Edinburgh Napier University

  The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is receiving increasing interest in Higher Education in the UK. Engagement with SoTL is required by a growing number of institutions as a means for academic staff to gain a teaching qualification, from certificate to doctoral level, and to show a commitment to expertise in teaching and learning in higher education. However, academic staff are often asked to engage with SoTL with little structured support. In addition, there is often the assumption, especially in research-intensive departments and institutions, that SoTL is synonymous with research, and peer reviewed publication is the prime example of evidence of engagement with SoTL. In these cases, other SoTL activities may be ignored, or sidelined.
Engagement with SoTL has its own challenges, especially if staff come from a positivistic, quantitative tradition. Staff may feel out of their depth with methodologies and literature which is unfamiliar. Despite being experts in their discipline, they are placed in the role of student once more, which may be uncomfortable for them. This paper will investigate how a group of twenty UK Life Science academics experience engagement with SoTL, what SoTL means to them, and what constitutes SoTL for them in their everyday practice, and their development as practitioners in Life Sciences teaching and learning in higher education. Using semi-structured interviews, the participants discuss the challenges they face engaging in SoTL, and how it impacts on them as academics. The results help us to understand, how staff engage with SoTL at different stages of their career, and the factors that influence how their understanding of SoTL develops. In trying to understand this development, it may be possible to offer more, and better support for staff engaging in SoTL.