Ethics in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

“This new Taylor Institute Guide takes the researcher through the essentials of the Canadian standards for ethical practice in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). It began with Lisa Fedoruk’s review of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2, 2014), which expanded and clarified the highest level best practices necessary for the scholarship done at Canadian post-secondary institutions across Canada. Because of the unique challenges of SoTL, where the human participants that are the subject of the research are also typically the researcher’s students, this Guide translates the comprehensive TCPS2 (2014) for the researcher conducting SoTL research. Of note, a 2018 summary of revisions to the TCPS2 can be found here. The team at the Taylor Institute wanted to provide a guide that laid bare the potential hegemony and power relationships that are part of instruction in higher education. In addition to a careful extrapolation of the relevant principles from the TCPS2, the author integrated several important findings from the scholarly literature on research ethics and SoTL. Next, input was sought from a Research Ethics Senior Advisor at the Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research with the Government of Canada. By including practical strategies for ethical practice in SoTL, the unique challenges that compliance with the TCPS2 poses for SoTL are brought to life. The work was then sent out to a community of Canadian academic researchers for their feedback and contributions (see previous page for the list of contributors). The result is a collaboration between a broad diversity of experts reflecting the insights of ethical researchers and ethics board members and chairs from across the country, to provide a resource to complement researchers’ own ethical practices, training, and sound judgement as they conduct their scholarship of teaching and learning. Research with human participants is complex. Just as the TCPS2 supports researchers in managing that complexity, we hope that this Guide will be helpful to SoTL researchers in their design process so that their research projects will be sound and robust, and the resulting insights can inform and extend our understanding of the processes of learning and of supporting that learning with effective, evidence-based instruction” (Fedoruk, 2017, p. 1)