New National Teaching Fellow, Professor Sin-Wang Chong, founding director of a SoTL research centre at St Andrews, argues that “cruise” is a more fitting analogy than “bridge” for the scholarship of teaching and learning.
A few years ago, as a response to the increased use of educational technology, including generative AI in teaching, learning and assessments, I was tasked with developing my institute’s scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) strategy and establishing a SoTL research centre (Centre for International, Language and Teacher Education Research, CILTER) so that judicious and evidence-informed could be made. As I reviewed the earlier versions of my thinking, I found myself falling into the rut of focusing on outputs and impact, as well as the linear trajectory from research questions to published papers as if it was the most effective and only path to engage with inquiry on teaching and learning. This changed when I spoke to my colleagues whose day job is largely focused on their teaching and who rarely, if ever, have had the opportunity to engage in pedagogical research given their work patterns.
SoTL is essentially asking questions about your own teaching, finding out answers through a systematic, collaborative and transparent process of collecting, analysing and interpreting data, and sharing these insights with others in ways that go beyond informal anecdote or experience. This may sound simple, but getting university support and recognition for such work is not always straightforward. Most often, this type of support takes the form of a ‘bridge’, which has a beginning, an end, and a particular set of resources (eg a research grant, a sabbatical, a doctorate) to get you from start to finish in a defined period of time. This ‘bridge’ model may be appropriate for researchers who are supported to engage in research as part of their contractual roles, but this rarely applies to my education-focused colleagues.
Why SoTL needs more than a ‘bridge’
The current research infrastructure in universities does not provide sufficient support for those whose teaching roles are their professional priority or who operate in different types of contractual arrangements such as fixed term, part-time or remote appointments, many of whom will lose access to libraries, research networks or institutional membership once their contract ends.
SoTL as a ‘bridge’ has little relevance to doctoral students who serve as teaching assistants, academic skills tutors, language instructors and those in teaching-intensive lectureship posts, nor does it benefit teaching staff who support non-traditional postgraduate students, such as part-time, online or mature age students and those completing alternative research degrees such as thesis by publication. All of these groups have legitimate scholarly interests related to teaching and learning, but how they seek to realise these are different from those who have protected time for engaging in scholarly inquiries, making the well-established research pathway less applicable to them.
What SoTL needs is more like a ‘cruise’
A ‘cruise’ has its destinations but those on board engage with one another in the journey. This is not dissimilar to the way that impactful and sustainable SoTL activities operate, beginning with people’s teaching questions and moving out from there in often co-creative ways to find answers. This shaped my own institute’s SoTL strategy and CILTER’s activities, which was informed by a wide range of conversations I had with those ‘in the field’ and led to my own rethinking of the balance between the process and outcomes of scholarly inquiries as well as collaboration as a way of managing time constraints.
I have been able to apply this ethos to three main areas of SoTL work in my career.
Ethics approvals are a major hurdle for many teacher-researchers who are used to operating within their university’s ethics frameworks, which are not always designed to facilitate practitioner research. In my role in the British Educational Research Association (BERA)’s 2024 ethical guidelines’ working group, I was able to contribute, through an international desk-based review of ethical guidelines for the social sciences, to the proposal of revisions for BERA’s guidelines to take into consideration the needs to recognise practitioners as an integral part of the educational research community.
Access to evidence is another key impetus for me to establish TESOLgraphics (now with Masatoshi Sato as co-director), an international evidence intermediary for language instructors. This website provides visual summaries of research papers that focus on answering one question: how can language teachers, including those teaching in universities, transform research insights into practical actions for their teaching? Other resources hosted on TESOLgraphics include a podcast, social media activities on X and more recently Instagram; we have recently started developing research-informed teaching materials and resources, which will be available on our website. This platform aims to facilitate greater use of research evidence in contexts where there is a barrier to accessing high-quality pedagogical research, such as those teaching and residing in low- and middle-income countries.
Finally, my own approach to supporting education-focused staff training postgraduate researchers also reflects this “SoTL cruise” philosophy. In national leadership posts, I have developed resources about doctoral education for part-time, online and mature students, as well as those completing alternative research degrees, such as thesis by publication. These students cannot necessarily start and finish at the same time and in the way that their full-time peers do, and so teaching staff need to provide more personalised and tailored support. Resources I have created include a Substack page supporting doctoral students to navigate the journal peer review process, a website on thesis by publication (with Shannon Mason and Margaret Merga), and a book (with Neil Johnson) on the same topic.
Collaboration
Everyone knows that the best way to enjoy a cruise is not to do it alone but to share it with others. The same goes for SoTL. Wherever possible, we need to think of interdisciplinary and interprofessional opportunities for SoTL. This includes working across our own institutions, with colleagues and students in other universities, and in partnerships with governments, industries, academic publishers and community groups.
In the UK, there are some positive developments in cruise-like SoTL initiatives like the UK SoTL Alliance. This collaborative, sector-wide approach to SoTL enables education-focused academics researchers to access and contribute to the wider research and scholarly ecosystem.
I am thankful to the University of St Andrews, in particular my colleagues at the International Education and Lifelong Learning Institute, for supporting my rather unconventional vision for a new research centre of SoTL and a research strategy for a primarily education-focused unit at the university.
If you are planning to build your SoTL “cruise” or have built one, I am interested in hearing more from you.
Sin-Wang Chong is Founding Director of CILTER at the University of St Andrews and Visiting Professor in Education at King’s College London. His interest in metascience, or the study of how research is produced and used, has informed his work on evidence synthesis, research ethics, academic publishing and evidence mobilisation.
