The Carnegie Teaching Academy Campus Program

What is the Carnegie Campus Program?

The Carnegie Campus Program is an effort headed up by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in collaboration with the American Association for Higher Education. The information contained in this section is taken from the web sites of both the Carnegie Foundation and the American Association of Higher Education .

The Carnegie Foundation

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905, and chartered in 1906 by an Act of Congress, is an independent national and international policy and research center, dedicated to strengthening schools and colleges in America and beyond. The mission of the Foundation (as expressed in the founding charter) is ". . . to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold and dignify the profession of teaching. . . " Carnegie founders created an institution dedicated, not only to the advancement of teaching in general, but to the "profession of teaching" in particular. The Foundation's main activities of research and writing have resulted in published reports on every level of education. Historically, Carnegie's focus has been on education in the United States, with an emphasis on higher education, but in recent years they have broadened that scope to include an interest in elementary and secondary education. For more information, please visit the Carnegie Foundation.

The Foundation currently has several on-going projects which include the Carnegie Classification, the Professor-of-the-Year awards, the faculty surveys, the Carnegie Teaching Academy, and a set of activities that surround the themes of Scholarship Reconsidered and the recently-published Scholarship Assessed.

The Carnegie Teaching Academy

One Carnegie project, the Teaching Academy Campus Program, focuses on the "Scholarship of Teaching," which deals with the continuing goal of defining, exemplifying, analyzing, celebrating and disseminating the profession of teaching as an act of scholarship. The goal is to expand the definition of profession so it includes teaching as scholarship at its heart. The Academy has already devoted effort to investigating three other topic areas: The scholarship of discovery (research and performance that add to a knowledge base and the intellectual climate of a campus); the scholarship of integration (drawing together and interpreting diverse kinds of knowledge); and the scholarship of application (applying knowledge to practical problems). The Teaching Academy is spearheaded by the American Association for Higher Education for the Carnegie Foundation.

The premise of the Campus Program is that many campuses have been intrigued by new ideas about teaching as scholarly work and by new practices that enact those ideas, including ongoing substantive conversations about teaching and learning, faculty investigations of their teaching practices, new ways of assessing the effects of powerful pedagogies, new forms for documenting teaching, and new rubrics and tools for gathering and reviewing evidence about teaching. To help such campuses build on and implement these ideas and practices is the aim of the Campus Program.

The Campus Program

The campus program to examine the "Scholarship of Teaching" involves three parts. Specifically, the creators of the Campus Program envision that all campuses would profit from a level of activity aimed at considering what the "scholarship of teaching" means for them and the conditions that work for or against enactment of that definition.

This kind of stocktaking, Part One of the Campus Conversations process, involves groups of campus stakeholders in discussing a draft definition of the "scholarship of teaching" and the implications of the definition for that campus. You have agreed to participate in Part One, which involves participating in a discussion on different approaches to and ways of enacting the idea of teaching as scholarly work. Participation in Part One is the first step toward fostering a campus "discourse community" in which faculty, staff, and administrators can talk and work together as reflective educators.

Part Two of the process is studying and acting on one issue having to do with the scholarship of teaching that was identified during the initial stocktaking. Selected campuses will be invited to participate in Part Three, which involves formal affiliation with the Carnegie Teaching Academy and subsequent eligibility for grants, consultancies, and national recognition.

The Scholarship of Teaching

Certain elements of the scholarship of teaching are elusive as some faculty regard teaching as the presentation of material for student consumption, with students responsible for their own learning. Other faculty are willing to learn new pedagogical strategies, but teaching for them is functional, not intellectual work. Still other faculty care deeply about student learning but face the reality of professional survival that demands attention to their research.

The Academy offers the following draft definition for the "scholarship of teaching:"

The scholarship of teaching is problem posting about an issue of teaching or learning study of the problem through methods appropriate to disciplinary epistemologies application of results to practice communication of results self-reflection, and peer review

Our job is to adapt this definition to fits our campus community.

Starting the Conversation at UM

The Carnegie Teaching Academy's draft definition of the "scholarship of teaching" was our starting point for a campus conversation of ways that the definition is enacted on our campus, conditions here that support the scholarship of teaching, and conditions that inhibit it.

Part I of the Conversation is being carried out in three phases.

Phase One

Faculty, staff, administrators, and students were invited from across campus to take part in small group discussions of the relevant questions. Eight two-hour sessions were held, with five to fifteen participants at a time using GroupSystems group conferencing software. Although we could accommodate as many as thirty at a time, given our experiences with focus groups and other groups, we felt the sessions would work better with the smaller numbers. The GroupSystems dialogues worked very well. This software allows the participants to respond simultaneously and anonymously to the questions posed. The participants can submit their own comments and read and respond to the comments of others, if they wish. They can also respond to one question, move on to the next, and return to a previous question, if they wish. The software then generates a complete transcript for each group discussion.

We asked the following questions:

1. How would you define excellence in teaching?
2. How would you define the scholarship of teaching?
3. What would you include in a definition of the "scholarship of teaching" for UM?
4. What lines of work (e.g., administration, support staff, etc.) At UM contribute to the scholarship of teaching?
5. How does UM discourage the scholarship of teaching (think of policies, practices, structures)? What can we do to improve these conditions?
6. How does UM affirm the scholarship of teaching (again, think of policies, practices, structures? What can we do to sustain these conditions?
7. What are the most central teaching issues on our campus? How are these issues being addressed?

Phase Two

During the summer of 1999, we reviewed the transcripts from each of the eight group discussions, consolidated the comments for each question, and clustered the individual comments into a number of themes that we inductively derived.

The spring 1999 discussions explored the full set of questions posed regarding the Scholarship of Teaching. The summaries developed from the spring discussions now form the foundation or background for the second stage of our process, which has just commenced. We have provided the summaries to all the participants and asked them to revisit their earlier definitions of excellence in teaching, the scholarship of teaching, and the scholarship of teaching for UM. As we indicated to them, they have the full complement of comments available to review as they consider (and respond with) their final definitions. A form was provided for their responses, and they have the option of responding anonymously. We have now begun to receive those responses.

Phase Three

The final phase of Part I will involve small group discussions, or the convening of a committee (or both), to develop a workable definition for our campus and to develop, from the spring 1999 discussion summaries, a final campus response as to existing supports for and inhibitors of the scholarship of teaching and the central teaching issues on our campus. This group, or committee, will also set the initial agenda for us to move into Part Two of the Carnegie program.

UM Results

In the course of the campus-wide discussions, we noted several issues or concerns running through comments. Broadly stated, the major issues or concerns pertained to:

• The faculty reward system and recognition of the scholarship of teaching, vis-a-vis research, etc.;
• Effective teaching approaches/strategies and assessment for learning and teaching effectiveness;
• Faculty assistance, training, and development for teaching and assessment;
• Student recruitment and enrollment--quality versus quantity, etc.

Prepared by Susan S. Wallwork, M.B.A., and Betsy Wackernagel Bach, Ph.D., University of Montana. Used with permission.