Certification as a SOTL Process: Some Steps along the Way

Certificated Courses in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland, provide opportunities for faculty to develop a culture of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The Teaching and Learning Centre runs a Certificate, Diploma and Master's Programme which is grounded in a SoTL philosophy. Central to finding SoTL pathways here is the development of a Teaching for Understanding pedagogy and the use of Course Portfolio models to document, peer-review and assess learning. To date, 200 faculty have successfully completed one or more of these courses. The paper examines the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework as a useful pedagogical and disciplinary lens, designed to make teaching and student learning visible. It provides evidence from the Course Portfolio work of UCC faculty, across a range of disciplines, to support the claim that TfU facilitates a SoTL process. (Contains 1 footnote.) [For the full proceedings, Research-Teaching Linkages: Practice and Policy. Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the National Academy for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (3rd, Dublin, Ireland, November 11-12, 2009), see ED539248.]