Editor's Choice: The Teaching Scholar and the Scholarly Teacher

Drawing upon more than 25 years of experience teaching at a community college, the author describes how teaching and scholarship work together to create an educational experience for students: By producing scholarly work, faculty model "what it is to inquire and examine what you know for the rest of your life." From the editors: This essay by a community college faculty member complements Clara Ford's ERIC review of the literature on scholarship in community colleges. This work originated as a presentation (in March 1999) by the author to the Virginia Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Higher Education. The version published here omits some information about the local context in Virginia and focuses on the author's view of the relationship between teaching and scholarship. In the early part of this century, my great grandfather was president of a woman's college in Petersburg, where he frequently enjoyed conversations with the president of Virginia State. Each of these gentlemen was the only person with whom the other could speak classical Greek regularly. So you see that the issues of teaching and scholarship go far back in higher education as well as far forward. I majored in the classics as an undergraduate, and with the certainty of a newly hatched bachelor's degree holder, I knew there were two things I would never do: I would never go to graduate school, and I would never teach. Such are the career plans of some 21-year-olds. Within five years, I had compromised both of those vows. I completed a master's degree in my newly discovered field of psychology and found that there was an interesting and somewhat unconventional college opening in my community; I applied for a position teaching psychology. There began for me a most fascinating and engrossing career--teaching in a community college and subsequently completing a doctoral degree--a career that now spans over 25 years, a period of time in which community college faculty have largely defined themselves. My work as a faculty member in the community college is defined by the unending challenge to reach and teach every student who comes through my door, engaging that student in the world of ideas, possibilities, arguments, explorations, contradictions, paradoxes, creative solutions that work and sometimes don't work, and all the struggle that is involved in learning something for themselves. In the end, ownership of what I know has passed to the student and becomes the unique possession of that student. A college teacher, a good one at any institution, doesn't stop with imparting knowledge as a goal, but stops only when the student has developed the ability to think carefully, to investigate, and to reach logical conclusions. At the community college, we think we are outstanding at this teaching business. We also think that we have colleagues at four-year and research institutions who are excellent at it; after all, they taught us. But for us, our hallmark is superb teaching. We have a passion for it, and we are here by choice. Our workloads are heavy, and the demands are strenuous; in fact, we typically encounter the least prepared and most academically needy students--those who need the most individual attention and the greatest quantity of all our resources. This aspect of teaching and learning at the community college deserves particular attention. To keep the best faculty in teaching institutions, it is necessary to provide the resources they and, in turn, the students need. These resources include opportunities to engage in all the academic pursuits of the mind--scholarship as well as teaching. Embedded in and inseparable from outstanding teaching is the dimension of scholarship, by which I mean "the systematic pursuit of a topic, . …