Disciplinary Thinking

Catalog description

Effective teaching requires more than disciplinary content knowledge and an understanding of ways of knowing in the discipline. It also requires understanding of pedagogical content-specific knowledge that is uniquely helpful in the work of teaching. Studies of teaching have elaborated on pedagogical content knowledge to apply knowledge to specific content-related inquiry as well as the broad and flexible knowledge of how students think about content upon which to base instructional decisions that arise in unanticipated ways. This suggests that the disciplines are more than just accumulated bodies of knowledge or epistemic frameworks, but rather unique sets of ideas about what it might mean to generate knowledge, often referred to as the syntactic structure of the discipline. This course will engage students in the inquiry necessary to access the syntactic structure of their discipline and demonstrate their new knowledge in multiple modalities.