Making Your Case: Ten Questions for Departments and Individuals Building an Argument for Work in Discipline-Centered Education

Abstract

In our chapter, "Is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning New to Chemistry?," Dennis Jacobs and I outlined the different ways in which education-focused faculty members have been represented in departments of chemistry (Coppola & Jacobs, 2002). Briefly, these include (a) a long-standing tradition of chemistry professors publishing in the 86-year-old Journal of Chemical Education, (b) the rise of the “chemical educators,” as a division of the American Chemical Society, (c) the growth of the Chemical Education Research community (similar to the disciplinary education research communities in physics and biology), and (d) those who have been exploring their students’ experience through the scholarship of teaching and learning. Our reply to the titular question (“perhaps”) is as true today as it was then. In the meantime, the American Chemical Society has issued an updated statement on scholarship in chemistry (ACS, 2007), and a task force on hiring and promotion in chemical education has published guidance to faculty candidates who are seeking education-related positions (Bauer, et al., 2008). I support strongly the non- separatist tenet of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) conversation, that is, where all professors are, by definition, collectively responsible for advancing teaching and learning in more intentional and less haphazard way than most currently are (Coppola, 2007). In this essay, however, I wish to take up a related issue, namely, the integration of education-focused faculty positions within the traditional disciplinary unit