Jason’s March 30th Reading log

Posted by on April 4, 2010 
Filed under Reading logs

For this week we were responsible for reading one chapter from both Mckinney and Cross.  We also read the article that I chose to present on, which was titled “overcoming doom and gloom”.

Chapter eight in the McKinney book related very well to the article that I chose.  I chose the article because I felt that it was very discipline specific, however it does not fully qualify as SoTL.  The Mckinney chapter was striving to answer the questions: How does SToL differ between disciplines (and institutions) in its methodology and status?

There are discipline specific characteristics to SoTL, for both practical reasons and for historical reasons.  While I think SoTL should be easily integrated into sociology, after all teachers of sociology are trained in social scientific research methods, classroom research by sociologists can run into similar barriers as other disciplines (low status, lack of reward, etc.).  Besides those cross discipline barriers, I could see sociology running into unique discipline specific barriers.  For example, historically sociology has struggled to legitimize itself as a science (on par with say psychology).  I could see many sociologist being reluctant to join an emerging form of scholarship that is running into the same stigma.

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