SoTL

Spring 2026 SoTL Journal Club

Building on the success of the Summer 2025 Journal Club and the panel discussion featuring its participants at the 2025 Assessment Institute, the CTL is delighted to offer the SoTL Journal Club in Spring 2026.

The Spring 2026 SoTL Journal Club will provide participants the opportunity to explore SoTL literature related to student success and course completion, thereby aligning strongly with the IU Indianapolis 2030 Strategic Plan’s Student Success and Opportunity pillar, specifically with the goal of “increasing on-time ungraduated graduation rates” and “strengthening undergraduate first-to-second-year retention rates.”

2025 Assessment Institute Journal Club Panelists (L-R): Aparajita Sengupta, A'ame Joslin, Carol Hostetter, Erin Schaefer, Julie Stella, Richard Turner, and Anusha S. Rao

Participating in the 2025 Summer SoTL Journal Club transformed my development as a scholar. It helped me situate my pedagogical research within a meaningful scholarly community. This helped me reduce imposter syndrome by building confidence through dialogue, mentorship, and shared reflection with like-minded educators.

Erin Schaefer, Assistant Professor of English, IU Northwest

Participants will engage in structured discussions and reflections and consider applications to their own SoTL interests/projects and teaching practice.  While participants will be encouraged to apply their disciplinary research lens to this literature review process, the interdisciplinary nature of SoTL has the potential to spark innovative ideas and research methodologies for furthering one’s own disciplinary research.  

Program Details

By participating in the journal club, you will:

  • Explore through structured discussions and reflection, SoTL literature on student success to improve your students’ learning, design SoTL studies, and support your promotion and/or tenure efforts.
  • Engage in conversations about scholarly teaching and SoTL, while improving your own teaching practice and research productivity.
  • Network with a growing community of instructors interested in SoTL and leverage opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations.

Incentives:

  • Particpants who attend and submit reflections for all three meetings are eligible to be selected for the opportunity to present at a panel discussion at the 2026 FACET retreat or the 2026 SoTL Summit.
  • All participants will have access to the following three SoTL ebooks: 
    • Chick, N. L. (Ed.). (2023). SoTL in action: Illuminating critical moments of practice. Taylor & Francis. – an easy entry into SoTL
    • Yeo, M., Miller-Young, J., & Manarin, K. (2023). SoTL research methodologies: A guide to conceptualizing and conducting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Taylor & Francis.
    • Friberg, J. C., & McKinney, K. (Eds.). (2019). Applying the scholarship of teaching and learning beyond the individual classroom. Indiana University Press. (Currently available only for Indianapolis, South Bend and Kokomo campuses)

All faculty, staff, and graduate students with instructional roles and interest in SoTL and student success are eligible to participate. The meetings will be open to all IU campuses.

Faculty advancing on teaching (non-tenure, tenure, and clinical tracks) are especially welcome to take advantage of this opportunity, given the focus of SoTL on promotion and tenure guidelines.  

The SoTL Journal Club will meet once a month for 75-minutes in February, March, and April. The meetings will be held on Zoom. 

Meeting dates and times

  • February 13, 1 - 2:15 p.m.
  • March 7, 1 - 2:15 p.m.
  • April 10, 1 - 2:15 p.m.

Before the meeting: Based on the disciplines represented in the club, the facilitators will identify one peer reviewed SoTL article on the topic of student success and course completion every month and share it with participants at least two weeks in advance along with an discussion outline. Participants can also recommend potential articles for discussion.  

During the meeting: Facilitator Dr. Carol Hostetter will begin each meeting with an overview of the article followed by small-group discussion and debrief.  At the end of each meeting, participants will have the opportunity to begin a short structured reflection exercise. 

After the meeting: Participants are ecnouraged to share their reflections with the facilitator and receive feedback.

Journa club articles, discussion outlines, reflection exercises will be shared and referenced using a Teams site, to which all participants will be added. 

About the Facilitator

Carol Hostetter is Professor Emerita from the School of Social Work at Indiana University, having joined the faculty in 2001. She has won many teaching awards, including the top teaching award for all eight campuses of Indiana University. Dr. Hostetter has been a leader in Indiana University’s teaching academy, FACET (Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching) as well as in Indiana University’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) program. Her SoTL grants, presentations and publications focus on social presence in online courses, high-impact practices and learning analytics. Carol is CTL’s SoTL Faculty Fellow and leads the center’s SoTL programming planning and delivery.

Dr. Carol Hostetter

The SoTL Journal Club helped me move beyond evaluating teaching tools to designing a thoughtful, mixed-methods study of how students think, engage, and feel about learning. The collaborative discussions deepened my perspective and strengthened my approach as an educator-researcher.

Aparajita Sengupta, Lecturer of Physics, IU Indianapolis