Becoming a

SoTL Scholar

Edited by Janice Miller-Young and Nancy L. Chick

Elon University Center for Engaged Learning
Elon, North Carolina
www.CenterForEngagedLearning.org

©2024 by Janice Miller-Young and Nancy L. Chick. This work is made

available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

Series editors: Jessie L. Moore and Peter Felten

Copyeditor and designer: Jennie Goforth

The cover art was drawn by fellow SoTL scholar Kathleen McKinney,
Endowed Chair and Professor, Emeritus, Illinois State University. It was
inspired by the Zentangle® Method of pattern drawing. Learn more at
zentangle.com.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller-Young, Janice | Chick, Nancy L.
Title: Becoming a SoTL Scholar / Janice Miller-Young and Nancy L. Chick
Description: Elon, North Carolina : Elon University Center for Engaged
Learning, [2024] | Series: Center for engaged learning open access book
series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024936229 | ISBN (PDF) 978-1-951414-10-8 | ISBN
(PBK) 978-1-951414-11-5 | DOI https://doi.org/10.36284/celelon.oa6
Subjects: LCSH: Education, Higher – Research | College teaching |
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Classification: LCC LB2331.B43 2024 | DDC 378.125
 174 | BECOMING A SOTL SCHOLAR

Doing SoTL Humanities Narrative Essay

CHAPTER 10

IT WASN’T WHAT I CAME FOR

BUT I’M SURE GLAD I STAYED
From Writing Studies to SoTL
Kristin Winet, University of Arizona, US

At the coffee shop across the street from the college where we both
work, the new director of our teaching and learning center takes
a long sip of coffee and tells me that leaving her tenured job was
the best thing that ever happened to her. Even though we barely
know each other and have only worked together for a few months,
I think she knows I need to hear this. I also think she means it. Her
hair pinned in a messy bun, her arm gently draped over the top
of the chair, she seems more relaxed than I’ve been in the three
years since I’ve worked here, a small liberal arts college in central
Florida. As we sit and talk about her decision to leave what most
early-career English PhDs believe to be the holy grail to devote
herself to the field of teaching and learning, I realize that this is the
first time that someone has said what I needed to hear for so long:
It’s ok—it really is—to leave.
“Kristin,” she says, her eyes narrowing, “have you ever thought
about doing what I do?” She shrugs. “I mean, you’re probably only
a few years out from sitting where I’m sitting.”
“But I’m not qualified to do what you do,” I tell her, looking
down at my napkin.
I knew the woman in front of me had a PhD in English, like me,
and that we both loved teaching and writing. But unlike me, she was
a powerhouse in the field of teaching and learning—she’d published
books, developed programs at multiple campuses, was the editor of
 It Wasn't What I Came for but I'm Sure Glad I Stayed  | 175

a prestigious journal in the field. The field itself—was teaching and

learning even a field?—seemed as limitless as the backgrounds of the
colleagues I knew who were in it. The prior director had come
from education; the director of instructional design and technology
was an ex-music teacher; and the instructional designers were from
literature, history, Spanish, biology. What, however loosely, held
their threads together?
“You don’t need a qualification to do this,” she says. “You need
experience.” She taps her finger on the table and lists the projects
we have been working on together. Training instructors . . . assessing
program outcomes . . . writing across the curriculum . . . curriculum design
. . . faculty learning communities. . . .
Then, she tells me to look up the scholarship of teaching and
learning, better known by its acronym, SoTL. I write down the
acronym, but at this moment, the letters are just letters—they are not
yet a new career path. That day, I am so consumed by the shame
of having my tenure-track job eliminated, of losing my faculty
townhome, the life my husband and I had been building together,
the future I had been imagining for our son, who was just a tiny
flicker of life inside me when the news had come the week before,
that I could not yet see it. To the life I had been promised, I wasn’t
ready to say goodbye. But this is not the story of what came before;
that story is for another chapter, another day.
This is the more important part of the story: it is the story of
what came after. It is, in some ways, a love story—a saying goodbye
to one’s first discipline in search of a new one.
*
But first, a memory that might explain things.
First, you should know I didn’t grow up wanting to be a profes-
sor. The thought never even occurred to me until I was in graduate
school at the University of Arizona, where I taught first-year writing
as part of my graduate assistantship. I had taught English for a year at
a technical university in Colombia before that, but I had never had
any training in teaching or goals to become a professor. I wanted,
instead, to write. I had never wanted to do anything but write.
176 | BECOMING A SOTL SCHOLAR

However, by the time I finished my master’s in creative writing and

found myself wondering how one actually made a living as a writer,
it occurred to me that teaching might complement my aspirations of
a writing life. I met with our writing program director, who would
become my dissertation chair and a dear friend, and she encouraged
me to look into the doctoral program in rhetoric and composition.
The memory is this: In the first semester of the program, I was
required to attend a first-year colloquium that would serve as an
introduction to the profession. On the first day, the professor lead-
ing the colloquium proudly stated that our program had a 100%
job placement rate into tenure-track English professor jobs. “In
five short years,” he said, “you will all have tenure-track jobs, and
in ten years, you will all have tenure for the rest of your life.” He
waved his arms around the conference room, as if to show us the
kingdom we would, one day, inhabit. “There is no other job,” he
said, for emphasis, “better than this.” It wasn’t until five years later,
when I defended my dissertation, that I realized how thoroughly
I’d been entrenched in the narrative. That year, I had filled out
over a hundred job applications for tenure-track positions, and as
my fellow colleagues began accepting positions and I waited for
mine, a fear started creeping inside of me: Would one of us break that
statistic? And if so, who would it be? Would it be . . . me?
In the fall of 2010, when I entered the program, the idea of
taking a different kind of job was not taken seriously. This wasn’t
necessarily the fault of our professors—if I had to guess, it came down
to two reasons: 1) none of us were ready to accept that humanities
PhDs far outweighed the number of faculty jobs available; and that
2) our professors were themselves tenured professors. With their
benefits all around us, why wouldn’t we try to follow in their foot-
steps? I knew of a few people from programs with lower placement
rates, such as literature and creative writing, who had graduated
and taken jobs in teaching, copywriting, or marketing—fields that
needed the skill sets PhDs are known for: the ability to synthe-
size information and communicate main ideas, to train others, to
research and present data, to propose new ideas. However, I also
 It Wasn't What I Came for but I'm Sure Glad I Stayed  | 177

knew that for these folks, the dream still tightly held its grips: it was
no secret they were actively trying to publish and routinely sending
out hundreds of cover letters every year in the hopes that they, too,
might land back in an English department.
By the time I started my job in central Florida, I’d been institu-
tionalized in the worst possible way, coming to believe, as Leiff et al.
(2012) discuss in their work on faculty identity, that the only job I
was designed for was a traditional faculty position. As they suggest,
our academic identities are constructed by three main factors—
personal, relational, and contextual—and if I could have ticked off
all the boxes they present as being the most salient, I would have
ticked them all. How we perceive our capabilities, make sense of
prior experiences, and come to terms with our competing identities
(personal) all play into our sense of belonging, how we believe we
stack up to others, and how we perceive others (relational) within
wider departmental discourse and, of course, the work environment
(contextual) (Leiff et al. 2012, 212). Though these factors are not
absent in other industries, this triangle seems particularly critical
in academia, where many of us are taught to believe that we are,
quite literally, our jobs.
That’s the thing about social identity. As Tajfel and Turner
propose in their early work on social identity theory (1979), we are
socialized to believe that we belong to certain groups—and these
groups are what give us both a sense of pride and self-esteem as well
as a sense that we fully belong to the social world. When a group
no longer includes you, what then? In my last year in Florida, as
the writing program fell apart and I became less and less present
in the department, I often found solace in going down to the lake
and watching the snakebirds stretch their wet wings as far as they
would go and sit there until their feathers settled back into place
and they could fly again. Some days, I saw myself in those birds, a
strange animal who wasn’t sure if her wings would dry, or where
she’d fly off to once they did.
*
178 | BECOMING A SOTL SCHOLAR

We returned to Arizona when my son was three months old.

It had been nearly a year since the coffee shop date when I’d met
with my colleague and written down the four letters that would
ultimately change the direction of my life. Though it was terribly
painful, I had committed to finishing out my contract that year,
teaching my classes during the day and interviewing for English
faculty jobs on nights and weekends while I entered my second and
third trimester. But my heart was just not in it anymore; I felt as if
I had gone back in time, unearthing drafts of cover letters, teach-
ing philosophy statements, job talks, and teaching demos I’d excit-
edly and optimistically written the year I graduated. My husband
searched for jobs too, hoping this would be the year his applications
would float to the top of the pile of literature PhDs. Though I did
manage an offer at a highly competitive college in North Carolina,
I would ultimately turn it down: no spousal hires, they told us; not
here. My husband pushed for us to return to Arizona. We have
friends there, he told me. We can teach there until we figure out
what’s next, he said. There might be opportunities we can’t even
imagine yet there, he said.
A few months later, after we’d moved back across the country
and settled into a small adobe bungalow close to campus, I finally
settled into a new life of teaching half-time, helping out with some
administrative projects when I could, writing when I could, and
caring for our newborn son. Then, in late spring 2020, nearly all
of the lecturers in the department who were not on multi-year
contracts lost their jobs; the projected enrollment for fall 2020 had
dropped to unprecedented low numbers and the department could
not support the faculty. The director of our program called me to
tell me that she had heard from the office of the provost that an
application had recently been accepted to bring an international
professional development network for STEM graduate students
and postdocs, the Center for the Integration of Research, Teach-
ing, and Learning (CIRTL), to campus. The office was looking for
someone to start the first chapter here in Arizona, and because of
my background, she’d recommended me.
 It Wasn't What I Came for but I'm Sure Glad I Stayed  | 179

I looked up the organization. At this point, my relationship with

STEM teaching and learning was limited, although not completely
non-existent: plenty of the book clubs and pedagogy workshops I’d
taken included at least some STEM faculty, and the writing work-
shops I held always had at least one STEM faculty member in them. I
had also taught technical writing to STEM students for years, which
sometimes required us to check in with STEM departments to see
if our curriculum was complementing theirs. I pulled up my CV,
let my eyes wander through my own past, a series of bullet points
I’d designed so carefully for my future, and wondered if this was
really the time to explore the four letters I’d scribbled down on a
napkin nearly two years ago. Could I actually help STEM students
on their own teaching journeys? Did I have the credentials, and
would anyone trust me? Even more importantly, could I find the
courage to step into the unknown again, fully embracing the fact
that I didn’t know what the outcome would be?
When I got to my publications, something occurred to me.
There, the English Journal article my husband and I wrote, it wasn’t
just about translation activities; it was a study that sought to under-
stand if having international students bring in poetry from their
home countries increased motivation in a basic writing course. The
Kairos article I co-wrote with friends from graduate school wasn’t
just about infographics and technical writing; it showed how pilot-
ing a unit on infographics increased students’ ability to articulate
the value of digital literacy. A study I was currently working on
with the assistant director of online writing—about how teaching
a pre-designed online course can increase confidence in teaching
multimodality—was nothing if not SoTL. Like Nowell describes
realizing in chapter 2 as she reflected on her career in nursing educa-
tion, I, too, was starting to practice SoTL without even knowing it.
Across my CV, I saw pieces of a larger puzzle I’d never seen before,
giving me a blueprint for SoTL before I was aware of it. This kind
of “retroactive realization” is not uncommon for many of us, and
it is something I often share with graduate students who are trying
out classroom-based research for the first time.
180 | BECOMING A SOTL SCHOLAR

How does one know if opportunity is knocking? I wondered.

How does one repair a professional heart that has been broken?
I am still not sure I can answer these questions, but somehow, I
knew I wanted to try. For the first time, I felt empowered to make
a choice that was right for me, not a choice I’d been made to believe
was right for me. For the first time, I felt ready to step away from
the discipline I knew—the discipline that raised me to think like a
teacher—and to walk toward a field that felt familiar but thrilling,
unmapped, uncharted.
*
The program I was hired to develop trains graduate students,
postdocs, and early-career faculty for teaching in higher education.
Though local institutions are responsible for developing their own
programming, the CIRTL network emphasizes teaching-as-re-
search, which, as an entry point to SoTL, focuses on teaching
instructors to become reflective teaching practitioners by doing a
small project on student learning using empirical research. Visu-
ally, the teaching-as-research process (widely known as TAR) is
often represented as an iterative, recursive cycle, much like the
writing process is. To complete the program, students publish or
present on the results of their projects in much the same ways that
SoTL scholars do. In a sense, CIRTL prepares them to think like a
professor who is committed to their craft, a skill that might one day
lead them toward a lifelong interest in the scholarship of teaching
and learning whether they decide to become SoTL practitioners or
simply engage with the literature from time to time.
I had the language to talk to writing instructors, but I did not
yet have the right words to talk about teaching in STEM. To find
out how graduate students across disciplines are taught to teach, I
needed to find mentors who, as McCollum writes in chapter 14,
would let me watch “from the sidelines” so I could “take measure of
the expectations and norms of the field” and find my footing among
a sea of research traditions, disciplinary perspectives, and teaching. I
asked my colleague in the teaching center if I could guest enroll in
her learner-centered teaching course; I took CIRTL’s foundational
 It Wasn't What I Came for but I'm Sure Glad I Stayed  | 181

course, An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM

Teaching; and I asked my new colleague at the University of Iowa’s
CIRTL program if I could sit in on her TAR workshops for a
semester. With each of these experiences, I tiptoed my way into the
Zoom calls, worried that everyone would find out that my eagerness
was actually profound insecurity. But I also left them wondering
if I had simply misunderstood myself for a long time. Maybe I can
do this, I remember thinking after one of Iowa’s workshops about
using SoTL scholarship to justify a project’s research question. It
reminded me of all the lessons I’d taught in my composition courses
about finding sources, using quotations to support an argument,
and following citation practices. I had this knowledge within me.
What I didn’t have, though, was a sense of SoTL scholarship
as it existed outside of my first discipline. This took some time:
there were the interdisciplinary journals (College Teaching); the disci-
pline-specific journals (Engineering Education); and even podcasts
(Elon University’s 60-Second SoTL). As we started to build the
CIRTL program, I found myself skimming through all kinds of new
publications, seeking voices that could point the way for us. Cox’s
work (2003, 2016) on leadership roles and faculty learning commu-
nities was instrumental as we thought about inviting more graduate
students to participate in our program; Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s
(2019) work on threshold concepts and writing-across-the-curricu-
lum (WAC) initiatives took center stage as we designed the writing
track for the CIRTL certificate; and Henderson, Beach, and Famia-
no’s (2009) article on a co-teaching model in a physics department
allowed us to envision and pilot a postdoc co-teaching program.
As I became familiar with how SoTL scholars explored peda-
gogical challenges and implemented studies to improve them, I,
too, wanted to study our programs. On weekends, I read up on
SoTL methodologies to see if my work analyzing student writing in
writing programs could be a good foundation for preparing survey
and focus group questions, coding data, and identifying patterns.
So far, so good, I remember thinking one night, until I came to a
chapter on quantitative data and realized I didn’t know what a t-test
182 | BECOMING A SOTL SCHOLAR

was nor how to do a linear regression. After taking a deep breath,

I told myself, maybe stick to interviews, focus groups, surveys for now?
The world of SoTL has opened up a whole new world for me as
a writer, too. I am learning how complicated and fascinating it can
be to co-author publications with colleagues and work with schol-
arship across disciplines. Sometimes, I feel anxious when I see heavy
data-driven studies, so I try to look at them with an eye toward
what the researchers learned—and I encourage our students doing
teaching-as-research projects to do the same when they come across
writing outside their disciplinary expertise. When my co-authors
and I meet, we talk about style choices, tone, voice, and how best
to visually present data; we grapple with whether or not to use the
passive voice, how we should organize the introduction, and if we
should use IMRD or a narrative to tell the story. Sometimes we end
up with Frankenstein monsters of paragraphs—which is, I think,
one of the joys of SoTL. So often in the humanities, we write alone.
As I sit and reflect on this major transition in my life, it seems
like I should add that transitioning to SoTL is not simply a matter
of bringing ourselves to a new context; it is, as McCollum (chap-
ter 14) articulates, not simply a “switch” but instead a multi-year
process that simultaneously involves “unlearning” our first disci-
pline’s biases and becoming “incrementally aware of the field and
its practitioners.” It requires questioning what we know from our
disciplinary training (for instance, what is the difference between
engaged teaching and active learning, and in which contexts do
audiences use which terms?), broadening our scope to look at higher
education more holistically, more horizontally, and recognizing that
while the research methods we’ve learned in our first disciplines
can travel with us into SoTL, other methods might also be worth
learning. Graduate school me who was completely immersed in
rhetorical analysis of digital travel media could never have imagined
herself doing interview protocols and writing Likert-scale questions,
but as with any first love, the first is not often the last, and neither
is less rigorous than the other.
*
 It Wasn't What I Came for but I'm Sure Glad I Stayed  | 183

Over time, I would come to see “the coffee shop moment” as

a pivotal one in my professional life, a moment that would come
to help me redefine what I meant to the academy—and what it
meant to me. Recent theorists, such as Brew (2008), suggest that
identities are much more flexible than our academic tribes taught
us to believe, and that academics “[re]define themselves as they
negotiate among contexts” (434). Forming an academic identity is
an ongoing, lifelong process that is shaped—and reshaped—based
on where we find belonging. But this can take time. As we know,
academic identity emerges from the socialization into academic
communities, and these are deeply ideological spaces often full of
conflicting messages about who we should be and who we actually
want to be (Gaus and Hall 2015).
Becoming a writing program administrator was never part of
what I imagined my dream job to be, but it taught me a very
important lesson: I have always thrived in liminal spaces. It was
often the highlight of my day to meet with librarians or instructional
designers or the director of our teaching and learning center and
talk about curriculum and faculty development and assessment. I
enjoyed the puzzle of looking at data to make informed decisions
about programs, of working with people who understood math to
design metrics that would see into the minds of our student writ-
ers, and I enjoyed seeing STEM faculty change their perspectives
about writing in our WAC workshops. For many of us, turning to
SoTL is a negotiation of who we are and where we belong—and
often means a realignment of our academic identities as teachers,
academic developers, students, and scholars (Simmons et al. 2013).
But that’s all part of a larger narrative. What’s more important
to this story is that there is an after, even if it takes time to see it—
and that former faculty can thrive in SoTL positions. Sometimes, I
look back on the old me and wonder who she might have become
if things had turned out differently: if I’d written that book on the
rhetoric of digital travel writing; if I’d gotten tenure at a liberal arts
college; if I’d decided not to have children and focused entirely
on my research. However, though I do wonder about the parallel
184 | BECOMING A SOTL SCHOLAR

life I could have had, I don’t miss it anymore. What I think about
instead is what I might have missed out on had I not stepped into
unfamiliar terrain: the people across campus I’ve gotten to work
with; the graduate students and postdocs I’ve gotten to learn from;
the courses and workshops on writing and inclusive pedagogy I’ve
gotten to facilitate; the research we’ve done to find out what the
graduate students, postdocs, and faculty are learning and find valu-
able. Though I am nowhere near a SoTL scholar, I know that with
time (and maybe a statistics course?) I’ll start to see myself as one. As
the title suggests—and as many of the contributors to this volume
no doubt attest—becoming a SoTL scholar wasn’t exactly what I
came for, but as it turns out, this “liminal space outside of traditional
disciplines” is a world of exciting and creative possibilities (Huber
and Morreale 2002, 21; Little and Green 2012; Little 2014).
About a year ago, I wrote my old coffee date an email. I was
a little nervous to send it (after all, would she remember me?), but
I wanted to tell her that I had taken her advice—and that she had
given me a new start when I’d thought my world had ended. I
wanted her to know how much that conversation meant to me. She
wrote me back right away and told me of course she remembered
me and she had a feeling this would be the right path for me. Since
then, we’ve written to each other lots of times, and I’ve taken her
suggestions on pedagogy books, asked her for feedback on projects
I’m working on, and talked about new writing projects.
And that led to this chapter.

A special thanks to Dr. Nancy Chick for meeting me for coffee nearly five
years ago and giving me the courage to explore a new world.

Reflection Questions
• What part of the narrative resonated most with you? Why?
• If you were to tell the story of your own academic journey,
where would yours begin?
• Have you ever struggled with an aspect of your professional or
academic identity? Where and how did you look for guidance?
 It Wasn't What I Came for but I'm Sure Glad I Stayed  | 185

• What advice would you have given to the author in the coffee
shop?

References
Adler-Kassner, Linda, and Elizabeth Wardle. 2019. “Using a Thresh-
old Concepts Framework to Facilitate an Expertise-Based WAC
Model for Faculty Development.” In (Re)Considering What We
Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and
Literacy, 297–312. Utah State University Press.
Brew, Angela. 2008. “Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Affiliations
of Experienced Researchers.” Higher Education: The International
Journal of Higher Education Research 56: 423–28.
Cox, Martin. 2003. “Fostering the Scholarship of Teaching through
Faculty Learning Communities.” Journal on Excellence in College
Teaching 14 (2/3): 161–98.
Cox, Martin. 2016. “Four Positions of Leadership in Planning,
Implementing, and Sustaining Faculty Learning Community
Programs.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 148: 85–96.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20212.
Henderson, Charles, Andrea Beach, and Michael Famiano. 2009.
“Promoting Instructional Change via Co-teaching.” American
Journal of Physics 77 (3). https://doi.org/10.1119/1.3033744.
Huber, Mary Taylor, and Sherwyn P. Morreale, eds. 2002. Disci-
plinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Menlo
Park, CA: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching.
Leiff, Susan, Lindsay Baker, Brenda Mori, Eileen Egan-Lee, Kevin
Chin, and Scott Reeves. 2012. “Who Am I? Key Influences on
the Formation of Academic Identity within a Faculty Devel-
opment Program.” Medical Teacher 34 (3): e208–e215. https://
doi.org/10.3109/0142159X.2012.642827.
Little, Deandra. 2014. “Reflections on the State of Scholarship in
Educational Development.” To Improve the Academy 33 (1): 1–13.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tia2.20005.
186 | BECOMING A SOTL SCHOLAR

Little, Deandra, and David A. Green. 2012. “Betwixt and Between:

Academic Developers in the Margins.” International Journal for
Academic Development 17 (3): 203–15.
Simmons, Nicola, Earle Abrahamson, Jessica M. Deshler, Barbara
Kensington-Miller, Karen Manarin, Sue Morón-García, Carolyn
Oliver, and Joanna Renc-Roe. 2013. “Conflicts and Configura-
tions in a Liminal Space: SoTL Scholars’ Identity Development.”
Teaching & Learning Inquiry 1 (2): 9–21. https://doi.org/10.2979/
teachlearninqu.1.2.9.
Tajfel, Henri, and John Turner. 1979. “An Integrative Theory of
Intergroup Conflict.” In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Rela-
tions, edited by William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, 33–47.
Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.