Reader Response

The Editor

The summary of Professor Boyer's book Scholarship Reconsidered (Issues of Teaching and Learning Vol 4(2)) represents an exercise in Orwellian Newspeak that is potentially unhelpful to scholarship and the activities of our university. I agree that scholarship involves the generation of new knowledge (be this "discovery" of new knowledge, the novel "integration" or novel "application" of existing knowledge in Boyer's terms). However, I disagree that teaching needs to be classified as a form of scholarship (although teaching itself can be a focus of scholarship) to grant it legitimacy.

Teaching is not a form of scholarship because it does not seek to generate new knowledge. Teaching is a fundamentally important activity that scholars undertake.   Without teaching, future scholarship would wither and die. Scholars of tomorrow need to be trained in existing knowledge and inspired to generate new knowledge, just as the community of scholars at the University of Western Australia represents those who have been so trained and inspired. However, attempting to legitimate teaching by borrowing the legitimacy of scholarship can only erode scholarship. Furthermore, seeking legitimacy for teaching by attaching it to the other activities of scholars fails to acknowledge the true value of teaching and learning. Teaching and learning have intrinsic worth, just as the generation of new knowledge has. Teaching and learning have a fundamentally important place in the activities of a university, just as the generation of new knowledge has. The worth and the importance of teaching is such that it does not need to ride on the coat tails of "research" to be a legitimate activity for scholars to engage in. Rather, scholars should be exhorted to continue giving due credit to the worth and importance of teaching, just as we give to scholarship.

Andrew Page

"A scholar is just a library's way of making another library" Dennett (1995)

Further reader comment concerning the issues raised in the article Scholarship Revisited is invited.