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The Faculty Forum can accommodate all types of scholarship, as defined by Ernest Boyer and others. While all of Boyer's scholarship types are appropriate to the Faculty Forum, they all must, from a practical viewpoint, be integrated with the Faculty Forum format. This means they must be in a written form, presentable within a reasonable time frame and mesh with the Faculty Forum venue and objectives (the specifics of which may vary from institution to institution). Scholars on scholarship generally recommend that scholarship should be written and available for peer critique or review at some point, though scholars may innovate from the written format during the actual presentation at their local in-house Faculty Forum conference to enhance the presentation with visual aids and audience interaction as desired.
In the "sequel" to Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered, Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (Scholarship Assessed) call for new standards of this broad scholarship, scholarly work and documenting scholarship. Outlining the characteristics of a good scholar, they determine six qualities are necessary: clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective critique. Therefore, to conform to these criteria, it is recommended that Faculty Forum work be:
Why Written?
The Faculty Forum differs from another conference where faculty display their work or "teach" each other (on any topic) in that it primarily entails writing workshops, where other professors can review and help each other in their work. The focus here is not the conference itself, but on what goes on behind the scenes, before the conference, where the interaction with and collegial support of peers allows the faculty member to "improve" in their thinking, writing, and content area skills. Critical thinking skills are improved by the act of writing, which slows down our thoughts in a busy world, and allows us to examine what we've written (our thoughts) and allows others to examine it (Rose and McClafferty, 2001). Writing and editing demand integrity, accuracy, and quality in work and encourage the self reflective critique necessary in every teacher-scholar. Our work is also recorded for professional and public review and for posterity, to be criticized, evaluated, built upon, refuted, enhanced.
Why Peer Critiqued and Reviewed?
Through writing, our ideas have been exactly defined and can be further refined and evaluated, by ourselves and others, through the review and critique of our colleagues in writing workshops, at conferences, and in journals. We get the needed feedback to subject our work to the same intellectual rigor that we expect of our students. The comments of peers provide the objective viewpoint to allow us to clarify and create excellence in our work, and to further examine, understand, and improve our own thinking. In addition, our conversations with our colleagues on our work and ideas not only improves them, but leads to new thoughts, creating a fertile atmosphere for intellectual thought.
Why Scholarly?
The Faculty Forum enables professors to gather, in workshops and the final conference, and to engage in and share their scholarly interests and activities of all sorts, including broad scholarship. Scholarship improves teaching, as discussed earlier, but a clear understanding of what counts for "scholarship," when considering examples besides writing for conferences and journals, should be gained to evaluate what should be included in the Faculty Forum. Ernest Boyer in Scholarship Reconsidered (1990) as well as Glassick, Maeroff and Huber in Scholarship Assessed (1997), discussed above, clarify this. (See also Huber's discussion of this at "Evaluating Outreach: Scholarship Assessed's Approach" for a better idea of what this is.)
The Faculty Forum and resources developed here assist professors with written scholarship, which can be scholarship of discovery and scholarship of integration, primarily, but also includes scholarship of teaching and scholarship of application when it reaches the final stage -- the written stage. The results of all of these can be delivered at an outside venue, and the Forum activities assist in that.
Many professors are interested in writing for conferences and journals, but are either unsure of how to do this and where to begin. Nearly every study on scholarship shows that it simply does NOT occur in an isolation; that collegial support is the single most important factor to faculty productivity. Even those professors active in scholarship already, can benefit from the Faculty Forum activities in many ways: the collegiality, encouragement, resources, and support that the Faculty Forum offers will enable them to participate in this activity with greater ease and success.
The time, energy, and resources of Forum activities can help develop the "content area" side of faculty work. Knowledge is the foundation of a professor's world -- before teaching techniques can affect instruction, content area knowledge must be deep and thorough. While knowledge may often end in practical application, it begins in the world of ideas. However, knowledge is constantly changing, in all fields of teaching. One way to keep up with these changes is through professional networking. The networking involved in academic development connects professors to dialogue with other members of academia and encourages closer faculty ties to their disciplines. This also serves to strengthen faculty's competence and currency in their field. Academic writing solidifies ideas into a product that is a unit of commerce in the intellectual world. We are speaking in the language of others in the academic world, in our disciplines, so thus become privileged to participate in the dialogue; our interactions can nurture and develop knowledge in our world. The "product" we have written can then be bartered in the intellectual realm: published in a journal or presented at a conference, in a way teaching a non-written seminar cannot (Axtell, 1999; Mitchell, 1999; Rose and McClafferty, 2001). The benefits of entering this world, to professor and to institution, are immense.
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Works Cited
Axtell, James. The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998.
Boyer, Ernest L. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990. [Also: Revised Edition, 1997]
Glassick, Charles, Mary Taylor Huber, and Eugene Maeroff. Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.
Rose, Mike, and Karen A. McClafferty. "A Call for the Teaching of Writing in Graduate Education." Educational Researcher (March 2001): 27-33
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