Beyond Decoding the Disciplines: Ways of Thinking, Being, and Practicing
This exciting instance of the TeLEd Monthly Event Series features Michelle Yeo, Director of the Mokakiiks Centre for SoTL and Professor in the Academic Development Centre at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She is also currently a visiting scholar at Høgskolen i Innlandet. Her research and practice around the Decoding the Disciplines paradigm should provide useful insights to all of us. One of our biggest responsibilities as teachers of a particular discipline is to help our students think and understand like an expert in that discipline (i.e., get them to develop the habits of mind where they can think like a chemist or historian or mathematician). Dr. Yeo’s session will bring new insights and strategies for making both the identities and learning thresholds or roadblocks that accompany our disciplines a more conscious part of our teaching practices.
Main content
Decoding the Disciplines, originated by Joan Middendorf and David Pace more than two decades ago is a means to unpack bottlenecks in student learning. Michelle Yeo has been involved in Decoding work for over a decade with different collaborators extending the paradigm, and during that time has learned about not only how we construct specific disciplinary knowledge, but also the identities we embody and the disciplinary structures that both constrain and empower us. As a SoTL practitioner, this dynamic becomes even more complex. In this interactive presentation, we will uncover some of these moments of disciplinary knowing and unknowing in a SoTL context.