Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Building Supportive Communities

This chapter offers reflections on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) for Early Career Instructors in Politics and International Studies. It answers four questions: 1. What is SoTL? 2. How can SoTL help your teaching practice? 3. How can ECIs build their own SoTL? 4. How can we mentor and build communities of SoTL? I write this chapter as a Lecturer at Leeds University in the UK on a Teaching and Scholarship contract. I also write as a co-director (alongside Madeleine Le Bourdon) of the Centre for Teaching Innovation and Scholarship (CTIS), one of a small number of SoTL-focused research centres based within a Politics and International Studies School. My central argument here is that we do not need to see our teaching, or our scholarship, as individual endeavours, but that we can draw from, and add to, a growing community of educators who are actively researching the pedagogies of politics (and indeed the politics of pedagogy!).