Exploring More Signature Pedagogies

What is distinctive about the ways specific disciplines are traditionally taught, and what kinds of learning do they promote? Do they inspire the habits of the discipline itself, or do they inadvertently contradict or ignore those disciplines? By analyzing assumptions about often unexamined teaching practices, their history, and relevance in contemporary learning contexts, this book offers teachers a fresh way to both think about their impact on students and explore more effective ways to engage students in authentic habits and practices. This companion volume to Exploring Signature Pedagogiescovers disciplines not addressed in the earlier volume and further expands the scope of inquiry by interrogating the teaching methods in interdisciplinary fields and a number of professions, critically returning to Lee S. Shulman's origins of the concept of signature pedagogies. This volume also differs from the first by including authors from across the United States, as well as Ireland and Australia. The first section examines the signature pedagogies in the humanities and fine arts fields of philosophy, foreign language instruction, communication, art and design, and arts entrepreneurship. The second section describes signature pedagogies in the social and natural sciences: political science, economics, and chemistry. Section three highlights the interdisciplinary fields of Ignatian pedagogy, women's studies, and disability studies; and the book concludes with four chapters on professional pedagogies nursing, occupational therapy, social work, and teacher education that illustrate how these pedagogies change as the social context changes, as their knowledge base expands, or as online delivery of instruction increases. Praise for the companion volume: Volume two of Exploring Signature Pedagogiesoffers just the right complement to volume one with evidence-informed chapters on signature pedagogies in a new and diverse set of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, including those underrepresented in scholarship of teaching and learning work. The chapters demonstrate the fluidity and complexity of habits of the mind and signature pedagogies in both theory and practice, and offer brief critical reflections on the real and ideal states of scholarship of teaching and learning in the fields represented. Thus, readers will experience the joy and challenge, as well as reap the benefits, of learning about fields beyond their own. The volume will encourage readers to go beyond the false dichotomy of a focus on generic teaching best practices vs. disciplinary specific deep knowledge for teaching. Kathleen McKinney, Cross Endowed Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Illinois State University