Higher Education Research and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The Pursuit of Excellence

Excerpt: The scholarship of teaching and learning includes many activities all of which are focused on critically reflecting on teaching and learning in some way. In the last 10 years or so I have worked at two different universities in Australia both of which have devised ways of rewarding scholarly activities related to teaching. These activities take the form of a) engaging in sustained study and gaining qualifications in teaching in higher education, b) being in receipt of institutional and/or national awards for teaching excellence and c) presenting scholarly work on higher education teaching and learning in conferences and journals. In this piece I want to raise a number of issues related to the latter. Specifically I want to ask some critical questions about the implications of public presentation of scholarly work on teaching and learning for the field of higher education