Building Scholarly Communities: Supporting the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning with Learning Communities

Abstract: This special issue of Transformative Dialogues offers essays reporting on activities and experiences of the member institutions of a Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Institutional Leadership initiative group. Our group, Building Scholarly Communities, exists at the intersection of two major movements in higher education: Faculty Learning Communities and the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL). These two movements have guided us in our work to develop local and international multidisciplinary SoTL communities. In this introductory article, we briefly review the history and aims of the Faculty and Professional Learning Communities and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning movements in contemporary higher education. We seek to locate our CASTL group at the nexus of these larger movements, to better explicate our efforts, and to provide examples of how this combination (learning communities and SoTL) supports the advancement of teaching and learning at our various institutions.