Course
Anatomy:
The
Dissection and Analyses of
Knowledge
Through Teaching
Lee S. Shulman,
President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
This
volume is a contribution to the evolving scholarship of teaching. The course
portfolio is a central element in the argument that teaching and scholarship are
neither antithetical nor incompatible. Indeed, my argument is that every course
is inherently an investigation, an experiment, a journey motivated by purpose
and beset by uncertainty. A course, therefore, in its design, enactment, and
analysis, is as much an act of inquiry and invention as any other activity more
traditionally called "research" or the scholarship of discovery.
Before
launching into a detailed account of how a course can become a occasion for
investigation and therefore a contribution to the scholarship o teaching, I must
unpack and discuss both key terms of that phrase, scholar: and teaching.
I shall
begin this chapter with that discussion, then proceed t account of the variety
of ways in which the investigation of a course can proceed.
Scholarship
and Teaching
For
an activity to be designated as scholarship, it should manifest at least three
key characteristics: It should be public, susceptible to critical
review and evaluation,
and
accessible for exchange
and use by
other members of one's scholarly community. We thus observe, with respect to all
forms of scholarship, that they are acts of mind or spirit that have been made
public in some manner, have been subjected to peer review by members of one's
intellectual or professional community, and can be cited, refuted, built upon,
and shared among members of that community. Scholarship properly communicated
and critiqued serves as the building block for knowledge growth in a field.
These three characteristics are generally absent with respect to teaching. Teaching tends to be a private act (limited to a teacher and the particular sit dents with whom the teaching is exchanged). 'reaching is rarely evaluated by professional peers. And those who engage in innovative acts of teaching rare build upon the work of others as they would in their more conventional scholarly work. When we portray those ways in which teaching can become scholarship through course portfolios, therefore, we seek approaches that render teaching public, critically evaluated, and useable by others in the community.
What
then do we mean by "teaching"?' Too often teaching is identified one
as the active interactions between teacher and students in a classroom setting
(or even a tutorial session). I would argue that teaching, like other forms of scholarship, is an extended process that unfolds
over time. It embodies at lea five elements: vision, design,
interactions, outcomes, and analysis.
Teaching begins with a vision of the possible or an experience of the
problematic. The teacher holds a general view of how instruction might be improved,
and/or senses that current instruction is unacceptable or a problem in some
fashion. Vision leads to planning, the careful design of an instructional
program or activity. A course design is much like the proposal for a program
research. The design can take the form of a course syllabus, a course outline
even an argument for the development of a course. Usually, the design will
eventually take the form of a detailed sequence of teacher and student activities,
including topics, readings, projects, assessments, exhibitions, competitions, or
demonstrations. Design might also include the creation of course materials, such
as slides, demonstrations, simulations, websites, laboratories, internships, and
the like.
Once
designed, teaching must be enacted. Like any other form of inquiry the course
does not end with its syllabus but must proceed to delivery, action and
interaction. The actual enactment of a course is equivalent to the process of
carrying out a piece of research that has been designed. It is often punctuated
by unexpected and quite unpredictable developments. The enactment teaching is
complex and demanding. It demands technical skills such as lecturing, conducting
discussions, engaging in Socratic questioning, monitoring individual or
collaborative projects, assessing student learning both informally ; formally,
and making midcourse corrections as needed.
Like
any other form of investigation, teaching has outcomes. The outcome of teaching
are acts and products of student learning. A course once design( and enacted
must yield tangible outcomes, changes in students' skills, understanding,
values, propensities, or sensibilities. An account of teaching without reference
to learning is like a research report with no results. It lacks its most
essential ingredient.
Finally,
the extended act of teaching (now accompanied by learning) remains incomplete
without analysis. Again, like a research report, we are not satisfied with the
un-explicated report of results. We expect the investigator to propose a set of
interpretations of the significance of the investigation relative to the vision
that initiated the study. What does the work mean? How
does it extend the community's understanding of important questions? How will we
act differently in the future as a result of these experiences?
In
sum, a scholarship of teaching will entail a public account of some or a of the
full act of teaching - vision, design, enactment, outcomes, and analysis - in a
manner susceptible to critical review by the teacher's professional pee and
amenable to productive employment in future work by members of that same
community. The course portfolio is a particularly fruitful example of the
scholarship of teaching. And it is to a careful explication of the variety of
way in which a course portfolio might be organized, and to what ends, that I now
turn.
Course Portfolios
Conversations about teaching and
course portfolios often begin with question about what goes in them. Those are
natural, maybe even inevitable questions from the point of view of a faculty
member first thinking about developing a portfolio. But to my mind, the harder
questions one faces in developing the kind of systematic documentation and
analysis of a course that many of us are.....
The question I would therefore
like to explore is, What
can one ask about a course in order to understand the ways in which its creation
and conduct constitute a coordinated act of scholarship?
Inventing
a Genre
Note, first, that we take for granted the answers to the
above question when it comes to the scholarship of discovery. That is, we have
invented, in all of our fields, forms
of display and communication called articles, monographs, performances,
artistic creations, designs, and the like. Each field has its traditions and
conventions about the questions you ask and the forms you use to display the
fruits of scholarship for the evaluation and use of one's intellectual
community. In reading dissertations, monographs, or articles in the natural and
social sciences, for example, we have come to expect statements of the research
problem, reviews of the relevant literature, and designs for the research, in
that order, in the opening sections of the work. The expectation that we will
encounter such sections serves as a template for the reader, not to mention a
rubric for the referee or critic. Yet these are inventions, not revelations.
They are conventions of the disciplines that have evolved over time to ease the
communication of scholarship and its critical use. We do not need to read the
raw data of lab notebooks, interview protocols, or historians' index cards. Each
field has achieved an economy of inquiry and communication that compresses and
transforms the processes of investigation.
Note too that these conventions
did not appear spontaneously. They evolved slowly and painfully, over time, and
they helped shape the scholarly communities in which they evolved.
This process of inventing
conventions for capturing and conveying knowledge is the process in which
we're now engaged with regard to teaching. That's what the course portfolio (or
whatever it ends up being called) is all about: It is an effort to invent a form
of scholarly inquiry and communication through which we can represent and
exchange the scholarship of teaching, thus rendering it community property. As
one of the participants in AAHE's Peer Review of Teaching project observed,
developing a course portfolio was, for him, like "trying to write a short
story before the genre had been invented."
My argument here is that until we find ways of publicly displaying, examining, archiving, and referencing teaching as a form of scholarship and investigation, our pedagogical knowledge and know‑how will never serve us as scholars in the ways our research does. The archival functions of research scaffold our frailties of memory, and we need something comparable for the scholarship of teaching.
Moreover, intellectual
communities form around collections of text ‑ or these days, probably
hypertext. Communities are identified, that is, by their discourse; and it is in
large part because faculty (and teachers at all levels) do not have a shared language, a "discourse
community," that our practice is often so disconnected, so isolating. As I
have observed elsewhere, the "community of scholars" is alive and well
when we wear our hats as researchers and engage in the scholarship of discovery
or of integration. But as teachers we experience pedagogical solitude, we are
isolated and cut off from the other members of our professional teaching
communities.
Investigations
of the Course
So, what kinds of questions
might be used to organize and give shape to the course portfolio? What questions
can help form communities of conversation and practice? Not surprisingly, the
answer depends on the purposes for which a course portfolio has been designed,
and the audience of colleagues intended to review it. But I would propose four
different formats and themes that might be useful frameworks for our course
investigations and documentation: the course as anatomical structure, the natural history
of a course; the ecology of courses; and courses as investigations. The first three correspond to three standard
types of question that biologists ask about an organism: What are its parts, how
do they form coherent structures, and how do they function to support adaptation
and equilibrium? How does the organism develop over time, and how does it adapt
to changes and unexpected factors over time? How does the organism fit into the
larger contexts of which it is a part?
CourseAnatomy
One kind of question you might ask derives from the
anatomical or biological metaphor. Courses, like organisms, comprise a variety
of parts and structures, each associated with particular functions; one thinks
of tests, lectures, discussions, internships, projects, laboratories. All
these are elements of typical courses; they are the parts that are intended to
cumulate into a wellfunctioning, adaptive experience. And, as in a
structure‑function approach in physiology, we can ask how these individual
structures begin to interact and combine into systems. How well do the various
parts fit together, amplify one another's properties, and aggregate into an
effective experience of learning? How well do the systems work? This, then, is a
route into the anatomy of the course.
This is a useful route, I think,
because in good courses the parts mesh beautifully into a clear,
well‑articulated set of experiences. Students sense that what they are
reading, practicing, investigating, and having evaluated cohere into a
meaningful structure. The readings frame the labs, the quizzes both test and
review understanding, large projects provide opportunities for integration and
elaboration. In a well‑crafted and well‑conducted course, students
experience an aesthetic sense of wholeness and coherence.
Conversely, courses that are unsuccessful are often those in which the pieces fail to add up. The goals of the course are incompatible with the assessments used to evaluate the quality of what is learned; the creativity of the exercises and experiences is a mismatch with the material covered in lectures. Such mismatches undermine the value that students place in all the components of the course and in the overall experience it entails. Moreover, it is likely that these discontinuities inhibit student understanding and motivation.
Natural History or Evolution
A second framework for a course
portfolio is developmental or historical. We can, that is, ask about the way the
course unfolds. What is its plot? What is its itinerary? What does it look like
as narrative or as a journey? Does it have a denouement, or does it just end
with a dull thud? What kind of "course" does the course follow, and
how effective is the course in tracking the thematic purposes of the teaching
and the learning? It is worth remembering here that the first definition of course (in my third edition of The American Heritage Dictionary) is "onward movement in
a particular direction"; and that curriculum
(the term we Americans use for a program of courses) comes from the Latin currere, meaning "to run," the same root one finds
for current
The point here, as in the course
anatomy framework, is to uncover a quality five difference. Some courses read
like a great short story, building up tension creating problems, and then
providing ways of trying to resolve these problems-though, as with most good
pieces of fiction, not all of them get resolved. Other courses, however,
resemble a low-budget tour of France, where "if this i Tuesday, it must be
Chartres." Topics and themes come tumbling one after the other, with little
sense of logical necessity, narrative rationale, or cumulative sequence. It
seems likely that the course whose plot or dramaturgy is wellcrafted will hold
the attention of students more effectively and consolidate their learning more
durably. Of course, the evidence of outcomes will be necessary to transform that
conjecture into a warranted claim.
Another kind of unfolding over
time occurs across multiple generations of the same course, rather than within
any one particular offering. Thus, a portfolio can represent the evolution of the course as it adapts to the consequences
earlier experiences as well as to new situations. This form of course portfolio
might also read like the report of a course investigation, discussed further
below.
Course Ecology
A third possible framework for a course portfolio is
ecological. If the first kind of portfolio examines the course cross-sectionally,
and the second type takes longitudinal or narrative view, the ecological
perspective places an individual course within its programmatic or curricular
context. The ecological examination of the course explores where it fits in
the larger program, be it curriculum of the major or of the minor, or - what is
perhaps more important for many, our areas - where it fits into the education of
students who are neither majoring nor minoring in our areas but are taking the
course as part of a liberal education. "Ecology" means looking at the
individual course as part of a larger sys tem of instruction and learning.
Gerald Graff and others have
pointed out that academics do not often ask questions about how individual
courses fit into a larger curricular context. Such questions run against the
grain of our prevailing conceptions of faculty autonomy and academic freedom.
Nevertheless, this perspective is crucial if w are to achieve any kind of
instructional coherence at levels beyond that of the individual course. Rare
indeed is the course that can accomplish profound educational outcomes without
the help of other courses that precede and follow it. A most important
rationale for employing full-time faculty rather than the growing use of
part-timers lies in the claim that full-time faculty members create a coherent
curricular context among their offerings. An ecological perspective is
important, too, because it may help us get at ways to characterize the
contribution of an individual faculty member's work to the larger aims of the
department or program.
Course as Investigation
Finally, we can approach the
course as an investigation. The notion here is that every time we design or
redesign a course, we are engaged in an experiment. The design of the course is
in this regard a kind of working hypothesis; we teach the course hoping that
what we intend is in fact what will transpire -and knowing full well that it
won't be. Note that this overturning of expectation is what experience is all
about: Experience is what you have when what you expected doesn't happen. When
what you expected does happen - you drive to the once in the morning without
incident - you haven't had an experience, and that is mostly a blessing. Too
many real experiences would be intolerable. But experience is a source of
learning, to the extent that when one encounters discontinuities between
expectation and reality, between intention and accomplishment, critical
learning can take place. The course portfolio might usefully be seen as a
vehicle for probing such discontinuities, extracting from them important
experience-based learning for future practice.
Such a portfolio - the portfolio
as investigation - would follow the model of a research paper, raising
questions, testing outcomes against expectation, measuring achievement, and
critically analyzing the course as one would any other experimental or clinical
intervention. The portfolio might be presented as the report of an experiment.
It might also take the form of a clinical or ethnographic case. This model of
the course portfolio bears the closest resemblance to work in the scholarship of
discovery. It allows us to ask what we now know that we didn't know before about
the teaching of this area, and how we might redesign our teaching practice in
the future.
The Course Portfolio as
a Condition for Discovery
The four frameworks above will, I believe, be useful
organizers for our investigations of our teaching and our courses. They
certainly do not exhaust the possible formats for course portfolios. Moreover,
they overlap, in the sense that we can present structural, developmental,
evolutionary, and ecological portfolios as course investigations. But one issue
arises quite apart from the argument for any particular framework. It is a
familiar issue I confronted when, in 1995, I presented the report of Stanford
University's Committee on the Evaluation and Improvement of Teaching, which I
chaired, to the Academic Senate. One of my colleagues, a distinguished
department chair in the sciences, and a personal friend, got up and said,
"Lee, you know, this interest in investigating and documenting teaching
is all well and good, and in some perfect universe it would be great to do all
this stuff. But, you know, we've got research to do. It's bad enough that
teaching already interrupts our research - now you want us to do research on our
teaching. And this is just going to take too much time. It's going to interrupt
the flow of the real work of the university"
I
do not dismiss this objection, even by suggesting that it is limited to that small fraction of our
postsecondary institutions that are research intensive. I would like to address
the question by referring to the research of UCLA anthropologist Eleanor Ochs. I
heard Ochs describe her ethnographic studies of an international physics
research group whose members were divided between Los Angeles and a university
in France. I was struck by her account of what happens to this research group
when its members have to prepare a presentation for the annual meeting of their
disciplinary society. These meetings are very important for communicating one's
work to the community, and for establishing the priority and importance of one's
findings. Moreover, methods and findings must be displayed with great economy
and precision, for there is an ironclad 10‑minute time limit on each
presentation. The investigators must interrupt the flow of their research
routines and ask, What have we really learned that is important enough to pack
into the allotted 10 minutes? How c we most vividly and persuasively display
this work to our peers? Why must we stop
what we are doing to tell others our story?
I'm sure you will recognize
yourselves in this account. All working scholars are familiar with the
frustration of having to interrupt important work to writ proposals or to craft
reports for funding agents, site visitors, or presentation a an important
professional meeting. Ochs documents how having to prepare a paper not only
occludes the flow of this research group's discovery process; it also initiates
a dramatically different level of analysis, reflection, critical exam nation,
integration, and reinterpretation of the research that has been otherwise
rolling along. Suddenly the investigators have to move their deliberation; from
the private to the public domain, from sheltered discourse to public
discourse, from the hidden to the revealed. Their challenge is far greater
than sin ply to figure out which slides to use and which transparencies to
reproduce. The processes of the discovery mode give way to a more pedagogical
perspective. They not only must understand what they have learned from their
research. They must represent that understanding in ways that will make
persuasive good sense to others. Researchers must now frame their questions in
new ways, pose new challenges, and respond to new demands. The interruption of
the workflow for these purposes creates a crucible in which making sense of the
research gets tougher as it strives to become more meaningful.
I am a member of many visiting
committees and advisory boards. I've long ago concluded that the justification
for an advisory board or a visiting committees cannot rest on the wisdom of the
advice we give. The value of the visiting committee is that it obligates the
people being visited to prepare for the visit 1 stopping their work, stepping
back, and asking what it all means and how best to teach what they kn1ow to
others in their community. That interruption is critical. It leads to kinds-of
learning and reflection that would be unlikely to occur under "normal"
conditions. I have concluded that at two levels the occlusion or interruption of
the processes of discovery is beneficial to the quality of scholarly discovery
and integration. Similarly, the interruptions of typical teaching experiences
that are engendered by the need to create course portfolios can have comparable
benefits.
First, when I have to ask myself
what I know that is worth teaching, and he I can simplify, reorganize,
integrate, and represent what I know in ways that can be understood by others,
that process - like the process of the scholar preparing for a paper at a
national meeting - will loop back to shape and improve the teaching process
itself. And that is why faculty who develop course portfolios so often report that the process of
investigation, selection, and reflection entailed in writing the portfolio
caused them to change the way they teach - to be more self-conscious about
purposes, more vigilant about data collection, more thoughtful in assessing what
works.
Second, having to take our
teaching from the private to the public sphere, having to think about how we are
going to engage in it, but also how we will come to understand what we are doing
as teachers in ways that will permit us to organize what we do, display and
communicate and converse about it to our own community, will have the same kind
of improving effect for teaching that its parallel has for the improvement of
the scholarship of discovery. Occluding the flow of either research or teaching
leads to more serious reflection and analysis. These are the conditions for
effective learning from these experiences.
It is too early to tell whether
the forms of course portfolio I propose in this essay, or those that are
presented elsewhere in this volume, prefigure the genres of scholarly
discourse about teaching that will characterize the coming generation's
efforts in this area. We appear to be entering an era in which teaching in
higher education will be taken more seriously. The scholarship of teaching
appears to hold significant promise as a vehicle for fundamentally changing the
ways in which college and university educators view the chances for
reconnecting the scholarships of discovery and of integration with the pursuit
of scholarly teaching. But our attempts certainly represent legitimate movements
in this direction, worthwhile experiments in the documentation and analysis of
teaching.