Theme Issue: Faith and Learning in Action Across Academic Disciplines

Welcome to this theme issue of the Christian Higher Education journal! This collection of studies was developed within the investigative framework known as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL; Bernstein, 2018; Miller-Young & Yeo, 2015). The researchers who contributed articles to this theme issue of the Christian Higher Education journal were involved in a multi-year collaborative project with the goal of better understanding the pedagogical relationship of service-learning infused with academic faith integration as experienced by students in a Christian university setting. In conducting research projects related to their own classroom experience and writing up their findings, these scholars hope to further a conversation among Christian educators regarding the development of excellent service-learning experiences that are informed and enriched by faith-based knowledge and wisdom. The scholarly field of SoTL has been shaped over time by a great deal of discussion and debate, leading to various definitions of the term. This new field of scholarly examination was initially proposed by Boyer (1990) in Scholarship Reconsidered. In that book, Boyer broadened the idea of scholarship beyond the traditional aim of “discovery” to include “the scholarship of teaching” (along with other legitimate scholarly expressions). Further developments that occurred after Boyer’s 1995 death resulted in the adoption of term “scholarship of teaching and learning” (Boyer et al., 2015; Braxton et al., 2002; Glassick et al., 1997; Hutchings, 2000; Hutchings et al., 2011), which was meant to clarify that Boyer’s idea was more than simply scholarly teaching, but research that would seek to understand how and why learning occurred through (for example) an assignment, the design of a program, or a pedagogical approach. Boyer’s successor as president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Lee Shulman (1993), emphasized the importance of making such research public through respected scholarly venues. Emphasizing that teaching should be a communal endeavor rather than being conducted in isolation, Shulman observed, “It’s clear that scholarship entails an artifact, a product, some form of community property that can be shared, discussed, critiqued, exchanged, built upon” (p. 7; see also Shulman, 2004). More recently, various scholars have advocated for faith-based SoTL to be offered within the context of Christian higher education, including an article in this journal by Kaak (2016) and a review of the literature, also in CHE, by Smith et al. (2014). Smith and colleagues