From Inquiry to Identity: scholarship of teaching and learning in support of institutional vision

How do students with no previous experience of the concepts come to understand the value of social capital and the development of philanthropic thinking? What are the causes and potential mitigations of students' resistance to learning about gender issues? What happens when students learn to cultivate doubt about historical narrative through deconstructing school history textbooks? These are only three of the research questions that have been investigated by CEU/CRC Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Fellows, but they are representative of how individual faculty inquiry into student learning can have significant impact on teaching and learning within the individual classroom, at the institutional level, and beyond. This presentation will focus on the history and trajectory of the scholarship of teaching and learning, examples of how individual Scholars conduct inquiry projects, and how more collaborative and collective approaches to research can influence teaching and learning more broadly. The main emphasis will be on building a visionary institutional approach to incorporating evidence-based practices into the assessment culture of a university. Or to put it another way, if the 20th Century university was defined by its role in research and development, perhaps the 21st Century university should emphasize using the tools of scholarship to better understand and improve student learning.

Dr. Richard Gale is the Founding Director of the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University, Canada. Prior to that he was a Visiting Scholar at Canadian universities such as: Douglas College, Royal Roads University and Mount Royal College. He also served as Senior Scholar for The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Stanford CA) where he directed the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Higher Education Program. Richard has published and spoken widely on aesthetic literacy, integrative learning, and of course scholarship of teaching and learning. He has taught courses in theatre history and theories of drama, freshman composition and graduate-level playwriting, critical pedagogy and interdisciplinary arts. His degrees are in theatre history (PhD from the University of Minnesota), playwriting (MFA from the University of California San Diego), drama (MA from San Jose State University), and liberal studies (BA from San Jose State University).