In this article, taken from the 2019 ASHE Presidential address, Kristen A. Renn argues that to stay relevant and also to influence the direction of postsecondary education, there must be engagement in the will to reimagine the study of higher education. She discusses the challenges and opportunities for the future bound up in the fact that higher…

This chapter examines how the scholarship of practice is being used within applied disciplines and offers recommendations for colleges and universities regarding the implementation of the scholarship of practice for the discipline of higher education.

Higher Education as a Field of Study is multi-disciplinary in its origin. Given the relative youth of the field, as it was only founded less than 130 years ago, it does not yet have standalone theories or philosophies as the scholarship in the field frequently borrows from its epistemological, methodological, and philosophical ideas from more…

Read the news about America's colleges and universities--rising student debt, affirmative action debates, and conflicts between faculty and administrators--and it's clear that higher education in this country is a total mess. But as David F. Labaree reminds us in this book, it's always been that way. And that's exactly why it has become the most…

This paper calls into question the idea that we can simply think about higher education as a research field and explores different meanings of the term field. It asks whether there are related fields: research into higher education, academic development and disciplinary teaching research, rather than one. The approach of the paper is conceptual,…

The purpose of this article is to outline what could be learned from the international research literature on the issue of developing teaching competences of novice faculty members. The mission of academics has changed in recent years. Academics must now also meet a strong social demand for graduates' access to employment and are increasingly…

Considerable resources and intellectual attention have focused on seeking to raise the status of teaching in higher education over the last two decades. Initiatives at an institutional level have included the funding of pedagogic research, teaching awards and the creation of teaching professorships. In a broader context, the scholarship of…

The scholarship of teaching and learning represents an important movement within higher education. Through this work, the profession of teaching is able to build upon itself through sustained inquiry and an evidence-based culture. However, for the scholarship of teaching and learning to take hold on a campus, a culture shift often needs to occur,…

The authors are both professional practitioners (law and social work, respectively) who entered the university as discipline-based scholars. Their respective interests in teaching and learning have led them both down a path where they have transitioned from a discipline-based orientation to organizational roles grounded primarily in teaching and…

The paper looks at the feasibility and value of the scholarship of pedagogy (SoP) in an institutional context where it is not a common practice. I will draw on my experience with other colleagues at our university concerning the constraints, shortcomings and achievements of SoP, and use this as a springboard for reflection on its transitional…

Higher education is a field of study. It does not have an integral cognate discipline that defines its extent and borders. Contributions to understanding higher education come from, among others, sociologists, historians, political theorists, economists and students of science policy and cultural studies. These were the disciplines whose exponents…

The Research Institute for Higher Education in Hiroshima University started a program of research on the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) in 2005. The fourth and final conference was held in Hiroshima in January 2010. The following papers are presented at the conference: (1) Differentiation and Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning in…

Across the field of higher education and within the discipline of sociology, several important reconceptualizations of academic work have emerged. While not absolutely in sync, there is a striking overlap across three of the most visible of these: Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered, Carnegie's Stewardship of the Discipline, and Burawoy's Public…

At the 2007 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, we presented a workshop entitled "How to do the Scholarship of Teaching." The workshop had three main goals: to introduce participants to the literature on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and to various SoTL outlets, to guide participants in the process of doing…

Presents a tour of the field of higher education studies, including research on higher education, citing the relevant publication series and journals dealing with the subject, the strongest institutions worldwide offering university-level studies in the field, and the antecedents of the endeavor. (EV)