Over the past three decades, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has grown from local grassroots efforts to a global field of study. Academics across continents ask powerful questions about student learning, its relationship to teaching, institutional cultures and priorities, cultural institutions and influences, and the purposes of higher education. This global conversation is one of SoTL’s greatest strengths.
It’s also true that work from the United States has often dominated that conversation, sometimes productively, sometimes frustratingly, and often rightly critiqued. We take these critiques seriously.
So why launch a blog focused on SoTL in the United States? Because context matters. And right now, the American context matters—profoundly.
We’ve been learning a lot from our friends and colleagues around the world who’ve embraced the needs of their specific contexts with SoTL in the South, Latin SoTL, SoTL Canada, EuroSoTL, and SoTL China. That said, in our recent (just submitted for review!) article on SoTL in the current American context, we argue—as have many others—that SoTL is never neutral or placeless. It’s shaped by classrooms, disciplines, institutions, funding structures, cultural narratives, and political climates. What we choose to study, how we study it, what we publish, and how our work is received are all deeply influenced by where we are.
For scholars working in the United States today, that “where” is saturated with political polarization, legislative scrutiny of curriculum and pedagogy, public skepticism toward expertise, ongoing attacks on efforts to address inequity, increasing erosion of academic freedom, and faculty precarity and burnout. These conditions don’t simply form a backdrop to our SoTL work. They shape it.
They affect how and what we can teach, what assignments we can use, what artifacts we can collect, what questions we can ask, and even what words we can use. These conditions influence how students show up in our classrooms, how administrators make decisions, and how institutions define “effective teaching.” If SoTL is about understanding and improving learning in context, then this context demands sustained, collective attention. At conferences, in hallways, online, and on Zoom, we’ve heard colleagues admit
- “I’m not sure how to study this anymore.”
- “I’m worried about how this might be interpreted.”
- “I don’t feel safe publishing this right now.”
- “What can I do if I can’t do that?”
We hear these comments as expressions of commitment while trying to be responsible within and about our fraught contexts. We launched this site to support these conversations as a community. See the box below for some of what we can imagine.
We don’t believe the answer in our current US context is to retreat from conversation about the political targets on higher education. At the same time, we don’t want to dominate the global SoTL community as we address our local problems. We simply aim to be more intentional, reflective, and collaborative about the work we do here—and share it in ways that invite dialogue in and beyond the States.
We are deeply committed to SoTL as an international field and a global community made up of many local communities–a community of communities. Many of our most important insights come from colleagues working in vastly different systems, cultures, and political realities. This site does not replace that commitment. It sits alongside it.
Here, we invite you to share
- reflections on designing SoTL studies under constraint,
- examples of context-sensitive inquiry,
- stories of institutional and departmental navigation,
- questions about ethics, risk, and responsibility,
- explorations of equity and belonging in politicized spaces,
- practical strategies for sustaining this work,
- emerging issues across all aspects of teaching, learning, and SoTL in higher education,
- connections across micro, meso, macro, and ultra levels of impact, and
- whatever comes next.
If you’re working in higher education in the States and asking hard questions about teaching, learning, and SoTL, this space is for you. And if you’re watching us from elsewhere, we hope this site offers opportunity for conversation.
Welcome to SoTL in the States. How can we help?
Your colleagues,
Jen & Nancy
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