Computer Science Teachers as Amateurs, Students and Researchers

Boyer coined the term "scholarship of teaching", but the term has become ambiguous. In this paper, I nominate my own three categorizations of university computing educators: amateurs, students, and researchers. Amateurs may be excellent with students, but they do not routinely engage in dialog with other teachers about teaching. Students embrace the general theories of education, and write papers about how they have reconstructed their teaching in accordance with those theories. Researchers are engaged in the development and dissemination of a disciplinespecific pedagogy. Researchers do not reject the general education literature, but neither do they simply accept it. Instead, that literature offers theories that may or may not be verified in the laboratory of their own class room. They are involved in a discipline-based research community that transcends institutional boundaries. I illustrate these categories with examples from my own teaching, as an amateur, student, and researcher.