Warning Rant
While there is still no sector-wide agreement about the exact definition of SoTL/Scholarship and while this remains contested, debated, and perpetually redefined and tweaked, thousands of educators in Higher Education are engaging in undertaking SoTL, in their own way.
Sometimes haphazardly, cautious, tentative and sometimes full of valour and zest.
This article for once is not another rant about the lack of definition, and the clear need for a theoretical framework, I wrote this coming from a pragmatic point of view as someone who supports colleagues getting to grips with SoTL (whatever this means to you, in our institution).
We are approaching this under the wider remit of evaluating teaching practice and it includes textbooks or equivalent contributions as part of the overall scholarship of an educator.
Role of Evidencing Practice
So, if you take an approach to SoTL as a practitioner inquiry project (Walker et al, 2020) for which you collect data, you must apply for ethics. And some issues around ethics are the focus on this blog post.
SoTL is about examining your practice, reflecting on it, collecting evidence and then engaging with the evidence in a meaning making process. As our teaching practice is usually focussed on our learners we should question. How much of this activity is enabling our learners to have a voice.
If design is appropriate participating in research can enable the learner to be heard. You can use your SoTL as an instrument to shift the power disparity between teacher (educator) and learner (student). We can talk about empowering methods later. Today we look at the ethics process.
Voice versus Ethics
Our (particularly my college) ethics process based on the assumption that the participant is disempowered, voiceless, and victimised. The current process places the researcher immediately in the defensive position. The ethics forms structurally inhibit research design that is empowering.
Sure, you still can do it, but you have to swim upstream, fight against prohibitive language, and highly assumptious pre-filled boxes. There is barely space for alternative methods.
Because I as educator, am not permitted to treat my learners as equal, I am not permitted to acknowledge their agency (beyond they do not have to participate and can drop out at any point). Where is the agency for their voice?
At which point does the process encourage me as educator to question my privileged stance and encourage the learners voice? Outsite the language of risk assessment–again a deficit discourse.
How is a researcher to empower their participants, to engage in processes of freedom of expression if the structure of the application process is all about curbing freedom?
Why are we asked:
- How are you not going to hurt?
- How are you not going to take risks?
- How are you not going to abuse?
Instead of being asked:
- How are you going to create a space for diverse voices?
- How are you creating a brave space for joint learning?
- How are you going to use your voice as researcher?
- How are you listening? How are you empowering?
- How can the participants exercise their freedom?
- How can participants apply their voice?
Our SoTL ethics forms are not fit for purpose.
Ethical inquiries are developed by a well thought out design. Not by placing the educator in the position of an accused.
Our (college) ethics form does not even clearly differentiate between methodology and methods!
If only Ethics Could …
So maybe ethics for SoTL needs to focus on affordances of the research design. You know how when you want to stop students from plagiarising you do not tell them: Don’t plagiarise, but tell them how to do academic practice well? At the moment the ethics form for SoTL is all about “don’t” and not about “do”!
I want to make the point again that particularly for SoTL we need to rethink ethics as CPD process. Not only because so many colleagues from non-cognate disciplines are braving theories, methodologies, methods and a whole new language around research and inquiries that are unfamiliar. Some might never have had to fill in ethics applications, because their research is theoretical or does not involve living beings.
And for colleagues who like me are from a social sciences background, we might want to expand, decolonise, open our practice. Take more critical stance.
So instead of the ethics process being prohibitive and inaccessible (talk about ADHD and filling in forms!) make it a developmental opportunity that enables all of us jointly to develop better inquiries, and thus better teaching practice which has the voice of the learners at its centre.
References
Smith, S., & Walker, D. (2022). Scholarship and teaching-focused roles: An exploratory study of academics’ experiences and perceptions of support. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2022.2132981
Wall, K., Beck, A., & Scott, N. (2020) The Nature and Purpose of Practitioner Enquiry | University of Strathclyde. Retrieved 2 November 2022, from https://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/schoolofeducation/blog/thenatureandpurposeofpractitionerenquiry/
Adventures in Academic Development 