Developing scholarship of teaching and learning through a community of enquiry

A growing interest in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in higher education has created a need to seek opportunities for its development both within and across disciplines and institutions. However, rewards for individual competitiveness in research publications, including the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), tend to discourage collaboration, which we argue could be highly conducive to the development of SoTL. This paper makes a contribution to these ideas by proposing the value of working together in a collaborative community of enquiry (CoE) in order to take forward SoTL in higher education.  We draw on Cassidy et al.’s (2008) and Christie et al.’s (2007) seven elements of a CoE to explore our own experience of forming a CoE emanating from an inter-institutional professional course on teaching and learning, which assisted us to collaboratively contribute to SoTL. This approach for new collaborative potential can be useful to others seeking to transform established practices, particularly in the present South African context.