Decoding the Disciplines

What does it mean to "think" like an anthropologist, a physicist, an economist, a nurse? How can faculty across the disciplines translate those modes of thinking into teaching introductory courses? Faculty and Graduate Students at UK had the opportunity to explore these questions in a series of CELT-sponsored workshops offered in March and April.

The concept of "Decoding the Disciplines" was developed at Indiana University by a faculty working group led by Dr. David Pace, a History professor, and Dr. Joan Middendorf, Associate Director of Campus Instructional Consulting Center and Adjunct Professor in Higher Education.

This "decoding the disciplines" process allows instructors in departments from across the university to identify the kinds of mental operations that are required for success in their fields and to more effectively initiate students into these ways of thinking.

The Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching invited Drs. Pace and Middendorf to present workshops for UK instructors on the decoding process. On March 28, Professor Pace presented an overview of the decoding process and led over fifty UK faculty and graduate students through the process of "decoding" their disciplines. The first step asked faculty to consider where students are getting "stuck" in their courses? Where are the bottlenecks that prevent students from moving on in a course? Working in interdisciplinary groups, faculty then explored in some depth the strategies that they, as experts, take to solve such problems. The final step was to design an assignment that simulates this process for students.

On April 14 and 15, Dr. Middendorf further pursued the decoding process facilitating faculty work on generating metaphors for the disciplinary thinking needed in their courses. History Professor Hang Nguyen was in search of a metaphor that would convey to students the labor-intensive, complex work involved in preparing an original research paper. Teamed up with a group of faculty from across the disciplines, Professor Nguyen landed on the metaphor of growing a garden. "Conducting original research in history is much like gardening, so much of your success lies in your preparation, tending the soil, choosing the right seeds, thinking about the local climate. It was important that the metaphor not be too complex, that it be accessible to students, that it helped to illuminate, in my case, the multiple processes at work in conducting research in history. Everyone could visualize growing a garden. Like writing a quality research paper, you cannot "pull an all-nighter" and emerge with a successful garden."

Participants also spent time discussing problems with student motivation, creating assessments to track whether or not students are improving in the areas that have been targeted, and exploring how to continue this work as a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research project. The Decoding the Disciplines project has been praised for making transparent the ways in which faculty "think" as practitioners of their academic disciplines. Faculty participants at UK echoed this perspective. As one humanities professor put it, there was real value in the workshop and "recognizing that we have assumptions that are so obvious to us that they are invisible, but they trip up students."

Professor Kathi Kern, Director of CELT, did some decoding in her History 405 class this past semester, translating her own discipline and renovating her syllabus. Dr. Kern worked with Kate Black, a Special Collections librarian at UK, to give her students access to the university's Special Collections. Instead of listening to a traditional lecture on women reformers in the Progressive Era, students worked in small groups, delving into archival primary sources on Kentucky women reformers and then created a PowerPoint presentation for the class on their research.

"Students were moved, excited and empowered," said Kern. "They developed a new respect for how historians think through the assignment and pride in their own work."

"So often in history classes we only look at the results of historians' research, but this project allowed me to see firsthand where research begins, and it was very beneficial," said one of Kern's students in a survey at the culmination of the project. "I felt like I was teaching myself and was able to make my own assumptions, which was refreshing."

To learn more about the decoding process or to consult with CELT staff on working through the process in your discipline, contact Dr. Kern at 257-8014 or kern@uky.edu.