Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning: Professional Literature that Makes a Difference (review)

This book can best be viewed as the work of a scholar who has a passion for and who has dedicated much of her professional career to both communicating about and advocating the utility of studying teaching and learning in the academy. In this book Maryellen Weimer demonstrates her scholarship, as judged by the traditional norms of scholarship in the academy, on a topic that is not yet been identified as a part of the traditional mold of scholarship, at least not in the way she advocates it. She is interested in informing professors who are dedicated teacher-scholars about the professional literature that is largely the work on the thousands of teacher-scholars who are not trained nor particularly interested in formal educational research. Instead, Weimer identifies with professors trained in a discipline who conduct systematic forms of inquiry about their teaching and who publish their work in a growing number of journals dedicated to enhancing college teaching.

Weimer has combed the fields of pedagogical research and classifies the published works into five major categories, with four of them forms of an experiential approach to scholarship. The four experience-based forms, which she calls "Wisdom-of-Practice Scholarship," are (a) personal accounts of change; (b) recommended-practices reports; (c) recommended-content reports; and personal narratives. She divides her fifth major category, labeled "Research Scholarship," into three types: (a) quantitative investigations, (b) qualitative studies, (c) and descriptive research. This category comes closest to the traditional scholarly work in the academy, but it is not theory based. She states, "Because personal interest motivates the questions, analysis of them tends to be atheoretical" (p. 42). For each type of inquiry, she provides a very useful framework for judging the contribution of this type of research to the audience, which is primarily practicing teachers. In this framework, she first provides a "definition," a description and some examples; second, she provides a "critical assessment," the strengths and weaknesses; third, she presents a few "exemplars," a list of published works in the variety of journals that illustrate some of the best work in this category; fourth, she provides five "standards" that are common among researchers judging the work of others when evaluating the quality of the work; and finally, she provides a judgment about the "contribution" of the research. For example, in "Personal Accounts of Change," she concludes that "It's how-to-do-it literature in the best sense" (p. 68).

This book is important and useful for many reasons. In my view, those who are conducting some type of inquiry on their daily work of teaching will find this book the most useful. However, this book will not extend the theory of learning or pedagogy, since that is not Weimer's purpose. There is little theory in this book, in terms of helping the reader understand the summaries of results, connections to the dominant theories of learning and teaching, or the vast array of empirical findings on the effectiveness of teaching strategies, pedagogical approaches, student learning styles, and so forth. Weimer is very explicit in informing the reader "that you're not doing educational research. That's what people with Ph.D.s in education and the related fields do" (p. 178).

The value of this book, instead, is its affirmation that this type of work is important and that models of good practice and publications do exist in published form, from which the many interested teacher-scholars can learn and can join a community of fellow workers. This book is action oriented. Weimer encourages readers to get involved to better study how they teach and promote student learning. And she provides many useful steps and strategies to do so. By giving more attention to this kind of scholarly work, she and her colleagues in the field hope that this type of inquiry will be given more credit in the promotion and tenure process. If teaching is...