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Abstract
South African university academics are faced with many new challenges, one such being how they should respond to the pressure of publishing. At the same time, academics also have to devote time to teaching and service work, all competing responsibilities as universities frequently reward these obligations disparately — research and publication being rewarded more favourably. I argue that tensions between the three competing terrains might be overcome if scholarship is viewed as the essence of the academic enterprise. My view of scholarship is informed by the broader view (research and publication) espoused in the Carnegie Foundation report Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate (Boyer, 1990), that identifies four separate but overlapping functions of scholarship: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. More particularly I reflect on the idea of a scholarship of teaching and raise some implications that this notion could have for teacher educators' role(s) in a contemporary South Africa. In the light of an ongoing struggle over its meaning, I suggest that attention be shifted from a need to define the scholarship of teaching to an exploration of its deconstructive potential.