Towards Building a Community of Teaching and Learning in a Research-intensive University

Abstract

This poster will showcase the design and development of an e-newsletter as an essential step towards building a community of teaching and learning in a research-intensive University. The e-newsletter publishes articles contributed by faculty members on their teaching and learning practices. Up to the moment, it has published 40 articles. Teaching and learning receives increasing attention in today’s higher education due to the demand for high quality teaching by multiple stakeholders. There are also calls for a more integrated practice of research and teaching in research-intensive universities. However, any initiatives to enhance teaching and learning are seen as challenging in research-intensive universities, in which teaching needs to constantly compete with disciplinary research. Research on teaching or Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has not yet been valued or seen as proper research in most research-intensive universities. Before committing to promoting SoTL, one university in Hong Kong takes an initial step to build a community of practice on teaching and learning, aiming at fostering dialogue about teaching. An e-newsletter is seen as a viable approach to creating such a dialogue. As expected, there are many challenges involved in developing an e-newsletter specifically focused on teaching and learning. The two most difficult challenges are to solicit articles from faculty members and to ensure that the articles are written in a reflective manner. Following a first-person action research approach, the author documented the process of designing and developing the e-newsletter at a number of stages (e.g., establishing, launching and promoting, maintaining) and reflected on the actions taken and responses received from faculty members. During the process, feedback was collected from e-newsletter contributors (as well as those who declined to contribute). The actions and reflections at each stage (or cycle) generated improvements and new initiatives in the next stage. This ongoing journey generates a number of findings. First, the article writing needs to be in a co-constructing manner. Many academics with excellent teaching competence were uncertain about how to write about their teaching. Around 50% of the contributors felt difficult to highlight a key aspect of their teaching. The writing thus became much more effective if it is coconstructed between the teacher and the editor. Second, the co-construction needs to start as early as possible as it was often the idea that mattered most rather than the writing. Third, feedback to the contributors should be evidence-based with teaching and learning literature support. Fourth, the e-newsletter should be promoted as a practice for writing about teaching, which would ultimately benefit the contributors for preparation of teaching portfolios. In addition, the institution’s continuous development in its teaching has a considerable influence on faculty members’ attitudes towards the enewsletter. The study witnessed a change in submission before and after the launching of a teaching accreditation programme in the institution. This study contributes unique insights to the literature by providing a detailed reflective account on the development of an e-newsletter as an essential step towards building a teaching and learning community.