The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning @ CSM
By Jean Mach

As part of a nascent effort to establish the SoTL Center as a useful resource for the support, improvement, and documentation of successful and innovative teaching practices, a small library, like slow-growing ivy, has been taking hold in the salvaged bookcases against the east wall of 12-170. 

Even as SoTL @ CSM forges ahead into the virtual world of online documentation with ePortfolios, Sharepoints, and podcasts, it needs an anchor in the world of real books and journals--books that you can curl up with in a comfortable chair or take outside, under a shady tree.  Those real pages allow another (perhaps old-fashioned) kind of engagement with ideas--away from your computer screen and its relentless email, the stacks of un-graded papers, and the daily pressures of your office.  Books and journals can be the source of inspiration to restructure a class next semester, of fresh ideas to replace the same old collaborative exercises you’ve always used, or of broader perspectives on knotty issues like declining literacy, the assessment movement, and articulation difficulties between the different levels of our educational system.  Thoughtful, carefully researched books, divergent but respectful viewpoints expressed in established journals, and important reports published by serious educational associations can offer insight into the challenges we face in our own classrooms and on our own campus. The SoTL Center houses the beginning of a small collection of such resources for our use.

Although the shelves are still appallingly disorganized and the check-out system rudimentary (please write the name of the book, your name, and the date in the check-out binder), you may find something of interest if you just browse.  You may recognize the clear, precise voice of CSM’s dear benefactor, Ralph Lane, in his volumes of poetry.  You’ll be visually delighted if you page through one of the copies of Visual Relationships, a monograph that was the result of an extraordinary confluence model learning community that fused the work of photography, graphic design, and multimedia students in the spring of 2007.  There is a copy of the report that informs the Basic Skills Initiative (“the poppy copy’), AAC&U’s Greater Expectations and LEAP Reports, and a number of issues of Peer Review.  You’ll find books full of ideas about collaborative learning, classroom assessment strategies, learning communities, and writing across the curriculum. Several copies of Minding the Gap, published by Harvard Education Press, a fascinating book that considers our nation’s failures in guiding many high school students through the transition into college, will be arriving soon. Accordian folders will archive a range of short readings related to each of the various confluence model learning communities offered at CSM, so faculty wanting to explore the possibility of participating will not have to begin their preparation from scratch.

The doors to the SoTL Center must be kept locked, but I don’t want faculty to feel locked out.  I’m investigating solutions for easier access, but meanwhile call me (x6353) if you want to get in.  We even hope to find a few easy chairs and a coffee table should you want to curl up for a comfortable hour there, exploring ideas the wonderful, old-fashioned way, through reading.