The Scholarship of Teaching and Web-Based Representations of Teaching in the United States: Definitions, Histories, and New Directions

Source: Educational Action Research, Volume 17, Issue 1 (March 2009),
pages 63 - 78.

The relationship between the scholarship of teaching and practitioner inquiry is characterized both by questions of definition (what 'counts' as scholarship and who can produce it) and execution (how to facilitate the representation, interpretation and analysis of teaching).
The paper addresses both issues by beginning with an overview of the somewhat ambiguous origins and evolution of the scholarship of teaching in the United States. It then also describes a series of web-based representations of practice that have emerged out of one approach to the scholarship of teaching. Although many of these web-based representations may not 'count' as either the scholarship of teaching or practitioner inquiry, they may offer new means and mechanisms for representing teaching in ways that can allow anyone to learn from it and build upon it.