A matter of conviviality: a note on the "Big Tent" metaphor in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)
Big Tent Debate in SoTL Center for Engaged Learning Elon University, North Carolina, 18 September 2013. The “big tent” metaphor has thus far characterised much of SoTL’s thinking about its inherent diversity. Huber and Hutchings (2005) identify the “teaching commons,” as the process of coming together to encourage discourse within and outside of our disciplines about how we teach and how students learn. These Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching colleagues encourage scholars to make their inquiries not private but communal enterprises that cultivate discipline-specific methodologies in an ongoing pursuit of deepening our understanding of teaching and learning. They urge us to create a “big tent” for SoTL (Huber & Hutchings, 2005, p. 30). Mary Huber & Pat Hutchings with Tony Ciccone (2011, p. 9) clarified the "big tent" debate in SoTL as based on a distinction made between advocates of constructionism . Constructionist learning is the creation by lea