Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind

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"A remarkable achievement that is sure to find its way onto everyone's short shelf of essential books on teaching and learning. This book...belongs in the hands of every beginning teacher or anyone wanting a good road map to the problems and possibilities of teaching the liberal arts."--Lendol Calder, Augustana College

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 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.