Scholarship, experience, or both? A developer's approach to cross‐cultural teaching

Abstract

Ernest Boyer's (1990) call for teaching to be recognized as a scholarly activity has resonated with faculty developers around the world in their efforts to convince faculty colleagues of the need to take teaching more seriously. Boyer's insistence on research as the cornerstone of ‘the scholarship of teaching’ is, however, not always part of actual faculty development practice. As developers, in other words, we sometimes espouse what we do not practise. Programmes and activities are often experiential and technique‐oriented rather than based on findings from the published research into student learning. The case of a workshop on cross‐cultural teaching in an Australian law school is used to support an argument for combining both experience and scholarship as an effective means of getting faculty to reconsider their approach to teaching students from diverse cultural backgrounds. At the same time, it is recognized that differing institutional and national contexts (for example, in Australia and the USA) can and do affect the ability of individual developers to put into practice the principles of scholarship they themselves promote.