by Nancy Chick, Jen Friberg-Fort, David Giovagnoli, Phillip Motley, & Marian McCarthy
In 2023, we completed Tools for Social Justice, a website that translates SoTL research into practical strategies for everyday advocacy. From April 2022 through October 2023, we were one of the four groups in ISSOTL’s first cohort of Public SoTL International Collaborative Writing Groups (ICWGs) developing works of public scholarship informed by SoTL.
Drawing on research about overcoming resistance to learning, correcting misconceptions, and cultivating empathy, we started from a simple premise: that teaching is about changing minds, so SoTL would have something useful to say about efforts to change minds about social justice issues at the dinner table, in community meetings, or in casual conversation.
We planned on circulating it widely, including sharing it at SoTL conferences as examples of public SoTL, writing an article or two about it, and—more importantly—sharing it more broadly through social media and direct messages to community groups and organizations across contexts.
Then we stopped.
Three years later, the site remains largely unshared. We want to be transparent about why—not to complain, but because we think the story of this project’s stalling is a kind of data point about where SoTL stands right now, and what it costs a field when it retreats from its own public ambitions.
Interestingly, it was right around this time when another collaboration identified the project itself as one site where “failure” can occur in SoTL—not because the project is poorly conceived, but because it loses momentum or encounters external barriers that halt its completion (Chick, Cruz, Friberg, and Steiner 2023). This project is one such example, although we stalled after completion, when we were trying to disseminate it, a phase the typology doesn’t yet fully account for, but one that may be where we’re often most vulnerable.
Looking back, two factors—one internal to the field and one external—help explain why.
What’s SoTL For?
Our first reason raises a familiar but unresolved question in SoTL: what is this work for—and who is it for?
We shared our development process and an early working version at couple of SoTL conferences, but when we tried to share the completed project with our peers, we were unsuccessful. Over time, it became difficult to sustain momentum, especially for a collaborative project built on volunteer labor and shared enthusiasm. Without voicing it, we quietly wondered if this work didn’t belong on the SoTL stage. And each of us had other projects and responsibilities to prioritize.
This tension isn’t new. SoTL continues to negotiate its boundaries—between practitioner priorities, between disciplines, between countries, between notions of rigor and relevance, and between work that satisfies reviewers and work that reaches people who need it. How we set the field’s agenda through its professional activities is worth ongoing examination. What gets presented and published largely shapes what we believe SoTL is for, and what doesn’t sends the implicit message about the edge of the field’s legitimate scope.
This first reason was quiet, unspoken, and powerful. The second was anything but.
Is It Safe?
The second reason reflects a different kind of pressure: external conditions that shape whether and how a project can circulate. By the time we finished, we’d be sharing this work in a rapidly deteriorating political climate, especially in the US. Escalating legislative and institutional pressures were challenging (even punishing) the kinds of work our site represents: efforts to apply scholarship to questions of social change.
Dissemination became complicated in ways we hadn’t anticipated when we began. Even if some members of our team felt supported by our home institutions, we weren’t naive. Tools for Social Justice was designed to be practical and accessible. But a practical, accessible resource is also a visible one, and visibility invites scrutiny.
What This Means for the Field
We share our experience because it raises questions that matter more broadly. Ours wasn’t a failure of design or intent, but of momentum and context—of the conditions that determine whether a project can move, circulate, and endure. What kinds of SoTL work are able to circulate in the current US context—and through which channels?
Tools for Social Justice is an early and rare example of SoTL’s public turn, but it isn’t unique in its failure. If anything, it may be representative of a set of pressures that are harder to name: the quiet ways that dissemination can be constrained, the gradual erosion of momentum, and the calculation about what feels safe enough to put into wider circulation.
References
Chick, Nancy, Jennifer Friberg, David Giovagnoli, Phillip Motley, and Marian McCarthy. 2023. Tools for Social Justice. https://toolsforsocialjustice.org/
Chick, Nancy L., Laura Cruz, Jennnifer C. Friberg, and Hillary H. Steiner. 2023. “Making Space for Failure in SoTL: A Blueprint.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 11: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.11.36
