Support Models for Diverse Disciplinary Teaching Agendas
Sally Jackson (Associate Provost and CIO, UIUC)
Professor Jackson began by focusing on the deep objectives or agendas behind particular academic disciplines; for example, the agenda for learning composition is promoting literacy, while the agenda for sociology is to contribute to the solution of social problems. For Professor Jackson, "healthy disciplines tend to have a very close correspondence between their research agenda and their teaching agenda." Her observation is that students can learn the basic content of a course and recite the material whenever needed, but they may still fail to understand the underlying concepts, how those concepts can be applied in the real world, and how these concepts relate to other disciplines.
There are often specific expected outcomes associated with learning any discipline. In the case of Speech Communication, the traditional motive has been to train people to become good speakers, but that has changed in recent times. While it is true that communication methods have evolved and speech has not remained the sole mode of communication, the expected outcomes for this discipline have understandably not deviated much from their traditional outcomes.
Professor Jackson discussed one case, Reasoning in Science, which builds on Eric Mazur's work at Harvard University, which values peer instruction and problem-based learning over traditional lectures. She provided an interesting, not-obvious question regarding water volume involving a lake, a boat, a man, and a rock and had the brown bag audience consider three alternative solutions. The audience then had to explore with a partner and make explicit the background assumptions behind their answers. The difficulty in answering the problem correctly has to do with the fact that many of us carry pre-instructional beliefs that are naive and incorrect. The example used shows how active, social, problem-based learning can challenge pre-instructional beliefs and, eventually, replace these with accurate, more expert-like knowledge.
A second case introduced a new teaching discipline put together by a collaboration of faculty members focused primarily on teaching optics. Both these cases deal with the same problem – students could master each individual subject, but they had trouble applying the knowledge from one discipline into another discipline.
The presentation went into detail about how both teaching examples function pedagogically and how these methods can be implemented on our campus. The use of clicker technology was discussed as a way of facilitating student responses to participatory learning exercises such as those described. Professor Jackson spent the remaining minutes answering questions from the audience.
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