Recognizing and Reflecting on ISSOTL Membership Patterns
What follows in this Pressbook is an exploration of some of the most significant themes and issues that emerged from our engagement with ISSOTL members. Before diving in, however, it is important to contextualize our research experiences and our findings within the overall membership trends of ISSOTL.
The mission of ISSOTL is to support SoTL work and scholars across disciplines, institutional types, and geo-cultural contexts. As stated in the organization’s 2022-2023 Annual Report, ISSOTL aims to “facilitat[e] the collaboration of scholars in different countries and the flow of new findings and applications across national boundaries” (ISSOTL, 2023, p.1). It is important to recognize that while ISSOTL aims to bring together scholars across the globe, certain geographic areas are better represented than others.
In 2022-2023, ISSOTL counted 861 members. Of those 861 members, the greatest representation was from Canada (259), the United States (251), and Europe (207). By contrast, the Asia-Pacific region counted 102 members, while countries classified as “other” counted 40 members. We therefore see quite a dominance of Euro-North American scholars within ISSOTL.
When we embarked on this project, we aimed to gather reflections on belonging in, and engagement with, ISSOTL from as many contexts and countries as possible. However, as we collected and analyzed our data, we realized that our participant sample very much mirrored that of the ISSOTL membership. Our survey and interview participants come from predominantly Canada, the United States, Western Europe, Australia, or New Zealand. This sample may also be due to the fact that as a group of researchers, our team members also represent Canada, the United States, and Australia.
What does this mean for our research and our findings? We spent a lot of time at the ISSOSTL conference thinking about what our participant population means for our research, what it means for ISSOTL, and how to better engage with members beyond the most well-represented areas.
There are a few things we want to propose when thinking about this study:
- One of the implications is that our findings should be understood in the context of our participant pool. The data we have will reflect the experiences of participants depending on many personal and professional factors, but also their geographic location. We know that much of SoTL is location and context specific and that this would likely apply to experiences of belonging as well. The experiences represented here will reflect, to some extent, the perspectives of those most represented within ISSOTL.
- We would also like to acknowledge that scholars from countries less represented within ISSOTL have written about their experiences and what teaching and learning research is like in their part of the world. The work of some of these scholars is included in our section on suggested readings. These essays and studies can help contextualize and elaborate our data, and we recommend reading them alongside our findings.
- Finally, we are planning to work more specifically on the issue of internationality, representation, and how we might understand the “I” in ISSOTL following this Pressbook. We would like to invite SoTL scholars from around the world to reach out to suggest resources we should consult and perspectives we should consider as we move into this next project phase.
