Jason’s Reading Log 3/23

Posted by on March 22, 2010 
Filed under Reading logs

This week’s reading was very interesting to me because of it’s focus on the community college system.   I have always thought that the community college structure has a distinct advantage over the university system in it’s ability to produce SoTL research.  The articles this week discussed this idea in detail.

The first article that I read was How community colleges understand the scholarship of teaching and learning. I think  a very concise statement summing up the community college culture is:  Community colleges have an advantage because of their “teaching focus” however community colleges are also disadvantaged by their lack of a “learning focus”.  By this I mean that community colleges are able to avoid the “publish or parish” issue and focus on teaching as there professor’s primary duty.  This does give them an edge over many university professors that are holden to the traditional research responsibilities.  However, community college’s have done little in terms of understanding learning.

So while the community college’s “non publishing” advantage is real, that same lack of focus on research has lead to a culture of trail and error and seasoned teacher advice as the primary forms of understanding successful teaching.  The community college system has also followed the common (and problematic) practice of using teacher evaluations as a substitute for more legitamite measures of learning outcomes.  In short, the distance from a research requirement has both advantaged and a disadvantaged the community college system in it’s ability to engage in SoTL research.

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