2022 Keynote Address
SoTL for Whom? Revisiting ‘Going Public’
Dr. Nancy Chick
One of SoTL’s defining features is that its projects are made public. This mandate
to “change the status of teaching from private to community property” aims to elevate
the professionalization, practice, and position of teaching in higher education (Shulman,
1993, p. 6). SoTL has maintained Shulman’s vision of this community, reinforcing the
value of sharing what we learn through SoTL with our institutions, our disciplines,
and even the broader academy. However, despite all of this attention to “going public,”
we seem to have hit a wall in our understanding of “public,” with existing educational
stakeholders as the outer edge of the common vision of SoTL. Even though SoTL has
generated important findings about bottlenecks in learning, ways of increasing empathy,
typical reactions to uncomfortable ideas, and more, we aren’t sharing this knowledge
beyond academic communities -- despite its relevance to significant issues like racial
violence and reconciliation, the scientific illiteracy behind mask and vaccine resistance,
and ongoing campaigns of misinformation. In this keynote, I will explore this gap
in this defining feature of SoTL and how we can reach well beyond our current audiences
to effect understanding and change in the world.
