What is SoTL?

By now, you've probably seen the abbreviation, SoTL, in a number of academic publications. What does SoTL actually mean? "SoTL" stands for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, an area of scholarship that was first developed out of EL. Boyer's famous publication, Scholarship Reconsidered. Boyer put into words what many people in higher-ed already knew but were not voicing: that the more traditional definitions of scholarship were no longer accurate or fair in describing the multitudinous contributions of today's professoriate.

Boyer wrote, "Specifically, we conclude that the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions. These are: the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching"(1990 p16). It is this last function of scholarship, the scholarship of teaching, that Boyer considered to be too often ignored by academia, but so crucial to student success and involvement.

Boyer's new ideas about scholarship typify the kind of innovative approaches to education prized among The Chicago School's growing body of faculty. It is because of our commitment to fostering innovative teaching ideas and techniques that The Chicago School continues to be the school of choice over other professional schools of psychology.