International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 2010

This multidisciplinary, international community of scholars will convene to share evidence-based insights and theoretical frameworks that enhance our understanding of student learning and guide our teaching practices. Incorporated into this year’s conference, is the 18th Improving Student Learning Symposium, an established annual event on the international calendar organised by the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University.

The major aim of the Improving Student Learning Symposia is to provide a forum, which brings together those who are primarily researchers into learning in higher education and those that are primarily practitioners concerned more pragmatically with improving their practice.

Conference Themes

The conference has as its theme a dialectic, chosen to stimulate discussion and debate amongst the international SoTL community:

• Global theories: are there theories of learning and teaching that can be demonstrated to transcend national, cultural and/or disciplinary differences?

• Local practices: How important is context? To what extent, if at all, do national, cultural and/or disciplinary differences inevitably affect approaches to pedagogy and student learning outcomes?

In addressing the conference’s main theme participants are invited to submit proposal for presentations that focus one of the following:

• Teaching and learning Focussing on what teaching, curriculum and/or assessment practices are being engaged in order to have impact on student learning. This theme can include looking at particular interventions and how this impacts upon varying learning outcomes, or addresses particular teaching issues and how changing teaching practices impacts upon student learning.

• Organizational change Focussing on larger issues. What are the impacts of policy reforms, culture changes and contextual variations? Working at Strategic and policy level and how this impacts upon changes in practice, teaching and learning across the institution and in the disciplines.

• Faculty development (supporting changes in teaching and learning practice) Focussing on activities that demonstrate how organizational changes/faculty development activities (culture changes etc) are used to/ or impact upon changes in practice, teaching and learning. It should include the varying activities that ‘faculty developers’ use.