Encouraging the scholarship of learning and teaching in an institutional context

In this chapter, we aim to give voice to some key challenges that emerge in our work as institutional facilitators of the scholarship of teaching and learning. We seek to make visible some of the ethical and conceptual tensions that arise for us in making decisions about shaping, responding to, and then supporting a program of institutional change such as the scholarship of teaching and learning. We focus on three dimensions in particular. The first of our challenges results from an explicit focus on academics' learning; specifically, their learning about university teaching and student learning within our graduate programs. The second relates to the state and status of educational research as a context for developing the scholarship of teaching and learning itself. In encouraging academics to consider their teaching and students' learning as potential sites for research, there is often a shift in the terrain of what it means to inquire, how to go about it, together with the proper ethics and values involved in an educational inquiry process. The third challenge for us in developing the scholarship of teaching and learning is about the ethics of change and the politics of transformation; both individually and institutionally. How far should we push an agenda of change when we see our academic colleagues under pressure? How far should we encourage them to question the structural and organisation arrangements of teaching and learning in their departmental or disciplinary contexts; ones which may have made putting scholarly teaching practice in place difficult?