Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Homepage  

For a good overview, introduction, and links to understanding the scholarship of teaching and learning:

Examples of Teaching Commons at other institutions

What does it mean at Berea and beyond to build a "Teaching Commons"?

In a 1993 piece in Change Magazine, Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Stanford professor emeritus of Educational Psychology, advocated passionately for the need to create a context in the academy that fosters productive and open dialogue about teaching and learning.   While the work of disciplinary scholarship is made public as a matter of course, teaching, by contrast, often happens in private, behind closed doors, remaining too often unshared.  Shulman termed this state of affairs “pedagogical solitude” and has advocated throughout his career for a more productive and less lonely open exchange and study.  Taking up Shulman’s cause, Pat Hutchings and Mary Taylor Huber (2005) call for the building of a “teaching commons” a conceptual community space devoted to inquiry and innovation through teachers' active engagement with the scholarship of teaching and learning. 

 At Berea and beyond, the notion of the “Teaching Commons” has emerged from over two decades of work that seeks to make understanding our teaching and learning as worthy of thoughtful scholarly inquiry and vigorous discussion and public exchange as any other serious disciplinary or interdisciplinary topic.  For a teaching-focused institution, building a teaching commons makes tremendous sense.  Ideally, this space provides easy access to helpful resources, open exchange and collaboration around our teaching practices as well as evidence about student learning, a place that is both virtual and part of our daily lived practice as educators. 

This Teaching Commons belongs to all of us as a community of educators.  Its success and growth will depend not only on our willingness to engage with it but also on our collaborative efforts to build and tend a virtual as well as a physical, embodied educational public arena that invites genuine inquiry and dialogue about teaching and learning.