Elevating sport management: The scholarship of teaching and learning

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) plays a central role in advancing pedagogical practice, strengthening disciplinary knowledge, and supporting equitable learning environments within sport management. As the field becomes increasingly global and diverse, educators face growing complexity in addressing student needs, industry expectations, and institutional priorities. SoTL offers a systematic and theoretically grounded way of investigating teaching and learning, enabling educators to transform everyday pedagogical challenges into evidence-informed practice.

Drawing on foundations associated with Boyer, Vygotsky, Freire and Schön, SoTL supports curriculum design, inclusive assessment, intercultural learning, experiential education, community engagement and professional identity development. A range of methodological approaches including qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods and design-based research enable educators to study learning in context while attending to ethical issues such as consent, power relations, equity and students-as-partners frameworks. International examples from the United Kingdom, North America, South Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America demonstrate the varied ways SoTL is enacted across different cultural and institutional settings.

Through generating transferable insights and informing institutional strategy, SoTL enhances both teaching quality and academic career development, helping to prepare reflective and socially responsible sport management graduates.