Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind

From the Foreword
“These authors have clearly shown the value in looking for the signature pedagogies of their disciplines. Nothing uncovers hidden assumptions about desired knowledge, skills, and dispositions better than a careful examination of our most cherished practices. The authors inspire specialists in other disciplines to do the same. Furthermore, they invite other colleagues to explore whether relatively new, interdisciplinary fields such as Women’s Studies and Global Studies have, or should have, a signature pedagogy consistent with their understanding of what it means to ‘apprentice’ in these areas." -- Anthony A. Ciccone, Senior Scholar and Director, Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

How do individual disciplines foster deep learning, and get students to think like disciplinary experts?

With contributions from the sciences, humanities, and the arts, this book critically explores how to best foster student learning within and across the disciplines.

This book represents a major advance in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) by moving beyond individual case studies, best practices, and the work of individual scholars, to focus on the unique content and characteristic pedagogies of major disciplines.

Each chapter begins by summarizing the SoTL literature on the pedagogies of a specific discipline, and by examining and analyzing its traditional practices, paying particular attention to how faculty evaluate success. Each concludes by the articulating for its discipline the elements of a “signature pedagogy” that will improve teaching and learning, and by offering an agenda for future research.

Each chapter explores what the pedagogical literature of the discipline suggests are the optimal ways to teach material in that field, and to verify the resulting learning. Each author is concerned about how to engage students in the ways of knowing, the habits of mind, and the values used by experts in his or her field.

Readers will not only benefit from the chapters most relevant to their disciplines. As faculty members consider how their courses fit into the broader curriculum and relate to the other disciplines, and design learning activities and goals not only within the discipline but also within the broader objectives of liberal education, they will appreciate the cross-disciplinary understandings this book affords.