ABSTRACT
Each year four teachers are honoured as US Professors of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Higher Education (CASE) and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Since 1981 CASE has been recognizing and rewarding individual faculty ‘for their dedication to teaching, commitment to students and innovative instructional methods’. The criteria includes extraordinary dedication to undergraduate teaching demonstrated through student impact and involvement, institutional and community contributions, student and peer support, and an approach to teaching and learning characterized as scholarly (CASE, 2006). Although one might argue about the criteria and how they are demonstrated, it is the last category that is perhaps most significant: to ask teachers for a scholarly approach to teaching and learning as a prerequisite for being considered excellent might seem logical, but it is far from commonplace. Teaching awards are more often based on culminating evaluations and subjective narratives than on scholarly approaches to student learning and its systematic improvement. In championing this aspect of teaching excellence, in placing scholarship of teaching and learning as an attribute of high-quality instruction, CASE and Carnegie highlight an important feature of higher education; they make visible the understanding that teaching excellence requires more than knowledge, expertise and commitment to improving student learning; in order to be an excellent teacher one needs all three, along with a scholarly approach to the practice of teaching and learning. For when disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical expertise and scholarly inquiry are combined, not just in tandem but entwined, connecting with and reinforcing each other, they become a braided practice that is stronger, more coherent and more likely to lead to the kind of teaching that will in turn lead to significantly improved student learning. And although clearly a practical consideration, the role inquiry plays in excellent teaching is much more a conceptual issue, suggesting a new view of what constitutes evidence of student learning, what drives teaching improvement, what counts as scholarship, what it means to strive for excellence and make it commonplace in teaching practice.
