SoTL

The Hostos CTL Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) group arose from a conversation among four faculty members from different departments who were interested in documenting their approach to teaching through an inquiry lens. This diversity resides at the core of the group. The different professional and teaching identities, dissimilar pedagogical backgrounds, and varied expectations regarding publishing came together to build an understanding on teaching strategies, value the process of documenting results, and embrace qualitative and quantitative methods and different ways to share our teaching stories.

Co-Chairs

Prof. Alisa Roost from Humanities, Prof. Jacqueline DiSanto from Education, Prof. Antonios Varelas from Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Prof. Nelson Nunez Rodriguez from Natural Sciences started this inquiry group that has evolved into a systematic series of workshops accompanying faculty members on their teaching journey while fostering a culture of inquiry, documentation, and publishing results. Several workshops have been offered over the last three years sharing different teaching stories, moving faculty perspectives from doubts, aspirations, and expectations to purpose and intentionality, and formulating a research question. Subsequently, workshops about methodology, project design, and creating research questions have also been offered.

All of these have uncovered faculty myriad of pedagogies and perspectives while creating an enriching community of practice where different members share expertise while learning new strategies. The group members have accompanied faculty members in their class intervention-documentation process and have also suggested ways to publish results. Overall, this community of practice is also a venue to bring together faculty passion for teaching with the administration’s expectations for documenting learning-process effectiveness. Moving forward, crossing this border appears as the group’s next frontier. The assessment is an intrinsic part of any research approach. Thus, the SoTL movement is a natural venue to explore meaningful assessment strategies created and valued by faculty members.

SoTL Resources at other Universities

• Buffalo State College
• Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS)
• DePaul University
• Indiana University-Purdue University-Fort Wayne
• Indiana University and SoTL
• IS-SoTL (The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning)
• Programs and information on SoTL from the Carnegie Foundation
• Purdue University
• Southeast Missouri State University
• St. Olaf College
• Stockton University
• University of Central Florida
• University of Georgia
• University of Minnesota
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte
• University of Notre Dame
• University of Washington
• University of West Florida
• University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
• University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
• Vanderbilt University
• Western Carolina University
• Resource Human Subjects