Letters Across the Atlantic: A Hermeneutic Exploration of SoTL and the Academic Self

Abstract

We invite you to join us in our exploration of ideas, conducted in a series of letters written between the authors over a three month period––and here we begin, by writing directly to you. To introduce ourselves, we are two Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) researchers, teacher educators, and faculty developers from different national contexts who began an ongoing transatlantic conversation after meeting at a conference in 2022, the International Society for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) in Kelowna, Canada. Both of us are from educational research backgrounds, coming later to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)––a closely connected but not identical field. SoTL can be thought of as practitioner inquiry that focuses on student learning, typically conducted in a post-secondary context, but it also encompasses how teachers approach their work in classrooms––these are two sides of the same coin.