Andrews Becker The enhancement of undergraduate education flows naturally from an up-to-date university research agenda, the co-editors maintain.

In a new anthology published by the IU Press, an answer to that question takes the form of papers illustrating faculty engagement in the art and practice of teaching, primarily at one Midwestern research university.

Co-editors William Becker and Moya Andrews, in the introduction of The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, address a prevalent assertion in the field of higher education: Research overrides both personal and institutional rewards available to tenure-track and tenured faculty within a research university setting. The art and practice of teaching takes a back seat.

That assertion, they write, "misses the complementarities in the production of academic outcomes that are inherent in scholarly pursuits" and "involves a misunderstanding of what constitutes prestige in higher education."

Becker, an IU Bloomington professor of economics, and Andrews, a professor of speech and hearing sciences who has recently retired from her position as dean of the faculties on the Bloomington campus, draw upon the experience of an initiative carried out on the IUB campus between 1999-2003. Faculty from IU and other research university campuses explored the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) in seminars and colloquia. The published essays draw from the best of the presentations made during the four-year run of the SOTL program.

Becker and Andrews point out the changing landscape of postsecondary education in the U.S.: 50 percent of postsecondary institutions, for example, are now community colleges and "carry the weight of entry-level tertiary education with faculties that are 76 percent part time or full time with nontenure-track appointments."

"Unspoken," they write, "is the effect on innovations in teaching, education assessment and dissemination of ideas of the forefront of knowledge that emanate from faculties of the traditional research universities."

The range of activities included in the chapters, write the co-editors, "demonstrate that faculty members at research universities are deeply concerned about teaching" and that "programs of discipline-based inquiry enhance undergraduate student learning in ways that are highly unlikely without an up-to-date research agenda."

Among contributors are Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, and IU Bloomington anthropologist Jeanne Sept, who succeeded Andrews as dean of the faculties in Bloomington in August. (See story: Sept begins tenure as IUB dean of faculties.)

Shulman, incidentally, has two new published books from Jossey-Bass that address similar subject areas: Teaching as Community Property: Essays on Higher Education and The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach.

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