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  • Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning: Professional Literature That Makes a Difference
  • Aimee LaPointe Terosky (bio)
Maryellen Weimer. Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning: Professional Literature That Makes a Difference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. 272 pp. Cloth: $38.00. ISBN: 0-7879-7381-5.

The literature on college and university teaching and learning is unstructured and evolving. Maryellen Weimer successfully takes on the challenge of organizing an important section of this literature, largely unexplored by higher education scholars: pedagogical scholarship, which she defines as "published work on teaching and learning authored by college faculty in fields other than education" (p. 19). The range of this scholarship is vast, both in its disciplinary subject matter and form. For example, it may include a sociology professor's personal account of why or how he came to substitute discussion-based teaching for lecture to an engineering professor's formal report of a carefully designed quantitative analysis of students' attitudes toward computer-based test-taking.

Given the expansiveness and still-emergent nature of pedagogical scholarship, Weimer offers us a valuable tool for categorizing its diverse contents: a typology that subdivides pedagogical scholarship into two parts: (a) professors' accumulated wisdom of practice and (b) research scholarship. The wisdom of practice literature, which would include the pedagogical account of the sociology professor above, includes professors' discussions of the challenges and strategies of their own classroom-based teaching. Research scholarship would include the formal report of the engineering professor; it adopts traditional research methods to explore teaching and learning. In many cases, these research methods reflect approaches valued by the community of scholars associated with the disciplinary knowledge at issue. Weimer's typology provides us with a significant avenue for exploring this complex literature. In doing so, she also offers a starting point for conceptualizing standards that might, in due time, enhance the credibility and viability of pedagogical scholarship for scholars, professors, and leaders of higher education institutions.

The book includes three sections. In Chapters 1–3, Weimer describes why and how she created her typology of pedagogical scholarship. She justifies her work in three ways: First, no other scholar has reviewed previously published pedagogical scholarship. Second, pedagogical scholarship needs to be credible so that it merits recognition and [End Page 212] reward. And third, college teaching needs a viable literature on practice that helps professors and institutional leaders improve instruction. In Chapters 4–7, Weimer provides descriptions and exemplars of her two-part typology, including wisdom of practice (Chapter 4) and research scholarship (Chapter 5), and then assesses the current state and contributions of each category. She also offers suggestions for future directions for the literature. In the final section (Chapters 8–9), Weimer furnishes pragmatic advice to novice and veteran faculty members on how to conduct high-quality pedagogical scholarship and makes recommendations to institutional leaders on how to promote and support pedagogical scholarship on their campuses.

There are many reasons why this book should be applauded, not the least of which is its key contribution of organizing and critically analyzing a literature that evolved with few overarching frameworks. Importantly, Weimer moves beyond the presentation of the generic literature review. Along with helpful summaries, she models how one can pose questions about quality and utility to previously published pedagogical scholarship. For example, Weimer openly tackles criticisms about the quality of wisdom of practice writings that incorporate personal narratives, a methodology not fully accepted by the academic community. Yet she does not stop there. Weimer dissects exemplary wisdom of practice examples, highlighting how they may embed objective outcome measures (e.g., student test scores, satisfaction surveys, etc.) within more subjective accounts of teaching practices.

With regard to research scholarship, Weimer also openly challenges the normative view that pedagogical research dressed up in traditional methods is, by definition, good and appropriate. Weimer warns scholars away from research scholarship that does not address the unique investigatory requirements of a particular teaching problem. She asks, for example, whether it makes sense to employ quasi-experimental designs simply for the sake of adhering to traditional research templates, if the phenomenon under study does not require this kind of study. By modeling approaches to the analysis...

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