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 learners of mental models to understand the world around them. Constructionism advocates student-centered, discovery learning where students use what they already know, to acquire more knowledge. Huber, Hutchings & Ciccone argued that there are “narrow constructionists” who stress how SoTL is, presumably in form, closely related to traditional academic research (with some allowances for practitioner, local inquiry). Then there are “broad constructionists” or “big tent advocates” who have a view of SoTL as including much more than a form of academic research into our students’ learning. This has a potential to blur the boundaries between scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Potter & Kustra (2011) define scholarly teaching as: "teaching grounded in critical reflection using systematically and strategically-gathered evidence, related and explained by well-reasoned theory and philosophical understanding, with the goal of maximizing learning through effective teaching" (p. 3). They define SoTL as "the systematic study of teaching and learning, using established or validated criteria of scholarship, to understand how teaching (beliefs, behaviours, attitudes, and values) can maximize learning, and/ or develop a more accurate understanding of learning, resulting in products that are publicly shared for critique and use by an appropriate community" (p. 2).
Kathleen McKinney, reassessing the "big tent" debate, has argued that the distinctions made by many (Pat Hutchings originally) amongst good teaching, scholarly teaching, and SoTL are valid. Good teaching and scholarly teaching, McKinney argues, are critically important but not the same as SoTL. McKinney thinks that SoTL is not doing our jobs as teachers. Nor is SoTL traditional educational research or research on faculty development. McKinney thinks the three biggest assets of SoTL are that it is work done by the practitioner, evidence-based (broadly defined), and public (broadly defined). If SoTL becomes everything, it is nothing. McKinney writes: “We need a big SoTL tent but we need one whose span of fabric is not stretched so far that it collapses. We need a tent with flaps that open and close freely but still offer some differentiation or protection from the outside weather.” (McKinney 2014, 3 Nov.). McKinney (2007) asks, “Can
SoTL be of good quality and how is that defined?” (pp. 21-22). This stretching of the fabric of a "big SoTL tent" and the implications of that metaphor as it relates to the nature of quality and rigour in doing SoTL research is the point of departure for Nancy L. Chick, (2014). The big tent’s absence of walls speaks to the challenge of discussing quality in SoTL (Chick, 2014, p. 1). In discussing quality, Chick broadly adheres to McKinney’s observation that the three biggest assets of SoTL are that it is work done by the practitioner, evidence-based, and public.
Kelly Hewson and Lee Easton (2022) would like to send the big tent packing once and for all. They believe that it has fulfilled its function in what was an emergent field, designed then to evoke a convivial coming together of practitioners with diverse theories and methods, connected by common interests in improving teaching and student learning (p. 73). These scholars argue that the celebratory “big tent” of SoTL with its focus on better teaching and learning helped SoTL become a more respectable academic enterprise. However, this success has entailed ignoring approaches that often bring into view the challenges of teaching “difficult knowledge” — a concept meant to signify both representations of social traumas in a curriculum and the individual's encounters with them through pedagogy. In addressing the theme of decolonizing SoTL, Hewson and Easton argue that teaching and researching should not be an extractive affair but should include minorities as the enterprise is founded on active, equitable involvement and knowledge sharing. Hewson and Easton (2022) ask for the SoTL community to move beyond the metaphor, “which supplants and substitutes,” and “to acknowledge our diverse approaches, questions, and findings as adjacent, contiguous, and relational” (p. 74).
Hutchings, Pat, Huber, Mary T., and Ciccone, Anthony. (2011). The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Institutional Integration and Impact. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Huber, Mary. T., & Hutchings, Pat (2005). The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
McKinney, K. (2007). Enhancing learning through the scholarship of teaching and learning: The Challenges and joys of juggling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Potter, Michael K. and Kustra, Erika D.H. (2011) "The Relationship between Scholarly Teaching and SoTL: Models, Distinctions, and Clarifications," International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (IJ-SoTL) vol. 5, no. 1, Article 23. Retrieved on 21 January 2023 from https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2011.050123
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