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What role does academic development have to play in responding to radical cultural shifts in the global landscape? Whose voices and identities are contributing to institutional change? This reflective essay encompasses the perspectives of the four international panellists in the opening plenary of the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED) 2018 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, USA -- Torgny Roxå on ideologies; Chng Huang Hoon on agency and empowerment; Joy Mighty on voices and identities; and Mary Deane Sorcinelli on evidence and outcomes. These perspectives set the stage for the conference, and, brought together in this paper now, they address key conference themes, offer coordinates for reflection, and pose further questions about our profession.

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.

At the conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) in Bergen, Norway (October 2018), we were privileged to have heard a lecture by Elizabeth Minnich, “People who are not thinking are capable of anything: What are students learning, how are students learning it, and does it make them better people?” In November 2018, as a follow-up to the lecture, Chng Huang Hoon (then ISSOTL vice president, Asia Pacific) invited the ISSOTL community to pose the questions to Professor Minnich. Questions from four members—John Draeger, Torgny Roxå, Johan Geertsema, and Chng Huang Hoon—were received. Professor Minnich emailed her responses to each question, and over the next six months there ensued several email exchanges between each contributor and Professor Minnich, which resulted in the first draft of this conversation. With the help of the above contributors, Huang Hoon wove the separate pairs of exchanges into this conversation, which not only addresses points in her keynote in Bergen but also discusses issues in her works. Teaching & Learning Inquiry has generously provided this platform for sharing the conversation. We hope TLI readers will benefit from this effort and we welcome readers to continue the discussion.

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

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.

Using feminist pedagogy and postcolonial theory, the authors of this article focus on the (re)presentation of Asian sexualities in an Asian classroom through a feminist reading of the short prose fiction "Bandong," by Suchen Christine Lim. Constantly aware that representations of sexualities are closely linked to power, the authors question how academic knowledge can seek to (re)present Asian sexualities when that knowledge itself is deeply imbricated in power structures that empower global concepts of sexualities. The argument advanced in this article draws attention to essentialistic gender representations that continue to this day of Asian femininities and masculinities. For instance, the authors challenge the ways in which the trope of the subjugated Asian woman and man works in predictable ways to disempower Asian women and men far removed from such stereotypical locations. Critiquing dominant representations of Asian sexualities in the classroom involves teaching students to take ownership of their own reading and re-reading of texts. In addition, the article delves into how the authors attempt to make the academic package relevant to their students situated in the local Singaporean context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]