Developing university teaching through the scholarship of teaching and learning: A systematic review of recent literature

In this presentation we report the results of our systematic review of recent empirical studies that focus on making use of the scholarship of teaching and learning to support the development of university teaching. Given its potential as a strategy for individual development and, as importantly, for a university’s “aggregated ability to support student learning” (Mårtensson, Roxå, & Olsson, 2011, p.52), SoTL is widely understood as a signature pedagogy of educational development (Felten & Chick, 2018). However, SoTL has an unclear position in contemporary universities because it is one form of practitioner inquiry among others, including participatory action research, teacher research, and self-study, with which it shares a number of common characteristics. In its embodiment of an ‘inquiry stance’, SoTL as practitioner research can be both pedagogyand scholarship (Cruz, Steiner, & Cruz, 2024), an ambiguity which is in part the source of the discomfort and disruption that it can cause in dividing it “from more traditional forms and paradigms of educational research” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p.46). Given these complexities, what do empirical studies suggest about the potential of SoTL to support and develop university teaching? What are the bene]ts and challenges of using SoTL to these ends? What gaps exist in the current literature on this topic? Our review suggests: 1) a relative lack of studies that provide empirical evidence for the assumption that building academics’ knowledge of their teaching and their students’ learning through engaging inSoTL can positively impact their learning about teaching; (2) that the literature on the development of university teaching through SoTL by and large does not connect with that on teaching expertise, which is surprising, assuming that teaching expertise would be an important aspect of the development of university teaching (e.g. Stigler & Miller, 2008; van Dijk et al., 2020).