Establishment of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Culture in Higher Education: Using International Experience to Examine the Promotion and Development of Taiwan's Teaching Practice Research

Since Boyer's original call to recognize the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) movement has been popular in North American higher education for the last 30 years. Taiwan's promotion of research on teaching and learning practice is in its infancy. The lessons learned from North America are critical for the development of SoTL culture on university campuses in Taiwan. This article explored three questions: (1) What is the nature of SoTL? (2) What are the major issues in the development of SoTL? (3) How can SoTL be promoted and developed in Taiwan's higher education? SoTL refers to systematic inquiry activities such as identifying problems in teaching practices, collecting data to evaluate the results of teaching interventions, and publishing the results after peer review. The process of establishing SoTL has attracted several heated debates concerning aspects such as the purpose of SoTL research, the positioning of SoTL in faculty reward mechanisms such as tenure extension and promotion, and the differences between SoTL research and educational research. To investigate the current development of SoTL in Taiwan, this paper first proposed an integrated framework for analyzing the SoTL campus culture, after which an empirical study was conducted at three Taiwanese universities. The results indicated that the development of SoTL culture in the sample university campuses is at the stage of emerging microcultures with well-established institutional support. Moreover, the three universities shared some commonalities in the promotion of SoTL culture at the micro, meso, macro, and mega levels. On the basis of the empirical findings, the paper comments on the current development of SoTL and offers suggestions for further promotion of teaching practice research projects in Taiwan's higher education.