The Five Grand Challenges of SoTL

On the Integration of ISSOTL’s Five Grand Challenges in SoTL Commons Programming

Diana Botnaru, Program Chair, SoTL Commons Conference

At the 2024 SoTL Commons, I attended the workshop “Building Collaborations and Value through SoTL’s Grand Challenges”. The authors, Lauren Scharff, Nancy Chick, Jennifer Friberg, Diana Gregory, Trent Maurer offered a brief overview of the ISSOTL Advocacy Committee’s process of identifying SoTL’s Grand Challenges (GC) and led participants in an activity where “they worked together to articulate how their work aligns with any of the GCs, plan how to leverage the GCs to build value for their work, and find new collaborators or networks to sustain their engagement with SoTL”. Inspired by their presentation and the significance of GC, it struck me that the GC can be leveraged to scaffold presentations at the SoTL Commons conference. As we are implementing this idea at the 2025 SoTL Commons conference, I would like to share some important insights that this process uncovered for me.  

Firstly, it exemplified the direct connection between attending conference sessions and the evolution of professional practice. Over the years, I often heard from conference attendees that they learned a lot during SoTL Commons. However, I don’t get to see, measure or evaluate any systematic change and can only attest to anecdotal cases. Yet, here is a clear example of how a significant change in practice happened because I attended a specific session. To me, it clearly underscores the transformative potential of a SoTL conference not only in my own practice (how I personally view SoTL), but also for SoTL as a field (how a long-standing SoTL conference views scholarly work).

Secondly, Peter Felten’s (2013) seminal work on good principles of SoTL advocated for the “adequately public” nature of SoTL. Perhaps we can take this further and recognize the imperative to create a shared space where we can align conference dissemination efforts with the globally recognized challenges supported by our international professional organization. If we, as a community of scholars, engage with the GC as part of our conference experience, we can enhance our understanding of critical issues in SoTL, we can support a more coordinated advocacy effort for SoTL as a field and we can better advocate for our own scholarly efforts.

I hope that by integrating the 5GC scaffold, SoTL Commons can make scholarly presentations more relevant and impactful on a personal (growth as SoTL scholars; tenure and promotion) and professional scale (SoTL as a valued scholarship), as well as continue to build on the “Hospitality of the Commons”.

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Scharff, L., Chick, N., Friberg, J., Gregory, D., Maurer, T.W. (2024). Building Collaborations and Value through SoTL’s Grand Challenges. Conference Workshop. Annual SoTL Commons Conference, Savannah, GA. 

Cruz, L., Grodziak, E., Botnaru, D.,Walker, D; Maurer, T.W., Altany, A., Abraham-Settles, B., Amos, M., Bunch-Crump, K., Cook, A., Eisenreich, H., Gregory, D., Howell, M. L., James, I., Landge, S., Lynes, J., Pompey, J., Shapiro, BL, Smith, A., Thomas, B., Turner, F.M., Williams, E.H., Gerchman, R., Horne, M., Hughes, R., Kahl, A., Layson, R., Lemmons, D.X., Stone, J.A., VanDeusen, E., & Zhang, Y. (2023). The Hospitality of the Commons: A Collaborative Reflection on a SoTL Conference. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 17(2), Article 7.

Last updated: 7/24/2024