Abstract
This is a large-scale, multi-author collaborative autoethnographic study exploring the concept of building a tangible teaching commons on the example of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Commons Conference. The project organizers sought to provide a big tent and extended an invitation to attendees to respond to a series of writing prompts about their conference experience. Collaborative writing took place asynchronously over an approximately 60-day period following the close of the conference and generated ≈ 20,000 words. This corpus became the basis for a three-stage emergent coding process, conducted by the four-member steering commit-tee, which led to the identification of three primary themes from the collective experiences of the 2023 SoTL Commons Conference attendees: SoTL as pedagogy, SoTL as a community of scholars, and SoTL as scholarship. Despite some limitations to what the sense of commons represents, the project highlighted the respondents’ spirit of appreciative inquiry, a signature mindset of SoTL and engaged participants who were new to the field. We argue that it acted as a form of academic hospitality itself; enabling the sharing of practice, deepening of reflection, strengthening of research skills, fostering of social connections, and, by extension, the advancement of the field as a community of scholars.
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Recommended Citation
Cruz, Laura; Grodziak, Eileen; Botnaru, Diana; Walker, Deborah; Maurer, Trent W.; Altany, Alan; Abraham-Settles, Betty; Amos, Michelle; Bunch-Crump, Kimberly; Cook, Alan; Eisenreich, Heidi; Gregory, Diana; Howell, Michael L.; James, Ioney; Landge, Shainaz; Lynes, Jane; Pompey, Joyce; Shapiro, Brendan L.; Smith, Allison; Thomas, Brenda; Turner, Felicity M.; Williams, Ellen H.; Gerchman, Robin; Horne, Miiriam; Hughes, Richard; Kahl, Alandra; Layson, Rebecca; Lemmons, David X.; Stone, Jeffrey A.; VanDeusen, Elizabeth; and Zhang, Yue
(2023)
"The Hospitality of the Commons: A Collaborative Reflection on a SoTL Conference,"
International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:
Vol. 17:
No.
2, Article 7.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2023.17207
Supplemental Reference List