By Jennifer Friberg-Fort
When I was a young child, I watched cartoons on Saturday mornings with my sister. In the stories told, calendars were often featured with pages flying off the wall to mark the rapid passing of time. Back then, I really didn’t understand that concept…it seemed to take *forever* to get to my next birthday or the next holiday. Now? I absolutely understand how time really does fly. I’ve been working in higher education for over twenty years and retirement is something that is no longer just theoretical.
While I’m not sure that it was a deliberate choice, some of my recent SoTL work seems a nod to the concept of passing the SoTL torch in my discipline. SoTL has grown exponentially in speech-language pathology and audiology (collectively called communication sciences and disorders or CSD) in the last two decades, but we have work to do to fully realize its potential for our current and future faculty and students. I believe the same potential exists in other disciplines, as well. At a complicated moment for higher education, that matters. When a lot of doors feel like they’re closing in terms of what we can study and who we can study, looking closely at SoTL within our own disciplines is very likely to turn up work that’s genuinely useful and genuinely welcome, despite the barriers some SoTL scholars are facing.
In my experience, there are two ways into that disciplinary space: looking in and looking out. They focus on disciplinary SoTL from opposite (but equally important!) sides and both operate at what SoTL calls the mega level: work that lives beyond any single institution while staying rooted in higher education.
Looking in: knowing our own disciplines
“Looking in” asks a field to take stock of itself: where have we been, where are we now, and where might we go? This is exactly what Kathleen McKinney (2018) did for sociology, examining how that discipline’s ways of knowing (perspectives, theories, and methods) shaped what its members would even recognize as good SoTL. A few years ago, three colleagues and I tried something similar for communication sciences and disorders (Friberg et al. 2023). While we used the same method in our study that McKinney used in hers, the outcomes of our work were not the same. The integration of SoTL and the future needs for SoTL work in sociology and speech-language pathology reflected different needs, voices, and priorities…exactly as it should be.
Studying how SoTL is integrated into a discipline isn’t a study of one course; it gathers up work scattered across the levels of impact (i.e., the micro of the classroom, the meso of programs, the macro of institutions) and pulls it into a fulsome representation of SoTL in a discipline (Simmons 2009; Weston et al. 2008). In other words, it takes a lot of dispersed local knowledge and lifts it up into the mega space, where you can finally see the patterns that have been constructed in past and current disciplinary SoTL work.
These patterns are worth seeing. When we looked across CSD that way, we could finally tell where support for SoTL was strong, where it was not, and where it existed but nobody knew to look for it. A deep view into a discipline can yield awareness that supports work toward a future, “goldilocks” integration of SoTL into its context: not so little that the work stays grassroots and undervalued, and not so much that we’re bolting on borrowed frameworks that don’t actually fit how our discipline thinks.
Looking out: lessons from the broader SoTL community
If looking in is important to understand our disciplines, looking out is, as well. Looking out reaches towards the broader SoTL community and then brings what it finds back home. Recently scholars in the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) helped to identify the five grand challenges for SoTL: shared questions, asked across disciplines and across countries, about how learning happens, how identity shapes it, and how SoTL itself grows (Scharff et al. 2023).
In a recent paper, I argued that a single discipline can take those big, cross-disciplinary priorities and put them to work within its own spaces (Friberg-Fort 2026). Doing so gives a field three things it often lacks when thinking about SoTL: structure (a shared way to frame what we study), connection (links between scholars who’d otherwise be working in isolation), and stronger networks reaching out to the other similar fields (medical education, nursing, the rest of the clinical professions) wrestling with the very same questions in slightly different words.
Reciprocal looking
Looking in and looking out aren’t really separate acts, and to really understand the state of SoTL in a single discipline, both are likely necessary. Looking in is how a discipline comes to know itself: its history, its habits, its particular way of asking and answering questions. Looking out is how a discipline connects its scholars and those in neighboring fields asking the same questions from different contexts. These processes feed each other. What we learn looking out becomes part of what we study the next time we look in. None of this requires permission, a big grant, or a guarantee that the wider local/state/national sociopolitical landscape will cooperate. That’s part of what makes disciplinary SoTL such a hopeful place to put our energy right now. The work is ours to do, and it pays off twice – once in what we learn about our own field, and again in the connections that learning opens to everyone else asking the same questions.
References
Friberg, Jennifer C., Jerry K. Hoepner, Allison M. Sauerwein, and Kerry Mandulak. 2023. “The Integration of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning into the Discipline of Communication Sciences and Disorders.” Teaching and Learning in Communication Sciences & Disorders 7 (1). https://doi.org/10.30707/TLCSD7.1.1675490380.873306.
Friberg-Fort, Jennifer C. 2026. “Using the Grand Challenges for SoTL to Guide, Connect, and Extend Scholarship in Communication Sciences and Disorders.” Teaching and Learning in Communication Sciences & Disorders 10 (1). https://doi.org/10.61403/2689-6443.1417.
McKinney, Kathleen. 2018. “The Integration of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning into the Discipline of Sociology.” Teaching Sociology 46 (2): 123–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055X17735155.
Scharff, Lauren, Heather Capocchiano, Nancy Chick, Michelle Eady, Jennifer Friberg, Diana Gregory, Kristen Loy, and Trent Maurer. 2023. “Grand Challenges for SoTL.” International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. https://issotl.com/grand-challenges-for-sotl/.
Simmons, Nicola. 2009. “Playing for SoTL Impact: A Personal Reflection.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 3 (2): Article 30. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/vol3/iss2/30/.
Weston, Cynthia, Denis Berthiaume, Kayo Matsushita, Mariela Tovar, and Julie Timmermans. 2008. “A Faculty Development Framework to Capture the Impact of Our Work.” Presentation at the annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Edmonton, Alberta, October.
