Exhibitions Disciplinary Styles | Disciplinary Styles |
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Exhibition Components
Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and LearningThe works displayed in this exhibition complement the book, Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Exploring Common Ground. Each of the works reflects questions and issues rooted in their disciplines as well as more general pedagogical concerns. They also participate in an interdisciplinary "trading zone," where scholars of teaching and learning seek advice, collaborations, references, methods, and colleagues from other disciplines in order to fill in whatever their "home" disciplinary communities cannot or will not provide. Scholars' WorkWestern Civilization Course PortfolioT. Mills Kelly (2001)History -- George Mason University  view site » This portfolio documents the teaching in a Western Civilization survey course at Texas Tech that took a thematic approach to investigate a number of the most important developments from the 17th Century to the Fall of Communism. The portfolio focuses on the impact of hypermedia on student learning and includes samples of student work, student evaluations, and peer comments. In relationship to the exhibition, Mills Kelly's central "problem" is one that scholars in many disciplines are facing -- how to effectively incorporate new media in teaching undergraduates. He focuses on the effect of hypermedia on students' use of primary sources -- an important aspect of historical expertise. Furthermore, he displays a historian's concern for access to source materials by including all of his own data in a course portfolio. At the same time, Kelly's analysis is influenced by psychological studies like those by Samuel Wineburg that have helped to illuminate amateur and expert thinking in a variety of fields; and the course portfolio itself is a genre which has emerged in the interdisciplinary "trading zone." Learning to Think MathematicallyConcerned that most students leave college thinking of mathematics as a fixed body of knowledge to be memorized, Cooperstein designed a new course to help students learn to think mathematically for themselves. This website serves as a course portfolio that documents the new class, Introduction to Mathematical Problem Solving. The principal activity in the class involved students working on and discussing novel problems which required them to formulate experiments, work out cases, look for patterns in data, pose questions, make conjectures, search for counterexamples and attempt to prove their assertions. Cooperstein has collected a vast array of student work samples and has annotated them extensively with his own commentary. Getting students to think beyond the basic facts is a problem for faculty across disciplines, one that presents a special challenge for mathematics. Similarly, representing students work is a problem in the scholarship of teaching in mathematics, and Cooperstein addresses this problem by using a web-based portfolio format to present an extensive, digital collection of students' proofs. At the same time, he borrows a variety of non-mathematical methods to explore student learning in his class and the overall format of his portfolio was itself based on the portfolio developed by historian Mills Kelly. Peer Review of TeachingIn this course portfolio, Dan Bernstein reports on changes he has made over three semesters in a psychology course on learning. He has succeeded in getting more students to achieve higher levels of understanding by changing the assessment from short abstract essay questions to problems that asked students to apply concepts in new contexts, and providing web-based opportunities for students to identify what makes some answers better than others. The portfolio includes examples of the assessments used, graphs reporting his results, and students final exams. The project shows how Bernstein makes use of ideas about levels of understanding derived from his own discipline, but not always applied in pedagogical practice. Similarly, he presents his work using the graphs and statistics drawn from his background as an experimental psychologist, but has to rely on the quasi-experimental methods more comfortable for his colleagues in other sectors of psychology. Background on the Disciplines The disciplines provide an important context for the work of scholars like Dan Bernstein, Bruce Cooperstein, and Mills Kelly. Like other disciplines, history, mathematics, and psychology each has its own intellectual history, agreements, and disputes about what is taught to whom, when, and how. Each has a set of traditional pedagogies and its own discourse of reflection and reform. In addition, each has its own community of scholars interested in teaching and learning in that field, with one or more journals, associations, and face-to-face forums for pedagogical exchange. What follows are summaries of essays from Disciplinary Styles on the state of the scholarship of teaching and learning in history, mathematics, and psychology. HistoryHistory Lessons: Historians and the Scholarship of Teaching and LearningLendol Calder, William W. Cutler III, and T. Mills Kelly Although few academic historians have approached college teaching as a topic of scholarly research, Calder, Cutler, and Kelly note that the situation is beginning to change. Two key professional organizations, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, have begun providing support for the growth of the field. With recently created forums for the exchange of ideas and the development of funding opportunities for such work, the authors believe that historians will be able to make substantial contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning. In particular, they contend, the nature of historical scholarship -- "richly braided accounts intertwining anecdotes with systematic evidence" -- provides a powerful analytical tool and is well-suited to addressing the complexity of classroom dynamics. They suggest a range of possible strands of inquiry, from the nature of "thinking historically" and the development of students' historical knowledge to the current landscape of teaching practice in history classrooms. In addition, the authors note the significant insights historians can offer through continued exploration of the historical forces that shape teaching and learning. Resources
MathematicsBridging the Divide: Research Versus Practice in Current Mathematics Teaching and LearningThomas Banchoff and Anita Salem While research in mathematics education, represented in journals such as Educational Studies in Mathematics and Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, has been directed at the K-12 system for over three decades, the study of postsecondary mathematics education has emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry more recently. In fact, the first journal devoted to the topic, Research in Collegiate Mathematics Education, did not appear until 1994. The National Science Foundation funds efforts to improve mathematics education at the college level, and forums for scholarly exchange about teaching and learning are provided at the annual joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. Banchoff and Salem attribute the current landscape of undergraduate math research to two catalysts of the mid to late 1980s: the increasing use of technology in the classroom and the appearance of the Calculus Reform movement. Both of these phenomena drew attention to curricula and teaching practices, propelling widespread discussion about the goals of undergraduate mathematics and the assessment of student learning. Current research on undergraduate mathematics, however, is divided into two distinct groups, the more theoretical work of mathematics education researchers and the study of practical strategies by teaching mathematicians. The authors suggest that the scholarship of teaching and learning may become a bridge between the two perspectives. Resources
PsychologyDisciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A View from PsychologySusan G. Nummedal, Janette B. Benson, and Stephen L. Chew As demonstrated by the American Psychological Association's first session on teaching in 1899, American psychology has maintained interest in issues of teaching and learning from its emergence as a discipline. Indeed, when the APA underwent structural reorganization in 1945, it recognized the teaching psychology group as Division 2. The field's early theories of learning (e.g. Thorndike, Skinner) were shaped by a strong disciplinary appreciation for the evaluation of teaching effectiveness, while the "cognitive revolution" of the 1960s laid foundations for contemporary psychological scholarship on teaching and learning. In particular, two lines of inquiry have proved particularly productive: (1) research on specific cognitive processes, such as memory, problem solving and meta-cognition; and (2) study of the cognitive development of college students. While scholars of teaching and learning in psychology can draw on the field's rich organizational and conceptual resources, they also face a key tension. Psychology's methods of research design and data analysis are invaluable tools for inquiry into teachIng and learning, but classroom conditions seldom allow one to meet fully the standard of scholarly rigor set in the field for laboratory experimentation. Resources
Background on Interdisciplinary Exchange The scholarship of teaching and learning draws strength from being situated in a discipline and its particular style. But growth in knowledge also comes at the borders of disciplinary imagination, and the scholarship of teaching and learning is no exception. Disciplinary boundaries in this area are not that well established, facilitating conversation and collaboration across fields. For example, Anita Salem, a mathematician at Rockhurst University has collaborated in her work on understanding students' mathematical thinking with psychologist Rene Michael. Many forums have emerged for fostering interdisciplinary exchange in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The scholars featured in this gallery have all benefited from interdisciplinary exchange in the Carnegie Scholars program of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and many present their work at general conferences like those sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education. ResourcesAnita Salem and Renee Michael's Course Portfolio Related Links
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