Project Background and Context

One of the biggest strengths of SoTL as a field, and one of its major appeals for scholars who engage in teaching and learning research, is its collaborative and interdisciplinary nature. For some of us, collaboration is ingrained in our disciplinary work and is an area where we can claim extensive experience. For others, however, particularly those coming from humanities disciplines, collaboration and interdisciplinarity offers a new way of thinking about our research topics, methodologies, and ways of sharing knowledge. For scholars interested in tackling this new challenge, ISSOTL offers yearly opportunities to work together with international, interdisciplinary scholars on SoTL projects with organizational structure and support. This chapter tells the story of how we took up this opportunity and sets the context for the project itself, our scholarly process, and some of our research findings on belonging in SoTL and ISSOTL.