It is a commonplace that U.S. higher education faces not just a time of crisis, but layers of crises: The demographic cliff, the deep cuts to funding, the rapidly evolving and unpredictable impacts of artificial intelligence, the ascendant meme that college is no longer vital to career success, the incessant political attacks … The Chronicle of Higher Education could plausibly change its name to the Crises of Higher Education.
Amid these challenges, this blog’s basic premise is that institutions of higher ed—from community colleges to liberal arts colleges to research one universities—must demonstrate the essentiality, and irreplaceability, of their teaching and learning missions. Currently, teaching is treated as low-skill, low-value labor at too many universities, and too many faculty—especially those whose primary assignment is teaching—are (often severely) undercompensated and under-resourced. Many college-level teachers also receive minimal training before they begin teaching and minimal support to develop, adapt, and transform their teaching practices over time. This structural neglect must change quickly, or the model of higher education as we know it will collapse, and sooner than we might think.
From this basic premise emerge several related principles:
Principle #1: Teaching is intellectual work.
Randy Bass, an advocate for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, notes that having a “problem” is a good thing for researchers; a research problem is an “invitation” for exploration, inquiry, and critical and creative thinking. Whereas having a “problem” is generally seen as a bad thing for teachers; if a teaching problem can’t be avoided, it should be remediated and moved on from as soon as possible. SoTL flips this notion on its head, reconceptualizing the challenges all teachers face: Conveying knowledge and assessing its acquisition, adapting our practices amid changing technologies, cultivating student agency, etc., as intellectual problems to be “investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated.”
Principle #2: Learning is supposed to be messy and hard.
There are no shortcuts to learning anything truly worthwhile, and the more advanced the knowledge or skills to be acquired, the more struggle that is necessary. Maybe there are one-in-a-million geniuses who pick up everything—across domains of knowledge—with relatively little effort, but for the rest of us, learning is hard work and frequently inefficient; it emerges from cyclically exploring, experimenting, making mistakes, and processing feedback.
Principle #3: The core problem (in the good sense) of teaching is to build highly engaged learning environments for all students.
This is the goal, fundamentally, that everyone in the profession of teaching (from pre-K though graduate school) should seek to achieve. This means fostering students’ motivation and desire to learn in the first place, as well as their capacity to navigate the inherent challenges of the learning process. We have done our jobs well when our students become confident in struggle.
Principle #4: Teaching is best supported through interdisciplinary cultures of pedagogical exchange.
Among my favorite experiences as a college teacher has been the (all too rare) chance to join interdisciplinary communities of practice toward engaged learning. Assembling conscientious teachers to share their experiences, to discover connections across their disciplines, and to exchange feedback on each other’s practices, is surely one of the most effective, intellectually fulfilling, (and relatively inexpensive) ways institutions of higher education can fulfill their teaching and learning missions. This blog will focus on the many challenges of implementing these principles in formal education, as well as on what people can and are doing to navigate.
Teaching Inquiry 