ABSTRACT
Members of professions take on the burden of their understanding by making public commitments to serve their fellow beings in a skilled and responsible manner. Although Daniel Bernstein, Brian Coppola, Sheri Sheppard, and Randy Bass have faced challenges in making a place for their engagements in the scholarship of teaching and learning, they acknowledge their extraordinary good fortune. These scholars’ careers are in progress, developing established lines of work and taking new directions. Scholarship is a deeply communal enterprise. It is, in essence, a conversation in which one participates by knowing what is now being discussed and what others in the past have said. Faculty who take up the scholarship of teaching and learning often say that it gives them a new perspective on their lives as educators, a new language, new literature, new colleagues, and new work. There is a venerable tradition of senior scholars turning to questions of education toward the end of their careers.
