Scholarship In Real Time: Use Of Assignments To Achieve Scholarship Of Teaching

In higher education, Boyer’s work “Scholarship Revisited” has regained attention as a greater number of academic programs are applied fields where scholarship defined solely as research is too limited in concept. While discovery of knowledge is critical to the academic enterprise, effective teaching is acknowledged as equally important in the age of outcome-focused education, such as in allied health fields. The time required balancing teaching loads that require 12 hours in the classroom, plus office hours and committee participation can present quite a challenge to the tenure-track faculty member trying to also build and grow a body of research. In the Boyer Model, the Scholarship of Teaching is defined as means of not only educating students but also enticing them to be future scholars (Boyer, 1990). This scholarship demands that teachers be well- informed in the knowledge of their fields. In Allied Health fields, this can be another time challenge as research agendas often follow particular niches within the broader field of study while classroom expertise requires generalist information dissemination. And while continued clinical practice can be informative to the educational enterprise, practice alone does not provide best evidence based information for the classroom. This article will describe the use of assigned course work that bridges the time gap created by these conflicting demands. The assignment calls for the student learners to be critical appraisers of information as it is presented in public formats by requiring that they find the scientific source and analyze the accuracy of the publically presented information. It facilitates the teacher-learner in completing a literature review of emerging topics within the field of study to meet the requirement to be well-informed. Further information on how to make these efforts obvious for the tenure process is discussed.