SoTL Research Fellow

During this week’s Course Design Studio focused on new instructors of record we encountered rich dialogue about navigating uncertainty and thought it fitting to share this 2017 study by Marquis et. al. entitled SoTL Research Fellows: Collaborative Pathfinding through Uncertain Terrain. The authors present an autoethnographic view of the sometimes uneasy relationship between SoTL and traditional scholarship.

The study examines the formation scholars in a SoTL research fellowship at a research-intensive institution. Findings from surveys and focus groups with the fellows reveal five main themes: identity, community, access, transfer, and structural-institutional features bearing on participants’ experiences. Additional key findings were the need for departmental support and for strategic interventions along the path from novice to practitioner identity. The analysis of this research fellows model highlighted the need to institutionalize the value of teaching and learning while simultaneously building scholarly communities.

Marquis, E., Holmes, T., Apostolou, K., Centea, D., Cockcroft, R., Knorr, K., ... & Karamanis, T. (2017). SoTL Research Fellows: Collaborative Pathfinding through Uncertain Terrain. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 8(3), 9.