The History Learning Project "Decodes" a Discipline: The Union of Teaching and Epistemology

Abstract

Thirty years of the scholarship of teaching and learning have provided a plethora of books about teaching, containing potential assessments, advice about course design, teaching tips, and prescriptions. Much of this work, which arises from practical classroom experience, useful as it may be, treats symptoms—specific student difficulties—rather than diagnosing the underlying illness, so that there is no framework for applying solutions. The Decoding the Disciplines (Decoding) methodology provides such a framework; it has led us first to identify and then classify student difficulties or “bottlenecks” in history. These turned out to be closely related to the epistemology of the discipline. While we do not expect that most of our students will become historians, our charge as college teachers is to teach students to think historically, whatever they go on to do, and this means that they must understand the ways of knowing of our discipline. Our teaching has been radically altered by this insight. We have found that the disconnect between epistemology and teaching is standard in many other disciplines. If we are to change student learning through our efforts, we will need to delve into the heart of this darkness. Decoding the Disciplines, a methodology developed by Joan Middendorf and David Pace as part of the Freshman Learning Project (Pace & Middendorf 2004), arose from the realization that there is a disciplinary unconscious, automatic moves learned tacitly by experts. Teachers expect, however, that students will be able to make these moves equally automatically, without being told to do so, much less how or why they should. Pace and Middendorf developed an interviewing process which helps faculty see moves that are so deeply ingrained that they are invisible, and render these moves explicit. The methodology is a series of steps, beginning with the identification of the “bottleneck” the teacher is concerned with and ending with sharing the results, which we are doing here.