Valuing the Engaged Work of the Professoriate: Reflections on Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered

This article discusses faculty engaged teaching and research as an imperative function of the academic institution in the 21st century. Reflecting on Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered, this article traces the history of the public nature of higher education and its role within institutions today and discusses the crucial role of promotion and tenure in advancing the engaged work of faculty.

Don Hellison’s Scholarship Reconsidered

Purpose: Don Hellison’s scholarship made a lasting impact on the academic literature, policy, and practice of physical education and sport pedagogy. In this essay, we summarize and interpret Don’s perspective on scholarship, his own work, and the literature that it spawned. Method: Don’s work, published and unpublished, as well as the rapidly expanding body of teaching personal and social responsibility literature was analyzed using Boyer’s comprehensive framework for scholarship reconsidered. Results: Don was a strong advocate for broader definitions of scholarship in kinesiology, whose work integrated the scholarship of discovery, integration, application, and teaching. This influence remains evident in the teaching personal and social responsibility literature. Discussion/Conclusions: Amid calls for broader and more flexible definitions of scholarship in higher education, Don was a role model who demonstrated what is possible in this regard in the field of kinesiology.

Riding the Fourth Wave

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is an important international movement in higher education. It is a continuously developing field that is traced back to Ernest Boyer's 1990 report, “Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate,” which outlines his argument for an understanding of scholarship that includes a scholarship of teaching. This chapter traces the history and development of SoTL as a research domain since 1990. It includes specific attention to the rationale and dimensions, the debates and critiques of the field, as well as the potential future directions

Documenting and Disseminating Unconventional Scholarship

The Journal of Scholarly Engagement was developed to provide faculty an academic outlet to document and disseminate scholarship primarily in Boyer’s domains of application and integration. The foundation of this new academic journal is Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. In 1990, Boyer and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching responded to the then, and current, predominant definition of scholarship—one that primarily involves conducting discovery research and publishing results (Boyer, 1990; Moser, 2014). In rethinking what it meant to engage in scholarship, Boyer proposed a more comprehensive model, extending beyond a view limited to scholarship of discovery (i.e., empirical research), to recognize scholarship of integration, application, and teaching. This new model (frequently termed the “Boyer model”) expanded the definition of scholarship beyond merely “conducting discovery research” and “publishing results” to fully embrace the broader purpose of the professoriate.

Research activities in the teaching intensive university: Scholarship reconsidered & repositioned

A quarter of a century has passed since Professor Ernest L. Boyer's landmark book, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, challenged the publish-or-perish status quo that dominated the academic landscape then and has continued to do so through a variety of research league-table games. His powerful and enduring argument for a broader approach to academic roles and rewards within universities continues to be important as higher education providers balance the varying expectations of their role in society. This paper is more an examination of the provenance of the Boyer model than a review of the book.

SoTEL: Toward a Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning

The publication of Ernest Boyer’s innovative study, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990), sparked sixteen years of academic studies, high level conferences, and campus teaching reforms in a movement that has come to be known as the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). During this same period, a rapidly developing study and practice of digital pedagogy, to be discussed here under the heading of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), generated its own extensive theoretical and practice-oriented literature. This paper is part of an ongoing work that explores points of intersection between SoTL and TEL in order to lay the ground-work for the latter as scholarship in Boyer’s sense of the term, that is, SoTEL.