The University and its Disciplines

Teaching and Learning within and beyond disciplinary boundaries

Carolin Kreber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135890346
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

University teaching and learning take place within ever more specialized disciplinary settings, each characterized by its unique traditions, concepts, practices and procedures. It is now widely recognized that support for teaching and learning needs to take this discipline-specificity into account. However, in a world characterized by rapid change, complexity and uncertainty, problems do not present themselves as distinct subjects but increasingly within trans-disciplinary contexts calling for graduate outcomes that go beyond specialized knowledge and skills. This ground-breaking book highlights the important interplay between context-specific and context-transcendent aspects of teaching, learning and assessment. It explores critical questions, such as:

What are the 'ways of thinking and practicing' characteristic of particular disciplines? How can students be supported in becoming participants of particular disciplinary discourse communities?

Can the diversity in teaching, learning and assessment practices that we observe across departments be attributed exclusively to disciplinary structure?

To what extent do the disciplines prepare students for the complexities and uncertainties that characterize their later professional, civic and personal lives?

Written for university teachers, educational developers as well as new and experienced researchers of Higher Education, this highly-anticipated first edition offers innovative perspectives from leading Canadian, US and UK scholars on how academic learning within particular disciplines can help students acquire the skills, abilities and dispositions they need to succeed academically and also post graduation.

Carolin Kreber is Professor of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and the Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment at the University of Edinburgh

I Introduction

Setting the context

1
Supporting Student Learning in the Context of Diversity, Complexity and Uncertainty

Carolin Kreber

University of Edinburgh

Perhaps the classroom should be neither teacher-centered nor student-centered but subject-centered.

(Palmer, 1998, p. 116)

Teaching from the microcosm, we exercise responsibility towards both the subject and our students … We honor both the discipline and our students by teaching them how to think like historians or biologists or literary critics….

(Palmer, 1998, p. 123)

Introduction

One might reasonably expect a book with the subtitle “Teaching and Learning Within and Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries” to begin with some substantive comments about the nature of ‘academic disciplines’: how they are defined, how they have evolved over time, what is known about their similarities and differences, and whether the latter might explain particular tendencies in the teaching and assessment practices that can be observed in departments. These questions, however, are the subject of Chapter 2. In this opening chapter I draw attention to the central theme running through this book, that is, the continuous interplay between the contextual aspects of teaching and learning and those which might be described as ‘context-transcendent’.

The chapter begins with an overview of contemporary higher education concentrating on issues of diversity within the student population and the need to prepare undergraduates not only for further specialized study but the, so-called, ‘real world’, one widely perceived to be both complex and uncertain (Barnett, 2000; Donald, in Chapter 3). Although this discussion could appear in any book on higher education teaching, it is especially pertinent to the focus of this volume. The reason we are concerned with disciplines, and the learning within as well as beyond them, is precisely that we perceive a need to prepare our students for the complexities and unpredictability characterizing their future professional, civic and personal lives. As I will propose below, it is by introducing students to the ways of thinking, the concepts, procedures and practices characteristic of our various disciplinary communities that this might be achieved. And surely, we are better equipped to succeed if we know who our students are.

I then describe different ways of preparing students for these challenges, contrasting approaches that are seen as an adjunct to regular academic study from those that are integral to it. I also offer some observations on the difference between ‘subjects’ as ‘what is looked at’ versus ‘subjects’ as ‘what is looked through or with’ (i.e., ‘disciplines’), suggesting that this distinction can usefully inform our decision-making around how to prepare students for future learning in diverse contexts. In the final section, drawing on the evocative notions of “teaching from the microcosm” (Palmer, 1998) and “learning partnerships” (Baxter Magolda, Chapter 12 in this volume), my intent is to expose and describe what actually happens in situations when teachers succeed in fully connecting their students with their subject. Success is defined by students not only learning lots about a subject, but knowing how they learned it and why what they learned matters to their understanding of and interaction with the world around them. As students acquire certain bodies of knowledge, procedures, conceptual tools, practices and even values within the particular contexts of our various subjects, their learning is context-specific but also ‘context-transcendent’.

Contemporary Higher Education

Who Are Our Students?

Regardless of whether one visits university classrooms in Canada, the US, Australia or the UK, what is immediately striking is that the move from a system of an elite to one of mass higher education has led not only to much larger but also much more diverse classes. It is surely not surprising then that today’s undergraduates have been shown to differ in terms of their educational aspirations and attitudes towards university study (e.g., Dey, Astin, & Korn, 1991; James, 2002; Levine & Cureton, 1998). Most students aspire to enter the labor market upon graduation, far fewer seek to continue with post-graduate studies and a smaller number still consider stepping into their teachers’ footsteps to become professors themselves.

Although much more needs to be done by way of removing barriers to higher education for certain sections of society, particularly in ‘elite’ institutions, many of today’s students are the first of their family to enter university and may lack the cultural capital that is positively associated with success at university. Aronowitz (2000) suggested that an increasing number of students now admitted into our programs are insufficiently prepared for the demands of university life or lack the basic study skills and confidence needed to succeed. Many institutions therefore recognize that making university study possible for students from disadvantaged social groups is not limited to providing access but involves a commitment to providing the needed additional support once these students have arrived.

It is important to realize, however, that it is not only wider access students who need support in their learning. All students would probably benefit from a clear explanation of expectations at the beginning of the course and the provision of prompt and constructive feedback on assignments, to mention just two examples of ‘support’. These examples reflect a view of ‘learning support’ that is not focused on the idea of a centralized service (that those who appear to struggle most can be referred to) but is integral to teaching itself. Linking support for learning with teaching means that faculty, student advisors and course organizers/coordinators play a key role in helping students develop as learners. However, as student enrolment continues to increase, the question of how to provide adequate support for effective learning for all students is an issue in urgent need of attention.

As a group, students are also much more culturally diverse than in the past. Some students, therefore, may find that aspects of the course content and/or the pedagogical processes employed challenge their religious and/or cultural beliefs. Being aware of cultural diversity may help teachers understand why some students might have trouble connecting with the course and as a result be more motivated to respond sensitively. Numerous guidebooks have been developed that offer advice on how to make courses more culturally sensitive and inclusive in terms of both content and process as well as on how to embrace cultural diversity on campus more widely. Many universities make these guidelines available on their websites. The University of Washington (2004), for example, has developed a website that is easy to use and highlights many inclusive teaching strategies.

An increase in immigrants, exchange programs and students studying on visas means that more and more of them study in a foreign language. Taking the UK as an example, in 2006 there were almost 320,000 international students attending UK universities (making up about 13% of the entire student population), of whom about one third were from countries belonging to the European Union (EU). Most non-EU or overseas students came from China, followed by India, the United States, Malaysia and Hong Kong (HESA, 2006). It has been predicted that over the next two decades there will be a drastic increase of international students worldwide due to factors such as growing interest in studying abroad, expected household wealth, increased demand for higher education, and lack of capacity for some countries in meeting this demand (Boehm, Davis, Meares, & Pearce, 2002).

Clearly, language difficulties that international students, but also immigrants, may experience can easily impede understanding in lectures, inhibit participation in tutorials and may cause problems in comprehending course requirements. Language difficulties may also, at least initially, make it more difficult for these students to connect with their peers and become integrated in campus life. Another point to consider is the intimate connection between language and culture. Although local students tend to report positively on teachers using examples based on popular culture to explain certain points (as by making reference to famous TV series or radio talk shows), such practices may not support the learning of students less familiar with popular culture. Likewise, in fields such as social policy, political science and education it is not unusual that the laws, policies and practices of the ‘home’ country (i.e., the country where higher education is offered) dominate the curriculum. International students, however, will have little or no prior experience of these, making their learning presumably much harder.

International post-graduate students, perhaps more so than undergraduates, may also challenge some of our assumptions about how certain subjects or disciplines are to be taught, learned and assessed. Although we will see later that links have been identified between certain aspects of teaching and the disciplines’ fundamental epistemological structure, there is an alternative view that considers the teaching practices that can be observed in departments to be just as much influenced by local cultures (see Trowler in Chapter 15 of this volume).

Many students entering higher education are mature learners with family and work responsibilities and a growing number are pursuing their degrees part-time. In fact, within the North American context Donald (1997) observed that “fewer students in postsecondary programs actually define themselves as students” (p. 85), which, by extension, means that they are less engaged in university life. As faculty we need to keep in mind that for these students what happens during class-time may be even more important than for full-time students who have greater opportunity to seek out advice from peers and professors informally. However, it is important to realize that even among our full-time students many are ‘commuter students’, who experience considerable constraints on their engagement with their studies.

Students’ lifestyles and values also reflect diversity. Some students identify with mainstream culture and, hence, can readily connect with teachers and course aspects that portray mainstream culture as ‘how things are’; others will connect with these teachers and course aspects less well because they are not reflective of their world (one may think, for instance, of certain employment trajectories that are portrayed as examples of ‘success’ or how a family and partner are ‘defined’ when ordinary life is talked about in courses or personal conversation with students). True, these latter aspects of diversity do not influence the ways in which students learn a foreign language, observe cells under the microscope, or think about the factors leading up to major world events. However, these aspects of diversity influence how students connect with the wider learning environment and community in which they study: whether they perceive it as affirming, reflective of the world as they know it and relevant or, instead, as somewhat alienating, unconnected from the world as they know it and irrelevant.

Students also differ in their epistemological development, that is, their understanding of the nature, certainty and limits of knowledge. Some seem to almost immediately grasp the notion that knowledge in the subjects they are studying is uncertain, constructed and contested, while others might graduate without having reached this understanding (see Baxter Magolda, 1992 and Chapter 12 in this volume). Students’ epistemological development is linked to the expectations they hold of their teachers and the extent to which they are prepared to consider their peers as valuable resources for learning. Knowing that students in one class are not a homogeneous group in terms of their epistemological development also helps us to understand why they may show quite varied reactions to our attempts to have them take greater responsibility for their learning.

Furthermore, students’ learning style (Kolb, 1981), that is the preferences they develop for certain learning tasks, can be seen to directly influence how they might engage with a particular subject or discipline. Kolb identified relationships between the discipline’s cognitive structure (defined by the two axes of “soft versus hard”, and “pure versus applied”, see Chapter 2) and students’ learning preferences. In essence, Kolb concluded that the cognitive structure of the discipline brings about a certain learning style. For example, a hard and applied discipline, like mechanical engineering, would bring about a learning style that excels in tasks requiring application of existing theory, a style Kolb called convergent. A soft and pure discipline, like English literature, would bring about a style that excels in tasks requiring openness to experience, looking at problems from various angles, and generating ideas, a style Kolb called divergent. It is, of course, equally possible that students with a certain learning style tend to choose certain subjects, and that their learning style then gets further reinforced by that choice. This would mean that a student who is used to pursuing learning tasks typical of one discipline could have difficulty with the tasks typical of another, due to the learning style that has been reinforced up to this point.

Clearly, there are numerous dimensions of diversity and all present certain challenges to teachers. Yet, readers may reach this point concluding that only the last two dimensions really matter to supporting student learning within and beyond disciplinary boundaries, and that others, though perhaps adding breadth to the discussion, are of little relevance. However, teaching is principally about connecting and communicating with people about our subjects. Surely we are more likely to succeed in entering into community with our students, and connecting our students with our subjects (Palmer, 1998), if we are aware of and welcoming of all aspects of diversity. In other words, while teaching must be “subject-centered” (Palmer, 1998, p. 116), it cannot avoid also being student-centered if it is to truly engage with students’ lives and worldviews. Moreover, many of us hope higher education will instil in students a positive attitude towards diversity and more liberal socio-political views. While exposure to specific courses, for example, on multiculturalism, may be positively related to such desirable attitudes (see below), it stands to reason that such learning is further supported if faculty, and others with teaching responsibilities, respond positively to different dimensions of diversity and employ inclusive practices. Recognizing and valuing diversity offers the opportunity to enhance the learning experience of all students.

Employability, Civic Responsibility and Lifelong Learning as General Graduate Outcomes

In the twenty-first century, the process of ‘globalization’ has exercised an undeniable influence also on higher education. National governments call on universities to provide the educated labor (‘knowledge workers’) needed to ensure the country’s competitiveness in the global market. As a consequence, many countries have identified the ‘employability’ (Knight & Yorke, 2003) of students as an important graduate outcome within the new knowledge economy (e.g. DfES, 2003; Teichler, 1999; UNESCO, 1998). The issue of preparing students for ‘employability’ is contested in higher education circles largely because people interpret its meaning in different ways.

A common tendency is to equate it with preparing students for specific jobs. Not surprisingly, many academics do not consider this to be part of their role. Another frequently encountered interpretation centers on the view that the entire ‘employability scheme’ reflects an attempt to fit students into predetermined roles in society, by meeting certain standardized goals, without engaging students in challenging or questioning dominant agendas. Clearly, many academics see this as violating core academic values and aims, chiefly among them the critical interrogation of the status quo and a key role as ‘society’s critical friend’.

Readers may find it more helpful to think of ‘employability’ in terms of general skills, abilities and personal qualities. Taking this perspective, Knight and Yorke (2003) identified several essential aspects of employability, including among others: self-management, critical analysis, creativity, ethical sensitivity, and the capacity to act morally, solve problems, resolve conflict, make decisions, negotiate, work in teams, and to work cross-culturally.

Next to employability, the need for responsible citizenship increasingly en...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Foreword: Ronald Barnett, Institute of Education, London
• Preface: Background and Structure of this Book, Carolin Kreber
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE CONTEXT
• PART II: DISCIPLINES AND THEIR EPISTEMOLOGICAL STRUCTURE
• PART III: WAYS OF THINKING AND PRACTICING
• PART IV: EXPLORING DISCIPLINARY TEACHING AND LEARNING FROM A SOCIO-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
• PART V: LEARNING PARTNERSHIPS IN DISCIPLINARY LEARNING
• PART VI: DISCIPLINES AND THEIR INTERACTIONS WITH TEACHING AND LEARNING REGIMES
• PART VII: GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON PREVIOUS THEMES