Development the Concept of Scholarship with Emphasis on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning a Qualitative Study in the Iranian Universities

Abstract

Introduction: Discovery and knowledge production, education, application, integration and engagement are the major domain of university functions. In the resent years the faculty evaluation systems lead the academic activities to research and publication. The positive result of this situation is being seen in the increase of international scientific ranking of Iran. But because of necessity to considering the totality and integration of university functions, this is the main question that “Does the entire scholarship domain especially scholarship of teaching and learning are developing equally?” For response to the question this research was designed. Materials and Methods: This is a qualitative methods by review the literature, documentation and semi-structure interview with 17 experts in four discipline area including humanities, basic science, engineering and medical science. In this research scholarship of teaching and learning are divided to three levels: good teaching [teaching based on personal expertise], scholarly teaching [based on pedagogical content knowledge] and scholarship of teaching and learning [sharing the educational knowledge]. Encoding and Categorizing was done by content analysis of interviews. Results: The results showed that in almost of the universities, teaching and learning process are done by personal expertise and in none medical universities there isn’t enough faculty development programs to empowerment of educational profession competency. The infrastructure for scholarship of teaching and learning in medical universities was better than the non-medical. Conclusion: It Seems that, cultural, scientific, political and formal infrastructure are necessary for knowledge storing and knowledge sharing. refining the faculty evaluation and promotion system, organizing the education development centers and holding the educational innovation Festival can be effective role in creating an scholarship atmosphere for developing the teaching and learning, specially, in none medical universities.