Launching TLI: SoTL’s Purposes, Processes, and People

Nearly a decade of vision, planning, and hard work has led to the words on these pages. Since the early days of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), many members and officers have been eager for a journal officially sponsored by the Society as a benefit of membership, a standard of quality in the field, and a complement to the annual conference. Despite the success of its conferences and an increasingly active membership, the Society waited strategically until a distinct vision was proposed, the right editorship was selected, and a relationship with a university press was secured.

We believe that there is a need within the field for another SoTL journal, one with a unique relationship with ISSOTL and a university press. We are honored to be the first and only journal carrying the official sponsorship of ISSOTL, and we are fortunate to be working with Indiana University Press in the publication of the journal. The first and fifth ISSOTL conferences were held on the Indiana University campus, and—in addition to its long and impressive history of presenting important scholarship—IU Press’s publication of TLI complements its more recent commitment to SoTL with its SoTL book series, which began in 2009.

As we explain in our mission statement, Teaching & Learning Inquiry will publish insightful research, theory, commentary, and other scholarly works that document or facilitate investigations of teaching and learning in higher education. It values quality and variety in its vision of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. With Nancy’s background in literary studies and Gary’s in psychology, we as co-editors are committed to ensuring that the journal’s pages will showcase the breadth of the interdisciplinary field of SoTL in its explicit methodological pluralism, its call for traditional and new genres, and its international authorship from across career stages. TLI embraces creative as well as traditional approaches to understanding teaching and learning and ways to share that understanding. Ultimately, TLI will be a beacon for such high-quality work that includes and even calls attention to both more traditional models and those not traditionally seated at the SoTL “family table” (Shulman 2006).

Our first task as editors was to build a strong Editorial Board, prioritizing coverage of all ISSOTL’s regions (the United States, Canada, Australasia, and Europe), the whole career spectrum (from students to retired faculty, and all in between), a breadth of disciplines and professions, a variety of institutional types, and a balance of women and men. The support and wisdom of this group has quickly become the foundation of all of our work, instrumental in the major decisions to date. For example, after much brain-storming, parsing, debating, and voting, they named the journal. They carefully considered the politics and nuances of SoTL work as they honed our reviewer selection process and reviewer guidelines. They are currently discussing some fundamental principles of “good SoTL” in an online conversation that will appear later as a follow-up to one of our invited pieces in this inaugural issue.

This inaugural issue consists of invited pieces and member submissions answering our call to “explore SoTL’s traditions or its cutting edges, its highest moments or the challenges that remain, its efforts to go public or its impacts in campus classrooms or hallways, its relevant constituencies or its unexplored audiences.” Two themes emerged from the final selection: nine essays considering the benefits of SoTL to specific audiences and contexts, and five essays articulating ways of advancing SoTL.

The first set of essays describes what SoTL and its practitioners offer specific audiences and contexts—starting broadly with SoTL’s service to higher education in general, then narrowing the focus to campuses, faculty developers, faculty, and finally students and student learning. In “The Transformative Potential of The Scholarship of Teaching,” Carolin Kreber argues that SoTL’s ultimate service is to enhance social justice via the improvement of higher education. In “Validity through Dialogue,” ISSOTL’s first President Barbara Cambridge considers the role of ISSOTL and now Teaching and Learning Inquiry as agents of change...