The SoTL Scholar’s Individual and Collective Journey: Navigating a Cognitive and Emotional Transition

Abstract

The article examines the dispositions that grow out of, and help navigate, the journey of the SoTL scholar from individual practitioner to collective participant in SoTL communities of practice. This transition, both cognitive and emotional, re-configures SoTL scholars’ research across the constitutive disciplines, epistemologies and methodologies of the field. Underpinning the process is a relational, non-performative SoTL culture which counters the negative effects of the neoliberalization of higher education. The analysis of dispositions derives, in part, from our individual and collective SoTL research. However, we have also woven in theoretical and empirical research from SoTL, decolonial and feminist studies, and social learning theories to explore the dialectical relationship between such features of the SoTL journey as; the cognitive and emotional, SoTL in the North and the South, performativity and caring, and disciplinary and transdisciplinary.