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Why teacher-scholars matter: some insights from FSSE and NSSE.

Article Excerpt
The key to educational excellence lies not in the memorization of vast



amounts of information, but rather in fostering habits of mind that enable students to continue their learning, engage new questions, and reach informed judgments. --ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, College Learning for the New Global Century

THROUGH ITS Liberal Education and America's Promise initiative, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC & U) boldly declares that, in the twenty-first century, all students must master the arts of inquiry and innovation. Essential to this task are faculty members who work with students to help them acquire such requisite skills and competencies as identifying and analyzing problems, finding and evaluating evidence, and developing and weighing competing interpretations and conclusions. Toward this end, AAC & U recommends that institutions increase the number of opportunities for students to work with faculty members and others on research. When they collaborate with faculty on research, students learn firsthand how experts think about and solve practical problems; their teachers become role models, mentors, and guides for continuous, lifelong learning. The model for such collaboration has long been the teacher-scholar (American Council of Learned Societies 2007).

Teacher-scholars are committed to high-quality undergraduate education, pursue an active program of research and scholarship, and are presumed to enliven and enrich their teaching and the student experience by incorporating insights from their own research into their instructional activities, student advising, and related work. Teacher-scholars are also expected to promote deep approaches to learning through activities that encourage students to process information in ways that help them make qualitative distinctions about the merits of data-based claims or the persuasiveness of logic-based arguments. Contrasted with "surface-level processing," which emphasizes rote learning and memorization techniques, "deep-level processing" focuses on both substance and the underlying meaning of the information (Biggs 1989; Marton and Saljo 1976; Ramsden 2003). Also characteristic of deep learning are the integration and synthesis of information with prior learning in ways that become part of one's thinking and approaching new phenomena and efforts to see things from different perspectives. As Tagg (2003, 70) puts it, "deep learning is learning that takes root in our apparatus of understanding, in the embedded meanings that define us and that we use to define the world."

The teacher-scholar model is conceptually appealing. But does the presence of such faculty match the rhetoric of the model? That is, at institutions where faculty members report participating in activities characteristic of the teacher-scholar model, are students more engaged overall,...

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