Cartographies

Introduction

Elkana’s assertion of the need to rethink faculty and faculty life when undertaking a project aimed at re-visioning doctoral education gives us a glimpse into the immense complexity of any attempt to rethink graduate education more broadly. Any attempt to disrupt the ‘hierarchical atmosphere’ of social relations within doctoral education – and to reconfigure relations within a ‘dialogic mode’ – challenges the prevailing narratives of what constitutes the intellectual work of graduate study. Hence, though some conditions of graduate education may be changing in the global landscape of the twenty-first century, most doctoral students find their identities still forged within the traditional model of the research university, a model which privileges disciplinary knowledge production over teaching knowledge. ¹ The pressure to re-examine the role of doctoral education in America, particularly in the humanities, challenges us to find new ways to support graduate students in building a knowledge base for teaching at the same time as they are acquiring disciplinary subject matter expertise. ² The scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) offers one way to address these concerns, providing a model for research universities to develop a multi-leveled framework to support future faculty preparation.

First, integrating a SOTL component into the fabric of graduate study in the humanities can help cultivate the intellectual curiosities and appetites of graduate students interested in the theoretical as well as practical dimensions of pedagogy and teaching. Because SOTL requires that scholars bring their disciplinary and professional habits of mind to bear on an investigation, it makes visible the conceptual affinities between research into disciplinary teaching and learning and other types of disciplinary research (i.e. concern for the relationship between ideas in a field of inquiry, desire to generate new funds of knowledge, etc.). Second, because any such integration would probably engender reflective practice, it could work in tandem with and complement a myriad of already existing supports for professional development in teaching practice (from classroom instruction to curriculum design to assessment). Finally, because SOTL implicitly demands teachers become more cognizant of, and conversant with, the pedagogical content knowledge of a field, it can concomitantly support a graduate student’s ‘learning’ of respective disciplinary epistemologies and methodologies. ³ That is, SOTL can provide another means for articulating tacit knowledge of how we come to think and to act like an expert. The question that arises, however, is which institutional sites might be best suited or hospitable to integrating a SOTL component into graduate study, especially given that Elkana’s call explicitly requires rethinking positionality. Can a ‘critical, reflective, and dialogical mode for conducting intellectual work’ (Elkana, 2006: 91) be established within disciplinary or programmatic arenas whose very logics beg the question of warrantable research and scholarly productivity (even if faculty embrace the idea of more symmetrical power relationships)? Perhaps. But, as Livingston so succinctly notes, there ‘are intimate connections between … location and locution’, and ‘ideas must also be sufficiently “disarticulated” from their social environments to permit them to reshape the very settings they emerged from’ (Livingston, 2003: 7). Subsequently, while SOTL can work within departmental or programmatic frames to enhance future faculty preparation, SOTL might be more effective in changing the ethos of teaching in graduate education outside such frames. Indeed, when integrated within the contours of a third space, ⁴ SOTL may afford us a more fertile ground for rewriting the narrative of the place of teaching in graduate study generally.

In the following sections, I briefly discuss the contexts in which SOTL can be integrated into graduate education to support future faculty preparation in teaching, and then elaborate how such integration might be enacted in third spaces that are explicitly focused on undergraduate education, such as centers’ housing programs specific to undergraduate general education or residential colleges. Drawing on theories from both postmodern geography and postcolonial studies, I argue that such spaces function as sites for authorized transgression in that, while they are outside the formal structure of graduate education, they are, nonetheless, inside the institutional context of the university. Furthermore, because the social interactions that occur in third spaces are usually cross-disciplinary and/or cross-college collaborations, these sites afford graduate students an alternative venue for grappling with emerging understandings of disciplinary knowledge production. That is, because collaborations in such spaces require acts of translation, they afford graduate students an opportunity to make visible to themselves as well as their peers their tacit knowledge of disciplinary expertise. ⁵ I then turn to data collected from a multi-year project at a research-1 institution in the United States, offering a cartographic analysis of integrating SOTL into doctoral education in one third space. ⁶

Orientations

In recent years, scholars and administrators in both the US and the UK have begun experimenting with integrating Hutchings and Shulman’s (1999) vision of the scholarship of teaching and learning into graduate study, trying to build models or case studies that demonstrate the efficacy of SOTL in improving doctoral education (Gale and Golde, 2004; Kreber, 2009). For example, in their work at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Gale and Golde proposed a ‘four steps’ model for such integration that essentially distills the more general tactics and strategies of SOTL work and inserts them temporally into a program of graduate study. In the initial stage of this model, first-year doctoral students would grapple with important questions of field (its history and problems) in a specific course that could then be aligned with pedagogical training. In the second stage, graduate students would have ‘guided’ opportunities to examine and critique SOTL projects – both those in process and those completed – of faculty mentors. In the third stage, graduate students engage either collaboratively or individually in independent research projects. Finally, in more of a turn than a step, Gale and Golde would place the graduate students in cross-disciplinary meetings and forums in which they could actively participate in discussion and review of such scholarly work. A second model proffered for integrating a SOTL component into graduate education builds on already existing departmental courses on teaching in a given discipline or field. Existing courses could be revised to focus on SOTL questions specific to teaching in the disciplinary context (essentially collapsing steps one and three in the Gale and Golde model), such as history or philosophy (Roxa et al., 2008). This model foregrounds the ways in which disciplinary epistemologies – and the structure of disciplinary knowledge – interface with teaching and learning. Yet another variation on this model suggests that centers for teaching and learning might be appropriate sites for introducing graduate students to SOTL in field or discipline-specific contexts. In this model, graduate students would have access to the same set of workshops and services that university faculty have, only now with particular departmental slants. ⁷

Implicit in each of these models are issues of positionality, location and locution, Elkana’s and Livingston’s respective points; subsequently, each returns us to the geographies of graduate education. By virtue of their institutional placement, these sites may or may not be able to offer graduate students sustained access to faculty mentors, and, more importantly, sustained access to classroom practice – a necessary ground for SOTL. Similarly problematic is that most of these models remain linked to departments, colleges, or programs in which sustained attention to teaching and learning, much less scholarly investigations into practice, can be (and often is) regarded as a digression from progress to the degree – the real work of graduate education. One way to negotiate these barriers is to re-situate SOTL within a third space that is both linked to and disarticulated from the dominant structures and discourses of graduate study.

The notion of the third space is most often associated with postcolonial studies in the humanities, although it has also been articulated by a number of fields, including postmodern geography (Harvey, 1990; Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1989, 1996). In each instantiation – from the physical or concrete to the abstract or discursive – third space remains a liminal space, one in which dominant structures can be resisted, overturned, or appropriated and re-configured. In History: Geography: Modernity, for example, Soja writes of a ‘distinctively postmodern and critical human geography … taking shape, brashly reasserting the interpretive significance of space in the historically privileged confines of contemporary critical thought’ (Soja, 1989: 137). Calling on cultural and social theorists to bring a critical sensibility to the ‘spatiality of social life’, Soja argued the need for geographers, among others, to think of the social production of space in the same ways that we think of historicality and sociality. Such re-conceptualization of space within the disciplinary contours of geography was more than a call for a critical awareness of the link between geographical (and topographical) knowledge of space (or of the political control over territory) and sociality; it was an exploding of a dominant conceptual lens for understanding the power relations existent within spatial contexts. ⁸ As such, it pushed geographers to move beyond the field’s traditionally understood object of inquiry to consider the power relations embedded within individual and collective spatialities. Soja sharpened this general recognition of the importance of the production and reproduction of space and spatiality in his work Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996). ⁹ Here Soja turned to the work of Lefebvre to define the notion of third space as ‘a purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings’ (Soja, 1996: 2). In this configuration, third space collapses the simplistic either/or dichotomization that so often defines how we think of physical space and of social space. In short, Soja’s project is an argument for ‘how physical space operates in the socialization of human interaction and, concomitantly, how social spaces can shape the physical’ (Moje et al., 2004: 39). Within such spaces one can occupy a position that is both strategic and flexible: that is, one can have both ‘clear practical objectives and preferred pathways’ as well as take ‘lateral excursions to other spaces, times, and social situations’ (Soja, 1996: 122).

Scholars of postcolonial studies have likewise noted the saliency of the concept of third space for constructing identities, or, more precisely in this frame, subjectivities. However, postcolonial scholars are ostensibly concerned with the ways in which the material and social production of space and spatial relations are discursively linked. Writing in The Location of Culture, for example, Bhabha defines third spaces as discursive sites in which the ‘meanings and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity’ (Bhabha, 1994: 37). For Bhabha, third space is a point of slippage or rupture within the dominant narrative, an opening in which differences can emerge. He writes:

What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narrative or originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments of processes that are produced in the articulations of cultural difference. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – individual and communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (Bhabha, 1994: 1–2)

Bhabha’s third space thus ‘constitutes the discursive conditions’ that ensure that symbols or signifiers, or other signs of authority can be ‘appropriated, translated, and read anew’ (Bhabha, 1994: 37).

Admittedly, Bhabha is primarily concerned with the ways in which various subjectivities are constituted within colonial discourses, and with deconstructing the sign of the colonial subject position. Literary, religious, and historical texts have power and authority because they fix the identities of the colonized under signs of otherness, and because they function according to set rules of recognition. Paradoxically, though, such texts (and signs) are also always fraught with contradictions. It is this aspect of Bhabha’s third space – the discursive terrain holds the possibility for initiating new signs – that makes it a flexible construct for integrating SOTL into graduate education in the humanities. If we figure discursive space within the material, and see them as mutually reinforcing, then SOTL in a third space works strategically to root the rewriting of the dominant narrative of teaching and learning. For example, professional identities are usually forged within the departmental seminar, the professional conference or meeting, or the laboratory; and they are partially articulated through the archive-able text: the scholarly paper, the public presentation, and the scientific report. And these archive-able texts, more often than not, exist within a binary system or discourse: research versus teaching. SOTL enterprises can be correspondingly figured as the discursive within the material; they too can be marked by social practices and interactions that are organized and experienced through signs (or performances) that are research-driven, product-oriented, and peer-reviewed. But SOTL in the third space changes the conditions of the production of these signs and performances, and it changes the embedded power relationships. Consequently, the signs produced in a space, a space where the disciplinary ‘imagination can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives that heretofore had been considered by the epistemological referees to be incompatible’ (Soja, 1996: 5), potentially afford graduate students a path for re-visioning the dominant tale of teaching and learning in their studies. In this new narrative, pedagogical content knowledge, teaching practice, and evidence-based learning become viable parts of professional identity formation and scholarly research agendas.

While third spaces can be found throughout the research university, sites that focus explicitly on undergraduate education may be uniquely positioned to be catalysts for using SOTL as a strategy for change in the culture of graduate education. Such sites have both intellectual and institutional capital: they have standing in the disciplinary departments (i.e. faculty expertise); they have standing in the university (i.e. curricula); and they have distinct missions (i.e. undergraduate education). Most importantly, though, they are seen as anathema to graduate study – as other. Thus while the baccalaureate degree program itself might function within the academic institutional context, it can also constitute a third space when set in opposition to graduate programs or research departments. This outsider status is sometimes reinforced by the fact that such programs are often physically located ‘elsewhere’ on campus (housed in different buildings and have no graduate program), and thus effectively de-territorialize the social interactions that occur within them. The nascent professional identities that graduate students bring to such spaces, while remaining intimately connected to those being cultivated in their respective home departments, are thus also disconnected from them. Consequently, undertaking SOTL in the third space re-positions graduate students by shifting their expectations of themselves as producers of disciplinary knowledge. That is, by giving them the liberty to see a teaching problem not as one to be re-mediated but as an intellectual puzzle to be engaged, SOTL also gives them the latitude to consciously widen their professional horizons. The point then is not to relegate the integration of SOTL into graduate education to teaching units or programs, but, rather, to open up a space in which undergraduate education has transparent intellectual and institutional capital, and in which graduate students will have the opportunity to find ‘conversational partners’ with whom ‘ideas about teaching and learning can be developed and maintained’ (Roxa et al., 2008: 280). And it is to open up a space in which graduate students learn to aggressively interrogate the very processes of producing disciplinary knowledge in which they are engaged. For, as Mills and Huber note, the ‘reticence of academics to trade or exchange ideas about educational practice’ is not attributable to disciplinary identity politics alone; it is also attributable to ‘a disinclination amongst most established disciplines to critically examine the conditions of their own production and reproduction’ (Mills and Huber, 2005: 10).

Of course, merely identifying a third space (particularly if it is a unit responsible for some amorphous general education curriculum) in which graduate students can engage in SOTL does not magically reshape the topography of doctoral education in the humanities. To this end, a third space must be understood as more than a clever trope or conceit. It must be understood, as Soja and Bhabha both suggest, as a critical space and a discursive terrain for action that allows graduate students to occupy multiple subject positions simultaneously – novice teacher, acolyte of the discipline, emerging scholar of teaching and learning. Most importantly, it must be a space in which pedagogic enactment can be approached with the same intention and rigor as other research-driven projects in doctoral study. The following section presents a mapping of one such space, the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities (CISAH) at Michigan State University, and offers a cartographic analysis of the systematic integration of SOTL into the education of graduate student instructors within it.

Longitudes

Enacted over the course of four years, the CISAH SOTL graduate education project sought to change the ethos of teaching and pedagogy within the culture of graduate education in arts and letters by integrating SOTL into an existing institutional frame. ¹⁰ One of three centers for integrative studies at the university, CISAH worked with faculty and graduate student instructors from different disciplines (art, history, music, English, American studies, and philosophy) within the College of Arts and Letters to design and teach an integrative general education course, IAH 201: The US and the World. However, CISAH also existed outside the departmental structure (i.e. its curricular mandates and funding were external to the departments), therefore outside mainstream graduate education. Additionally, CISAH was physically set apart by virtue of being located in a separate building on campus from that which housed departments in the College of Arts and Letters. Subsequently, while highly visible within the institutional landscape – all undergraduate students were required to take IAH courses – the Center afforded a liminal practice space in which graduate students could engage in teaching, and in thinking about teaching and pedagogy.

During the course of this study, IAH 201 instructors taught from a common syllabus defined by core readings, set assignments and exams, and shared criteria for assessment of student learning. ¹¹ While the graduate instructors did have some flexibility in enacting the class-to-class ‘teaching’ of the material in the units, and even in designing one of the course assignments (within the parameters of the unit objectives), they were still bound by the objectives and parameters of the course, including the use of common instructional materials (CD-roms, videos, etc.). Moreover, because the graduate instructors themselves were immersed in their doctoral studies, they were simultaneously engaged in study focused on the acquisition of specialized content knowledge. Subsequently, the challenges for teaching the course were two-fold: the first centered on a general lack of teaching experience and pedagogic knowledge; the second centered on unfamiliar subject matter. For example, the integrative character of the IAH 201 course inevitably meant that the instructor’s own area of study (English, American studies, history) might or might not be aligned with the subject matter content of one or more of the thematic units, and definitely not aligned with all. In an effort to support graduate students, the Center required them to attend weekly meetings with a faculty of record (FOR) where they could discuss both instrumental problems in teaching and problems specific to course content. ¹² It was in this context that the SOTL graduate education project took seed. Instructors who had previous experience teaching IAH 201 were invited to participate in a special FOR seminar dedicated to SOTL, each semester for the duration of the project. ¹³ The only criteria for application would be that the graduate student wished to spend time theorizing her or his own teaching practice by investigating a problem in teaching and learning in a systematic fashion.

In some ways, the IAH SOTL seminar was designed along the lines reminiscent of that proposed by Gale and Golde: its agenda included a set of readings intended to provide ground for thinking about teaching and learning as intellectual work; a set intended to introduce theories of learning; and a set intended to introduce models of disciplinary research in SOTL. To define the concept of SOTL, for example, we read a sampling of ‘foundational’ readings on SOTL, on multiple types of intelligence, and on assessment of learning. These readings were juxtaposed against select readings on theories of learning and cognition, and readings that modeled disciplinary scholarship in teaching and learning in the humanities. In addition, the project expected participants to grapple with a teaching problem framed as a researchable problem in teaching. However, unlike other models of integration, the IAH SOTL seminar invited graduate student instructors to undertake these investigations independent of a faculty mentor, though within the parameters of a common course. In this configuration, graduate student instructors could investigate a problem unique to their own teaching experiences – theorize their own practices – but do so in the context of the collective experience and in the spirit of collaborative inquiry. ¹⁴ The expectation was that the participants had a common if general understanding of course objectives as well as shared repertoires for teaching, and that the SOTL seminar would function as a site in which to examine the production of teaching and learning specific to IAH 201.

Not surprisingly, because the graduate student instructors were from a wide range of disciplines and fields in the arts and humanities (i.e. history, English, American studies, philosophy), they held different disciplinary perspectives on what constituted student learning in the IAH 201 course. Negotiating these disciplinary differences within the context of our SOTL discussions required making visible the extent to which expectations of student learning in the course were tied to unacknowledged, and often unexamined, epistemological biases towards subject matter. In the course of explaining their individual stances towards what constituted learning, the instructors exposed the regularized norms and protocols of their respective disciplinary communities without erasing them. As Northedge and McArthur, among others, have noted: ‘to acquire facility in using the meaning systems available within a disciplinary discourse, the student needs to accumulate familiarity with the ways of the disciplinary community – its discourses and practices’ (2009: 112–13). But within this space the graduate student instructors found themselves having to consciously move in and out of these very communities.

Among the richest articulations of this choreography are the SOTL framing and re-framing texts produced by the graduate students. The nexus of social interactions (i.e. seminar conversations) and discursive acts (project memos), these archive-able texts reveal patterns of both teacher development and epistemological growth predicated on integrating SOTL into graduate education within a third space.

Latitudes

One of the first significant patterns of twin growth in teacher development and in epistemological awareness emerges in the framing of teaching problems as researchable SOTL inquiries: the recognition of disciplinary-inflected expectations of what constitutes learning. Each iteration of the seminar opened with the graduate students sharing stories of teaching IAH 201, stories that more often than not centered on what students did or did not learn. These stories readily established the relevance of each graduate student’s general question to her or his personal development as a teacher, as well as signaling the merit of the question as a researchable problem in teaching and learning in IAH 201. Yet, even though these stories were situated within a common curricular experience, and voiced as such, everyone heard them in a slightly different key. This distinction helped foreground the extent to which the graduate student instructor’s assessment of student learning in the course was predicated on disciplinary literacies and competencies. To re-fashion the general problem as a SOTL query specific to the IAH 201 course at hand meant having to confront what learning outcomes were actually expected. In the subsequent framings of their respective stories as SOTL questions, the graduate instructors were thus attentive to the relationship between disciplinary-inflected pedagogies in the context of integrative learning. ¹⁵ Essentially the graduate instructors became cognizant of the degree to which socialization into any disciplinary community involves the replication of knowledge production processes prior to the acquisition of understanding. In this respect, SOTL in the third space of the seminar prompted the graduate student instructors to step away from the ‘preferred pathways’ and protocols of their disciplinary communities and to consider ‘lateral excursions’ (Soja, 1996: 122).

For instance, a doctoral student in rhetoric and writing told numerous tales of failed small-group discussions in her IAH 201 classes and hence wanted to study how to make such discussions more productive sites of learning. This is a generic and instrumental question that indicates a desire linked to overall teacher development. In the process of framing the problem as a SOTL question within the parameters of integrative learning, however, the graduate instructor revealed that she understood ‘effectiveness of discussion in promoting learning’ in very particular terms – that of rhetorical praxis. In another instance, a doctoral student in history told similar stories of ‘unproductive’ classdiscussion; yet, from her perspective as a historian, the problem was cast in terms of ‘students’ inabilities to engage primary documents’. In each case, the quality or character of discussion that was seen as a measure of learning wasexplicitly tied to disciplinary practice. If discussion were to remain the barometer of learning to be documented and assessed within SOTL, the instructors realized they would need to be clearer on the markers they were employing.

A second and tangential pattern of teaching development and epistemological growth to emerge in the framing and re-framing process centers on the issue of ‘seeing’ student work as evidence of deep learning – as ‘data’. The disciplinary research practices that most of the graduate instructors were familiar with, from archival research to close readings and textual analysis, did not prepare them to think of student work as data, much less to regard this work as evidentiary of learning. ¹⁶ That is, no matter which type of SOTL question the instructor posed, documenting student learning was made more complicated by an inability to determine an appropriate method for answering the question. Thus in addition to not being acquainted with the general educational literature on teaching and learning, the graduate students lacked a clear understanding of what the ‘object’ of such research would be. For example, in her initial framing memo, Christine, a doctoral student in English, writes of her concern with the quality of learning stemming from class discussions: ‘I want to discover the best method of conducting discussions that will allow my students to gain more … both in terms of course knowledge and in analytic skills.’ She continues, expressing her fears that in a large class those that do not participate may not be ‘getting anything out of discussions’. Then in a subtle yet crucial turn Christine speculates that her existing repertoire for scaffolding discussion may be failing not because of her unfamiliarity with course content but because IAH 201 had ‘no defined content’. What she identifies as an issue of integrative teaching further reveals the extent to which her own bias towards objects of study (e.g. literary texts, historical documents, etc.) and disciplinary epistemology is invisibly linked to her ability to regard student work in IAH 201 as evidentiary of learning.

Over the course of the SOTL seminar, Christine’s thinking on these points shifts, as we see in the re-framing memo. Here she writes that her initial suppositions on what constitutes ‘defined content in IAH 201’ are quite different from what she finds in a ‘traditional literature course’, and ‘perhaps that is why my attempts at scaffolding discussion have failed’. Drawing on notes from our seminar conversations and her teaching journal, she concludes: ‘Myhypothesis now is that my students think differently about class discussions than I do.’ Whereas Christine regards discussions as openings for synthesis and analysis of the text at hand, she believes students see them as merely as methods of accountability: ‘they think I’m testing whether or not they’ve read the documents, or whether or not they’ve read them “correctly”.’ More importantly, the language of the re-framing memo reveals another shift in how Christine is approaching student work in the course, assessing it for learning at the same time as mining it as data for her SOTL investigation. In this instantiation, she appropriates terms such as ‘hypothesis’, ‘taxonomy’, and ‘meta-reflection’ in an attempt to parse her own thinking processes; and she also employs the rhetorical markers of her respective disciplinary discourse community, such as ‘close reading’ and ‘hermeneutics’. She writes:

I now want to reframe my question about teaching and learning in IAH 201 so as to test my hypothesis … I’ve developed a strategy for assessment that involves close reading of in-class writings … a sort of hermeneutics of student writing.

In this reconfiguration, Christine intentionally aligns disciplinary practices with course-specific integrative learning objectives, a turn that overtly signals a growing awareness of the complex ways in which epistemologies interface with pedagogic practice.

A third significant pattern of teaching development and epistemological growth evident within this space is the (re)employment of disciplinary rhetorics and signifying practices. For example, when Tricha (a philosophy doctoral candidate) outlined a teaching problem centered on the absence of ownership in student writing as made evident by the lack of use of the first person (‘I’), the historians in the seminar collectively rejected her proposition. They rejected her question as a researchable problem in teaching and learning, not because it was too instrumental in nature, nor because they thought it not applicable to IAH 201, but because of their own discourse practices (and understanding of the knowledge structure of the discipline of history). Historical inquiry and analysis involved the particular use of rhetorical markers: the doctoral students in history simply did not allow students to use the first person in writing papers because they wanted students to ‘focus on providing evidence rather than simply presenting an opinion’. Yet when pressed to deconstruct the epistemological underpinnings of this stance, many were taken aback and surprised. In another instance, a historical disciplinary practice again became a flashpoint. While intellectually appreciating the distinctions between disciplinary rhetorics and discourses, Jeanine had privileged historical protocols as generalizable to general critical thinking and literacy skills – in this instance, the use of note cards. And again, what became evident over the course of re-framing her SOTL question in the seminar was that Jeanine’s own emerging understanding of the discursive and material practices of the professional historian informed her understanding of critical thinking more broadly. By situating the problem of ‘teaching the note cards’ within SOTL, Jeanine began to recognize how she herself came to do the work of disciplinary practice prior to understanding it – and, subsequently, to look anew at historical knowledge production.

The written memos reiterate this pattern and, in so doing, foreground the ways in which discursive practices and acts of translation functioned in tandem in the seminar to engender epistemological reflexivity. For example, Jaime (a history doctoral candidate) opened her framing memo not only by identifying her teaching problem, but by assessing it and proposing a potential ‘remedy’: ‘students have difficulty “reading” primary documents … likely because of my own structuring class discussions’. She thought a more ‘balanced mix of content and critical thinking questions would help students see the connections between content and context more easily’. Beyond the presumption that the teaching problem was something to be remediated, the memo reveals that Jaime’s understandings of content and critical thinking were anchored in her emerging expertise as a practitioner of history. She writes:

My initial teaching question focused on how to structure class discussion so that I offered a balance of content and critical thinking questions. When I began the project I was concerned that students’ lack of historical knowledge prevented them from being able to fully engage with the texts and think about them in a meaningful way. My project began because I doubted students could ever appreciate a text without understanding the context in which the author constructed his or her arguments. Initially, I thought that the best way to elicit this information from students might be to comb through the documents asking directed questions while adding historical background as needed. What I found was that we were spending too much time summarizing …

In the re-framing memo, Jaime rethinks her initial position, concluding that she has misidentified the problem (i.e. it was not one of balancing ‘content and critical thinking questions’). What she actually wanted students to learn was how to ‘use’ the information embedded in historical documents to a particular end. She writes:

While thinking about this problem and attempting to pay close attention to these patterns throughout the semester, I have come to the conclusion that balancing content and critical thinking questions may not be the problem at all. What I really want students to do is learn how to use the information in the documents to comprehend the connection between historical events/phenomenon and American political, social and economic thought … I notice now that once students realized they understood the documents on their own, they seemed more confident in answering the complex questions about the broader significance of a piece and how it is connected to other documents and unit themes.

Eventually, Jaime refocused her SOTL question to investigate which types of classroom activities and/or questions would best help students recognize what they understood the documents to mean before interrogating intertextual linkages and historical significance. By focusing on an assignment designed to help students use the documents to think about larger ideas, events and phenomena (i.e. how performing close readings were and were not linked explicitly to historical context), she also began to appreciate the ways in which student work could be evidence of learning in SOTL.

As Jaime and the other graduate student instructors tacked back and forth between their written memos and the seminar conversations which unpacked the logic of her SOTL questions, deconstructing the disciplinary inflections and biases embedded in learning in the IAH 201 course, they also laid bare the cognitive turns taken in their own graduate work and research. On the one hand, then, the social interactions and discursive moves that occurred within the SOTL seminar foreground the extent to which ‘context is significant in conditioning how disciplinary differences are articulated’ (Trowler, 2009: 186). On the other hand, these interactions and moves accomplished a great deal more in that they prompted the graduate students to reconsider the curious relationships between teaching, learning, and scholarly research. ¹⁷ SOTL in this configuration not only engendered growth in teacher development and epistemological reflexivity, it yielded a fertile ground for re-narrativizing the place of teaching in their professional lives.

Future mappings

If integrating SOTL in third spaces can help us re-imagine the landscape of graduate education in the humanities in some small way, it will also be in a grand way. It will be structured yet flexible; intentional yet imaginative; apparent yet disguised. And if, as Soja, Bhabha, Elanka and Livingston all suggest, in one manner or another physical space and social space are intimately linked to discursive practices and subject positions, then the odd, in-between third space of the institutional landscape can be a rich site for such integration. The Center for Integrative Studies in Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University has its own topography, the contours of which sustained one mapping of SOTL affecting a cultural shift in the ethos of graduate education. Other third spaces will, no doubt, yield distinctive cartographies. Yet, no matter the geography, SOTL offers graduate students a concrete way not only to engage in the reflective practice necessary for teaching development but also to approach undergraduate student learning as meritable research. Thus, most importantly, suturing SOTL into third spaces presents us a tangible opening for rewriting the grand (and often myopic) narrative of the work of graduate education. In this new narrative, teaching and research are not mutually exclusive but, rather, are braided strands at the heart of the intellectual project of graduate education in the twenty-first century.