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This article offers narratives of individual journeys through the scholarship of leading in three different contexts—Asia, Europe, and Africa. Together, these narratives argue for the need to make explicit the diversity of practices of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), with each practice inextricably tied to specific geographical, sociocultural, and political contexts. In offering these contextual specificities, we call on all who engage in SoTL to exercise reflexivity in thought, language, and action—to actively foreground our mental models and assumptions about SoTL and what it looks like for ourselves and for others; to sensitively engage scholars who do not share our context; and to strive toward an inclusive mindset and practice that will situate all of us within the “international” of an international organization. We highlight the problems of language, meaning, and translation; and the challenge scholars from “different shores” face in engaging with “other” shores.

A review of The Contemplative Mind in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning by Patricia Owen-Smith, Indiana University Press, 2018.

A review of A Review of Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust: An Integrative Approach

The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) began in 2004, constituted by 67 scholars, mostly from English-speaking countries located in the Western hemisphere. Since then, the world has become increasingly global and borderless, and students’ movements across continents in search a good education have meant that today’s classrooms are, in varying degrees, heterogeneous. Yet SoTL discourse—the metaphors employed, the issues identified, and SoTL methods or approaches to classroom practice—have remained largely Western in orientation. This paper describes three types of exclusions of Asian participants and perspectives in mainstream discourse on the SoTL: geographical isolation, methodological solipsism, and ideological exclusion. Through a review of the dominant scholarship, we argue that an international association like ISSOTL must take active steps to consciously acknowledge the need for alternative voices that are located outside its immediate realm and that the differences in practice, participants, and the politics of culture in locations outside the West need to be taken into consideration, or ISSOTL will risk losing relevance for a greater part of world. Or to put it more positively, ISSOTL has much to gain by paying attention to and not denying the existence of such enriching, if less familiar, perspectives.

A Review of Doing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Mathematics edited by Jacqueline M. Dewar & Curtis D. Bennett