Scholarship and the research environment
‘Teaching is the highest
form of understanding.’ (Aristotle; 384 - 322 BC)
I recently attended a two-day course entitled ‘Postgraduate supervision in Health Sciences’ and was intrigued by the considerable number of clinical staff who were involved in demanding doctoral degree research, supervising Honours and Masters degree students.
The new exit requirements from the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), alluded to in a previous editorial, place additional demands on radiologists in university-affiliated hospitals functioning in resource-limited environments. Despite an additional limited commodity (the research supervisor), original work is consistently produced and submitted to the SAJR, and other international journals, for consideration; this is a reflection of the practitioners’ dedication to scholarship.
The American educator, Ernest Leroy Boyer (1928 - 1995), President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, classified four types of scholarship (viz. discovery, integration, application and teaching) in his report Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. 1 The four domains of scholarship proposed by Boyer described how the separate functions created a dynamic whole.
The identification of
teaching as scholarship allowed teaching to receive
institutional recognition and gave rise to the Scholarship of
Teaching, or Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL),2 as an essential activity in
universities. Although teaching today may at times be
considered routine and yet another inconvenient duty, when
defined as scholarship, teaching both ‘educates and entices
future scholars’.1 It is this opportunity that is
afforded to academics involved in supervising Masters degree
students. The supervisor must be well-informed. At times, the
process of guiding a student may seem a selfless endeavour,
but it also allows a supervisor to gain knowledge and take
pride in the student’s success.
SAJR editorial board
I am delighted to welcome Dr Farhana Suleman to the editorial
board, which operates to assist the editor in the manuscript
adjudication and editing processes. Dr Suleman is a fulltime
radiologist at Steve Biko Hospital. Her willingness to be
involved reflects her dedication to scholarship and the
radiological literature.
Editor
1. Boyer EL. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. New York: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1997.
2. Hill PAL. Twenty Years On: Ernest Boyer, Scholarship and the Scholarship of Teaching. http://www.teaching-learning.utas.edu.au (accessed 25 April 2013).
S Afr J Rad 2013;17(2):50.
DOI:10.7196/SAJR.884
