Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Projects in Plant Pathology

All faculties who have teaching responsibilities should endeavour to teach effectively. Some elements of effective teaching include conveying information to students in an organised manner, engaging students in the learning process, and sharing a sense of enthusiasm for the material being covered. However, it takes work to become an excellent teacher. Those who make the effort to become informed about teaching practices by attending seminars and workshops, or by reading articles on the teaching process, can be called scholarly teachers. Faculty members who endeavour to investigate the effectiveness of their teaching practices using accepted research methods and then make the results of those investigations public are practitioners of the scholarship of teaching and learning. In this chapter we will provide some history and justification for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) movement. We will describe three examples of SoTL projects that we have conducted in our undergraduate course, ‘Plants, Pathogens, and People’, and we will provide our opinion on why we think it is important for plant pathology teachers to become involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning.