Purpose. Educational leaders and faculty agree that scholarly work contributes to the quality of instruction, yet, not much is known about how scholarship is perceived by college teaching professionals who have been recognized for teaching excellence. There is minimal research to describe what constitutes the essential structure of scholarship to promote learning in a teaching situation from the perspective of the teaching professional at a two-year college. The purpose of this study was to explore the essence of scholarship as perceived by faculty member recipients of teaching chairs. In this study, scholarship is synonymous with scholarly practices as proposed by Boyer's (1990) multidimensional definition of scholarship: research (discovery), synthesis of knowledge (integration), professional service (application), and teaching. In addition, Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff's (1997) standards of assessing scholarship and Shulman's (1999a) work on identifying key characteristics of scholarship were taken into consideration in evaluating the opinions of faculty member recipients of teaching chairs.

Method. This phenomenological study examined the views and opinions of exemplary teaching professionals who were recipients of endowed teaching chairs in a two-year college. The study has attempted to provide an understanding of the scholarly framework from the perspective of two-year college faculty recipients of endowed teaching chairs. The procedures used to collect and analyze the data used in this phenomenological study were derived from the in-depth interviews with 10 teaching professionals at a two-year college who were identified for teaching excellence through the Endowed Teaching Chair Award. The participants were chosen from this group and represented different teaching disciplines. The investigator explored the scholarly practices that were being used in a successful teaching interaction.

Major findings. In interviewing 10 teaching professionals who were recipients of endowed chairs at a two-year college on scholarship, three themes became evident from the findings in the study. The first emerging theme was that scholarship was influenced by discipline affiliation. According to the participants, scholarship required expertise and being current in developments within a discipline. The second emerging theme from the data analysis was that scholarship included the participants' teaching roles and the pursuit of improving student learning in the two-year college. The participants believed that scholarship applied to their teaching practices and the ability to transfer that knowledge to their students in a good learning environment. The third theme was that scholarship in the two-year college implied a connection to community in the form of serving the community through their field of expertise, thus fulfilling the mission of the two-year college.