A SoTL Primer

How many times did you introduce SoTL to someone new in the last year, and what did that introduction look like:  a definition, a description, a metaphor, a citation, a workshop, a book, a website?

I dream of a SoTL primer, a little anthology of key readings that would together provide some coverage, depth, and range of the field. I imagine a simple cover, a size that fits comfortably in my hands and lightly in my bookbag, lovingly worn pages with dog-eared corners and post-it notes throughout, and oh that book smell.

On a whim one day, I emailed the following question to an unscientific sampling of friends and colleagues:

If you were putting together a SoTL primer of 1 to 10 titles to introduce colleagues to the field, what would you include?  

Tiffany Doherty (a graduate student in sociology and the first SoTL Research Assistant I hired at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning) is filling out the citations, working with lists that look like everything from “Barr & Tagg” to “Randy’s seminal article on ‘problematizing’” to a few fully formatted bibliographies. (Thank you, Tiffany!)

I’ll put the full list on my SoTL Guide once it’s ready, but for now, here are a few highlights:

So far, I’ve received 22 additional lists (plus mine). The lists were contributed by the following (in alphabetical order):  Dan Bernstein, Sean Brawley, Sarah Bunnell, Lendol Calder, Nancy Chick, Chng Huang Hoon, Tony Ciccone, Peter Felten, Mick Healey, Bettie Higgs, Mary Taylor Huber, Pat Hutchings, Sherry Linkon, Aaron Long, Karen Manarin, Beth Marquis, Janice Miller-Young, Gary Poole, Torgny Roxå, Nicola Simmons, Kathy Takayama, Roselynn Verwoord, & Brad Wuetherick  

Compiling all 23 lists into a single bibliography, there are 112 citations.

Here’s a word cloud of all of the authors in the comprehensive list. (The bigger the font, the more citations in the comprehensive list.)

Here are the Top Ten Citations from the comprehensive list.

Since five of the items in the Top Ten are entire books and one is a website, here’s the list of the Top Ten Short Pieces that would fit into my imaginary SoTL primer.

I’ll share more highlights and combinations soon, as well as the comprehensive list.

What’s your list?  Post it below, and I’ll share regular updates.