How do you write up your findings after a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project? Where do you disseminate your findings? Regardless of whether you’re writing more of an opinion/demonstration/essay-style of article or a more traditional paper grounded in data, you’ll need to be sure to frame what you’re presenting within the SoTL literature- what do we know/currently think, what is the gap/what are you adding to our knowledge, and how it will help us understand or improve our teaching. In this way, writing a SoTL article is not really any different from writing about any other research. But, if you’re new to this area of research (or research in general), it’s an excellent idea to read multiple SoTL journal articles, especially those published by the journal(s) that you think you might like to publish in, to get a sense of the writing style and scope.
So, where do you find these SoTL journals? Well, a library search will certainly bring up some interesting articles related to your research topic, so you can start by looking up those journals to see their aims, scope, and other submission criteria. You can also search for journals based on some keywords related to your specific topic to find some journals (e.g., Canadian Perspectives on Academic Integrity). There may also be discipline-specific journals related to teaching which would be appropriate for your SoTL research (e.g., Teaching of Psychology).
Once submitted, journal articles may be reviewed by only the editor (e.g., Faculty Focus) or by two or more reviewers and the editor (e.g., Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning). Something to keep in mind about journal reviewers: reviewers are just volunteers with some expertise in the field, so some are better than others. It really comes down to luck as to whether you’ll get a helpful reviewer who offers constructive criticism or a ridiculously critical and unhelpful one (lovingly referred to as “Reviewer 2” by researchers). Make sure your project is grounded in the SoTL literature (and it’s not a bad idea to look for papers to cite that have been published in the journal you’re submitting your article to). Then, refer to the journal’s website for detailed formatting instructions (margin size, length of article, tables and figures placed in the text or at the end, etc.) Some journals even have formatted templates that they want you to use to submit your article. It is very rare that the journal will not perform a double-blind peer-review, which means the reviewers won’t know who the authors are and the authors won’t know who the reviewers are. To this end, most journals will require you to ensure that the document you submit is anonymous, including the metadata in the file. In Microsoft Word, this is achieved by going to File – Check for Issues button- select Inspect Document. The pop-up will ask you what you want- keep everything at their default values and click on the Inspect button. You will see a report of things that were inspected, including a list of “Document Properties and Personal Information”, with a button to “remove all” which you should click on. Doing this will remove your information as the author of the Word document (among other things), thus making the file anonymous and ready to send to the journal for review.
In the past, manuscripts for consideration for a journal were send by postal mail either on paper or floppy disk. Then, most journals moved to email submissions. Now, the majority of journals ask authors to submit their files (letter to the editor, anonymous main text, title page with author information) into a portal, along with filling out additional details about the manuscript (e.g., word count), though a few still receive submissions via email.
After you’ve submitted your article, it’s a waiting game (usually several months) until you receive comments from the reviewers and they either accept, accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions, or reject your article. If you receive revisions (major or minor), you’ll spend a few weeks addressing their comments, writing a response letter to the reviewers and editor explaining how you have addressed their feedback, and resubmit for review. If your article gets rejected, you’ll want to be ready to resubmit it elsewhere after your revise it based on the feedback you received from the editor and/or reviewers. Having a list of a few journals that might be appropriate for your article is a good idea (feel free to email me for some suggestions!) and make sure you keep track of which journals you’ve already sent your article to so that you don’t submit it a second time to the same place 😊 The entire publication process takes time (writing, submitting, revising), so remember that you can ask for time on your SWF for this research-related activity (use the form on ICE). Although my focus has been on SoTL writing, most of this post also relevant for other scholarly writing. Next time, I’ll explain why we should publish our work. If there is anything I can do to support your research or if you have suggestions for me in my role as Research Coordinator, please reach out via email.
