) 1,2 , posed the question "why do terms like 'chemical educator' even exists in higher education, when there is a perfectly respectable term for this activity, namely, 'chemistry professor.' One criticism of this view is that few professors bring any formal preparation in or background about education to their jobs and so lack any professional perspective on the teaching and learning enterprise, particularly discoveries made about effective teaching and how students learn.…”

“…(Wiki). Finally, there is an emergent perspective called The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) 2 . Although there is debate on how to best define SoTL, one of the primary practices is for mainstream faculty members (organic, inorganic, biochemistry, etc.)…”

Uncovering Our Feminist Pedagogy: A co/autoethnography

“…Part of demonstrating our integrity is the extent to which we can be transparent. In discussing their self-study methods, Lunenberg, Zwart, and Korthagen (2010) draw on Coppola's (2007) four characteristics of scholarship, one of which is that scholars make their work transparent and in doing so become trustworthy. In our case, conducting a co/autoethnography with its conscious working and reworking of memory and our professional knowledge into our reflections on our current practice, we use all of these criteria as we collectively write our experience.…”