Evidence-based narratives to reconcile teaching practices in academic disciplines with the scholarship of teaching and learning

Connecting discipline scholars with the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is accepted as an essential part of professional academic practice across the higher education sector irrespective of discipline. To connect meaningfully with teaching practice, SoTL needs to be translated by the discipline scholar and narratives related to the discipline context constructed. Previous work on disciplinary diversity suggests that there is a need to take a more grounded approach to the development of discipline-based educational scholarship. How SoTL is defined is critical to how SoTL is interpreted within discipline contexts and some of the numerous models and definitions of SoTL transcend disciplinary boundaries, but there is no single agreed definition of what is meant by SoTL. This paper reviews some of the models of scholarly teaching and raises some questions about how the links between pedagogical theory and discipline teaching practice are made by discipline scholars. We advocate that by providing discipline scholars with ways to map and then collectively view their practices within disciplines that this is likely to provide information essential for exploring SoTL in each discipline and reconciling SoTL with academic disciplines.