Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered

We usually trace the formal origin of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to American educator Ernest Boyer’s 1990 report Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Scholarly approaches to teaching certainly predate Boyer, and have developed along other trajectories in other parts of the world, but many view this publication as instrumental in laying the foundation for SoTL as we know it today. Boyer identified different types of scholarship that constitute academic work:

    1. Discovery –investigation, what we think of as traditional academic research
    2. Integration – synthesis, the work of making connections between facts and across disciplines
    3. Application – practice, using knowledge to solve consequential problems outside academia
    4. Teaching – the work of not only educating students but also enticing future scholars

Boyer considered the scholarships of discovery, integration, application to be well established in academic life, if differently prioritized. He argued that in addition to these more traditional pursuits in academic work, we should recognize a fourth scholarship of teaching, as teaching is the activity that sustains and renews all other types of scholarship.

What we urgently need today is a more inclusive view of what it means to be a scholar – a recognition that knowledge is acquired through research, through synthesis, through practice, and through teaching. We acknowledge that these four categories – the scholarship of discovery, of integration, of application, and of teaching divide intellectual functions that are tied inseparably to each other. Still, there is value, we believe, in analyzing the various kinds of academic work, while also acknowledging that they dynamically interact, forming an interdependent whole. Such a vision of scholarship, one that recognizes the great diversity of talent within the professoriate, also may prove especially useful to faculty as they reflect on the meaning and direction of their professional lives. (pp. 24–25)

 

Further reading:
Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. New York: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Open access: Scanned PDF available here: https://eric.ed.gov/?q=scholarship+reconsidered&ff1=autBoyer%2c+Ernest+L.&id=ED326149 Links to an external site.