Making teaching count for women in research : the scholarship of teaching

Boyer (1990) urged us to “move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate” and assisted by reconceptualising the term “scholarship” into four distinct but related dimensions: those of discovery, integration, application and teaching. This paper promotes the scholarship of teaching as a viable and rewarding area for women in research, particularly the many early-career female academics who, being overrepresented at the junior levels (i.e. below Level C), do much of the core undergraduate teaching and are given curriculum development responsibilities in that demanding area also. As the new agendas and drivers for change in the competitive tertiary sector have coalesced to demand a more professional approach to teaching and learning – a scholarly approach that embraces our new understandings around student learning – 21st century tertiary educators are being challenged to “go meta” (Hutchings & Shulman, 1999:13) and engage with their role as teacher in much the same way as a quality researcher goes about traditional research and scholarship. This paper will look at a framework for a scholarship of teaching that encourages teachers to publish on their creative teaching approaches and curriculum innovations. By making a …public account of some or all of the full act of teaching – vision, design, enactment, outcomes and analysis – in a manner susceptible to critical review by the teacher’s professional peers and amenable to productive employment in future work by members of that same community (Schlman, 1998:6) many women academics will discover how they can make their teaching count in the research arena in any discipline by publishing out of exactly those scholarly initiatives in teaching and learning.