How do we teach? Why do we teach the way we do? And how might we teach and learn better together? These foundational questions should sit at the heart of higher education, yet they are often set aside amid dominant conversations about learning outcomes, graduate capabilities, metrics, platforms, and compliance. While these priorities matter, treating teaching as assumed or habitual significantly risks undermining the foundational commitments that define higher education.
Learning outcomes, graduate attributes, and student success are not realised in policy documents alone. They take shape through everyday teaching practices and the relational work between educators and students. When the quality, purpose, and ethics of teaching slip from its focus, even the most clearly articulated and carefully measured institutional aspirations can become increasingly disconnected from students’ lived learning experiences.
Teaching is never neutral. Every pedagogical choice reflects values, assumptions, and priorities about knowledge, learners, the futures we are preparing students to enter beyond university. Teaching with intention and integrity therefore requires making these choices visible, reflective, and informed by evidence. This is where the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) becomes deeply relevant.
SoTL positions teaching as scholarly, ethical, and relational work. It invites educators to examine their practice, attend closely to student experiences, and share insights that strengthen learning beyond individual classrooms. In higher education, under growing social, technological, and financial pressures, returning to these foundational questions is not an indulgence. It is an imperative.
These foundational questions of how we teach, why we teach the way we do, and how we might teach and learn better together are imperative because they invite us to surface the assumptions, values, and relationships embedded in every teaching choice. They are at the heart of teaching with intention and integrity. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) provides a framework for doing precisely this. It invites educators to approach teaching not as a set of routines or obligations, but as a reflective, evidence-informed, and intentional practice.
By approaching teaching through SoTL, educators examine assumptions, attend closely to student experiences, and make deliberate choices that transform everyday classroom decisions into opportunities for insight, connection, and meaningful learning. As both a mindset and a practice, SoTL bridges the personal and the collective, making visible the often-hidden values, assumptions, and relational dynamics that shape how students learn, engage, and belong, while turning individual reflection into shared knowledge that strengthens learning across courses, disciplines, and institutions.
Engaging with SoTL is not reserved for specialists. Every educator can participate by experimenting thoughtfully, documenting insights, and collaborating with students as co-inquirers. At its core, SoTL recognises that teaching is inseparable from identity, culture, and context, and that learning emerges through relationships, human connection, and the values we bring to our work. It is both scholarly and soulful, nurturing the self as it shapes society, and guiding educators to design learning experiences that cultivate critical thinking, ethical awareness, and agency in the world beyond the classroom.
In an era of growing diversity, digital pressures, and institutional demands that can reduce teaching to routine, SoTL provides a lens for intentional, evidence-informed, and socially responsive practice. By asking critical questions about whose knowledge counts, who belongs, and what enables engagement, educators align reflection with action, intention with impact, and ensure that everyday teaching contributes to preparing students not only to know, but to think, act, and shape the world with integrity.
It is precisely these conditions that make SoTL matter now more than ever. Contemporary classrooms are marked by increasing diversity of identity, experience, and expectation. Learning unfolds across physical and digital spaces that are complex, global, and constantly shifting. At the same time, educators navigate intensifying pressures from workloads, metrics, platforms, and performance agendas. In such contexts, teaching can easily become reactive or procedural, driven by efficiency and compliance rather than purpose, care, or connection.
SoTL offers a way to resist the narrowing of teaching. Rather than treating pedagogy as fixed or routine, it equips educators with shared ways to reflect, inquire, and speak about practice. It brings the foundational questions of how we teach, why we teach the way we do, and how we might teach and learn better together back into view as practical and ethical concerns. Engaging with SoTL enables educators to examine the choices that shape learning, challenge assumptions, attend to student experiences, and design inclusive, rigorous, and purposeful learning. In doing so, teaching is once again aligned with intention and integrity, grounded in both values and evidence.
SoTL also transforms teaching from an individual effort into a collective responsibility. By sharing insights, collaborating with students and colleagues, and making inquiry visible, educators spread understanding across classrooms, disciplines, and institutions. This collective approach reconnects institutional aspirations with the relational and pedagogical work through which learning actually happens, strengthening student outcomes and fostering professional cultures of curiosity, care, and shared purpose. Through SoTL, teaching honours its personal and relational dimensions, shaped by identity, values, and context. It ensures pedagogical decisions are reflective, ethical, and responsive, creating learning experiences that matter to students and the futures they are preparing to enter.
The question, then, is not whether higher education can afford to treat teaching as scholarly and ethical work, but whether it can afford not to. At a time when universities are asked to bring greater accountability, inclusion, innovation, and social responsiveness, teaching can no longer remain implicit or peripheral. It must be visible, examined with care, and valued as core intellectual and moral work.
For educators, SoTL invites reflection on inherited practices, close listening to students, and alignment of everyday decisions with the learning and futures we aim to cultivate. For leaders, it requires creating conditions where inquiry into teaching is recognised, supported, and sustained, fostering cultures of shared responsibility and open dialogue. For institutions, embracing SoTL affirms that outcomes and success are achieved not through compliance alone, but through sustained, relational, and ethical practice that connects aspirations with the lived realities of the classroom.
Returning to the foundational questions of how we teach, why we teach, and how we can teach and learn better together is an act of leadership and care. SoTL gives these questions purpose, transforming them into shared inquiry, informed action, and collective responsibility. Through SoTL, teaching with intention and integrity moves from aspiration to everyday practice.
Dr Nira Rahman, Dr Angelina Yin Fong and Dr Kwang Meng Cham are from the University of Melbourne