SoTL reintroductions resumes with

Pushkala Prasad's Crafting Qualitative Research: Working in the Postpositivist Traditions (2018) treats qualitative inquiry as a craft learned through its traditions, each one carrying its own assumptions about meaning, knowledge, and what counts as evidence. Prasad lays out the major postpositivist traditions as a repertoire that researchers draw on and improvise from, learned as a craft instead of applied as a fixed procedure. This series takes up that repertoire across the fall term and groups the traditions into three sessions that move from how people make meaning, to how power and inequality shape social life, to how language and discourse unsettle the notion of a stable account at all. The sessions are built for the learning community and open to any faculty member curious about the ideas that sit beneath qualitative research in education. Each session stays theoretical in focus while remaining grounded in what these traditions offer the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), from framing a research question to judging what evidence a given tradition treats as credible.

September: Making Meaning: The Interpretive Traditions

This session opens the series with the family of traditions concerned with how people make and read meaning in social life. We work through hermeneutics, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, and ethnography, asking what each one assumes about the researcher's relationship to the people and settings being studied. For SoTL, these traditions give us language for studying student experience, classroom cultures, and the meanings learners attach to assessment, participation, and belonging. Participants leave with a working sense of when an interpretive lens fits a teaching and learning question and what counts as evidence inside it.

October: Power and Emancipation: The Critical Traditions

The critical traditions turn attention to power, conflict, and the conditions that decide whose knowledge counts. This session moves through critical theory and its account of hegemony and communicative action, feminism and gender studies. The common thread is how social structures produce and reproduce inequality, and how research can name and contest it. This speaks directly to SoTL and to critical pedagogy, including Freire's banking model of education. Faculty will leave with a sharper sense of how a critical framing reshapes a research question, from describing a classroom to interrogating the arrangements that structure it.

November: Structure, Discourse, and the "Post"

The final session follows the line that runs from structuralism into the traditions of the "post." We begin with semiotics and structuralism and their search for the underlying grammar of social reality, then move to postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. Together these traditions question stable meaning, grand narratives, and the authority of the researcher's own account. For SoTL, they open discourse analysis of syllabi and policy, critique of taken-for-granted categories such as "the good student," and decolonial readings of curriculum and knowledge. This session will carry particular weight for colleagues working on Indigenization and equity, where postcolonial and decolonial critique does substantive work.