The links between disciplinary ways of thinking and seeing, and the implications these have for the way we educate our students within their academic disciplines, have been a subject of increasing interest among educational researchers in recent decades. In 2005 Lee Shulman’s Signature pedagogies in the professions (Daedalus, vol. 134, no. 3, pp. 52-59) put forward the notion of ‘signature pedagogies’ which he developed in the context of learning for the professions and defined as ‘types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions’. In Shulman’s view these pedagogies combined cognitive, practical and moral dimensions. Building on this work, Dai Hounsell and Charles Anderson embarked on a study of academic disciplinary learning. Using data from course settings in history and biology their Ways of thinking and practising in biology and history: disciplinary aspects of teaching and learning environments (paper presented at the Higher Education Colloquium, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment, Teaching and Learning within the Disciplines, University of Edinburgh, 2005) argued that ‘students learn ways of thinking and practising characteristic of, and particular to, each of these subject areas. These ways of thinking and practising [are] not confined to knowledge and understanding, but could also take in subject specific skills and know-how, an evolving familiarity with the values and conventions governing scholarly communication within the relevant disciplinary and professional community.’
Drawing on this body of literature participants in LSE’s PGCertHE Career Track programme are invited to ‘decode their disciplines’, to think about the specificity of their discipline in terms of particular knowledge bases, skills and attitudes that lie at the heart of their disciplines (or sub-disciplines, multi-multi-disciplines) and to reflect on the implications this may have for their approach to teaching and supporting student learning. We will be sharing some of their responses to this piece of work in our longer post later this week.
