Scholarship Revisited

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of University Teaching has been concerned to re-examine the nature of scholarship and the place of teaching within it. In 1990 the President Ernest L. Boyer published Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate in which he argued that our understanding of scholarship has been too narrowly focused on basic research, with other functions such as teaching and application flowing from, rather than being on a par with research. He proposed an alternative model for scholarship that goes beyond the teaching versus research debate and aims to give all aspects of academic work ‘legitimacy’.

Surely, scholarship means engaging in original research. But the work of the scholar also means stepping back from one’s investigation, looking for connections, building bridges between theory and practice, and communicating one’s knowledge effectively to students. Specifically, we conclude that the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions. These are: the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching (Boyer, 1990, p. 16)

The scholarship of discovery is described as what we most often think of as scholarship, that is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the discovery of new knowledge. Boyer sees it at its most successful, is seen by Boyer to play a major role in stimulating and engendering the intellectual climate of the institution.

The scholarship of integration is proposed in order to give value to work done which makes connections and draws insights from discrete facts and findings, which brings a multi-disciplinarity to the pursuit of learning: "what we mean is serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together, and bring new insight to bear on original research" (op cit, p. 19).

Boyer sees the scholarship of application as related to the service role of the academic in that it is concerned with questions such as "How can knowledge be responsibly applied to consequential problems? How can it be helpful to individuals as well as institutions?…Can social problems themselves define an agenda for scholarly investigation?" (op cit, p. 21). In order for service activities to be seen as scholarship, he argues that they need to be fundamentally concerned with one’s field of knowledge and professional practice, and be characterised by rigour and accountability.

Finally weight is given to the activity of teaching by proposing it as the fourth form of scholarship. In doing this, teaching is no longer seen as a merely technical or routine activity, but is positioned as a highly complex activity involving deep knowledge and understanding of the subject on the part of the teacher; a dynamic, shifting relationship between the learner and the teacher; a professional practice needing constant reflection and review; a need for the teacher to remain a learner in their own practice; and a role for the teacher as inspirer of future scholars.

This edition of ITL takes this reconsideration of scholarship further by exploring it from the perspective of the teacher, the learner, the researcher and the general staff member.