Developing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at One University of Technology in South Africa

Abstract

Man’s quest to know, understand and navigate comfortably in an increasingly complex environment has become the single most visible driver of the 21st century academic revolution. The new quest for meaning-making and knowing how has become pivotal in the massification of Higher Education (HE) systems in South Africa, under the rubric of the public versus the private good. Similarly, notions of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) have impacted the conditions of the knowledge economy and the repositioning of HE within the global knowledge village, which sees neither boundaries nor limits. Premised on the belief that teaching is a scholarly activity to be valued as community property, one of the most important goals of SoTL is to foster significant, long-lasting learning for all students while simultaneously bringing recognition and reward to teachers who practise evidenced-based teaching. The philosophy behind SoTL acknowledges that students and universities of technology are best served when teachers practise scholarly teaching, and that no one is better situated to conduct the scholarship of teaching than those engaged with students on a regular basis. In this theoretical exploration, the authors examine how the scholarship of teaching and learning can be developed in one university of technology in South Africa, situating their work within studies that describe SoTL in the context of specific disciplines.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n1p51