Scholarship is a conversation

To help me grasp the whole scholarship concept, I needed to dig deep to basic definition of scholarship including its synonyms.  I have always understood scholarship to be a form of a bursary, sponsorship that is awarded towards an educational fulfillment.  In academia, particularly at post masters level scholarship is an activity that updates or maintains ones knowledge and skills, using ones time to consult, read literature, attend conferences, whilst acquiring new skills. (TRAC guidance) This can be full time, where ones takes a sabbatical leave or on part-time bases.

An interesting definition that shook the world of academia's in the early 1990 came from Boyer  Earnest.  His approach looks at scholarship as a four way approach which includes discovery, integration, application and teaching.  Boyers argues that a scholarship is not just teaching but stems from curiosity, following a research process, commitment to knowledge, following the investigation where ever it may lead give meaning to the effort. He also says scholarship is integration, by making connections across disciplines creating synergies and learning together vs working in silos  is one way of learning , going into the field in the form of in-service training, sharing work-spaces with other disciplines, attending conferences and sharing new knowledge or discoveries. Scholarship is application, by identifying a problem, forming a hypothesis, following the research process and finding solutions, the more research areas get identified, the better  problem solving methods found in research can be applied.

It is evident from the above that scholarship is something ongoing, it is a discovery that is arrived at by getting into conversation with others, it could be peers in the same discipline, it also can be moved toward by others in other disciplines. In getting into scholarship conversations partipants either novice or experts in the field must be familiar with the sources and subject matter in conversation, must at all times cite the works of others in their works created, must recognise that a particular work on a topic may not be the only perspective.

For my B-Tech degree at 4th year, I had my first real test of research methodology.  In those days we were only exposed to print journals, books and newspaper articles.  To be quite honest back then for me, research was not seen as entering into an ongoing scholarly conversation, but more of a class chore for me to pass.  Later on in the world of work I then realize how important research is as a contribution to the body of knowledge  and  everyday problem solving, It started making more sense when content can only be deemed valid or credible if its is empirically.  Today I am happy to be doing research again for my post grad studies, with more zeal and more understanding.

Today's students or scholars of research have  more advantage to previous scholars, thanks to technology and its packages that allow collaborative learning and sharing of information.  Today's researchers have at their disposal technologies that allow all research processes  to begin with ease and at short periods of time, at the touch of a button one can access literature from across the world on a topic, test or gather data using social media packages or other google packages, present findings on a blog or on webinar, slide-shares etc.