Writing for Publication
WHY SHOULD I WRITE ABOUT MY TEACHING? ON SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
Anker Helms Jorgensen
IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
There is currently a strong push in academia to improve the quality of teaching and learning and to put teaching and research on a par. One relevant approach towards this end is the paradigm Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). A key feature of SOTL is to apply research approaches, methods, and tools to teaching in order to enhance the quality of teaching and learning. More specificly, Trigwell and Prosser's (2000) interpretation of SOTL reads: know the literature, experiment with teaching, reflect on teaching, and publish the results. Hence academic writing is key in SOTL. The paper draws on three cases from my teaching: the effect of learning students' names (Jorgensen, 2014), exposing students early on to a peerreviewed paper (Jorgensen, 2011), and two metaphors on ambitions in theses (Jorgensen 2007). The paper addresses challenges and benefits in writing about experiences, approaches, and results in teaching, among these genre conventions, deciding what's new, where to publish, and doing research & development in one's own work as a kind of action research. The paper rests on the paper by Rienecker and Jorgensen (in press).
References
Jorgensen, A. H. (2014) Learning Students' Names: Doers it Matter? Proc. ICERI: International Conference on Education, Research and Innovation, Sevilla, Spain, November 1719, 2014, pp. 3366 3372.
Rienecker, L. and Jorgensen, A.H. (in press): Why should I write about my teaching? On Scholarship of Teaching and Learning [In Danish]. In: Rienecker, L. and Jorgensen, P.S.: University Pedagogy in Practice. Copenhagen: Samfundsliteratur.
Trigwell, K., Martin, E., Benjamin, J. and Prosser, M. (2000): Scholarship of Teaching: a model. Higher Education Research & Development, 19 (2), 155168.