Academic identity and disciplinarity

A workshop exploring the relationship between disciplinarity and academic practice

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Session plan•I

ntroduction•A

cademic identity/identities•E

xploring disciplinarity•D

isciplinarity and multidisciplinarity•P

ersonal theories of teaching•D

isciplinarity and the curriculum

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Session Aims•T

o articulate possible meanings for ‘academic identity’ and its impact on practice

•To consider disciplinary, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary ways of working

•To observe and compare teaching and assessment practices in other fields

•To set out ‘personal theories’ of teaching

•To identify where a consideration of disciplinarity features in curricula

What might we mean by identity?

•‘In its very nature, being a member of a disciplinary community involves a sense of identity and personal commitment, a ‘way of being in the world’, a matter of taking on ‘a cultural frame that defines a great part of one’s life’ (Geertz 1983, emphasis added).’

(cited in Becher and Trowler 2001)

Discussion: How has your academic identity/ies developed?

•What routes have you taken through one or more disciplines to arrive in your current position?

•H

ow has your entry into the disciplinary community shaped your thinking and practice?

Academic identity and teaching

‘One surely would assume that teacher identities are constructed also in interaction with many other factors (e.g., past and present learning experiences, observations of past teachers, and how one is uniquely positioned, within the department but also the wider society, in terms of the intersection of numerous other socio-cultural factors, including race, ethnicity, age, SES, religion, gender, sexuality, etc.)’

(Kreber, 2009)

Activity 1: Academic identity and teaching – broader influences

•After reading Kreber’s quote on the previous slide, please identify up to 3 factors that contribute to your sense of ‘identity’, and that influence your teaching. (It might also be useful to think of these in terms of values or ideals or Geertz’s ‘cultural frame’ on slide 4.)

•Can you suggest specific ways in which your sense of academic identity has an impact upon your teaching?

Activity 2: Disciplinary artefacts

Please present an object, picture, image or text that you feel relates to your sense of academic identity.

• Please describe your reasons for selecting the item.• What comments do other members of the group have? • How is your object similar or different from those chosen

by group members?• Could you use an exercise like this with graduate students?

Exploring disciplinarity

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Activity 3: Free writing

At the top of the page, please write the name of a discipline with which you would associate yourself. Now write continuously for 3-4 minutes on the ways in which this disciplinary identity shapes your thinking or approach to academic work.

Activity 3: Free writing

Please write a discipline with which you would associate yourself. Now write continuously for 3-4 minutes on the ways in which this disciplinary identity shapes your thinking or approach to academic work.

•What are some of the central characteristics of ways of thinking and practising in your discipline?

Activity 3: Free writing

Please write a discipline with which you would associate yourself. Now write continuously for 3-4 minutes on the ways in which this disciplinary identity shapes your thinking or approach to academic work.

•What are some of the central characteristics of ways of thinking and practising in your discipline?

•Please discuss your ideas with another person in the workshop.

Disciplinary groups Nature of knowledge

Pure sciences (e.g. physics): ‘hard-pure’

Cumulative; atomistic (crystalline/tree-like); concerned with universals, quantities, simplification; impersonal; clear criteria for knowledge verification and obsolescence; consensus over significant questions to address; results in discover/explanation

Humanities (e.g. history) and pure social sciences (e.g. anthropology): ‘soft-pure’

Reiterative; holistic (organic/river-like); concerned with particulars, qualities, complication; personal, value-laden; dispute over criteria for knowledge verification and obsolescence; lack of consensus over significant questions to address; results in understanding/interpretation

Technologies (e.g.) mechanical engineering, clinical medicine): ‘hard-applied)

Purposive; pragmatic (know-how via hard knowledge); concerned with mastery of physical environment; applies heuristic approaches; uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches; criteria for judgement are purposive, functional; results in products/techniques

Applied social science (e.g. education, law, social administrations): ‘soft-applied’

Functional; utilitarian (know-how via soft knowledge); concerned with enhancement of professional practice; uses case studies and case law to a large extent; results in protocols / procedures

From Becher and Trowler, 2001. p. 36

Activity 4: Please consider Becher and Trowler’s table of disciplines on the previous slide

-Offer a critique of the categories. How would you revise them?

-Where in this schema (or in a revised one) would you locate your own discipline?

-Write a description of the ‘disciplinary group’ with which you associate your work and the nature of knowledge that emerges from this area

-This framework was written in the 1990s. How have conceptions of disciplines changed since then? What changes might we see in universities of the future?

Discussion point: What is your response to Henkel’s point about disciplines and specialisation?

‘As disciplines subdivide, multiply and become more specialised, they become a more disintegrative force as far as the enterprise [university] is concerned. It is more difficult for their members to make connections with each other, let alone across disciplinary boundaries …’ Henkel, 2000, p. 20 Photo: Jim Forrest. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Activity 5: Disciplinary perspectives

•Please see Activity 5 on the Workshop guidance file for this workshop (DiscThinkAcademicidentityWorkshopguidance.doc).

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Interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity

•Of courses, disciplines are not single, fixed, monolithic entities.

•Increasingly, students and academics work in interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary contexts.

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Activity 6: Interdisciplinary/ multidisciplinary work

•Please think of an example of interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) work that you have been involved with. This could be a piece of research, a shared course, a project, etc. Please jot down some notes about • a brief account of the work• ways in which different subject practices were evident• Benefits of working within a mutidisciplinary group• Challenges of working in a multidisciplinary.

Activity 7: Devising and solving interdisciplinary problems

•Please see Activity 7 on the associated Workshop guidance file for this theme. (DiscThinkAcademicidentityWorkshopguidance.doc)

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Devising/solving interdisciplinary problems

•Plenary discussion about the task:

• What worked well in this task?• Did your group draw on the different disciplinary

backgrounds of its members?• How could the creation or performance of the

problems be improved?

• How could an activity like this be used in teaching?

What does this mean for practice?

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Teaching practices and departmental cultures

Kreber (2009) reminds us that sometimes teaching, learning and assessment practices are attributed to disciplines, but may equally have much to do with the local culture of departments or other internal university structures.

Personal theories of teaching

‘However, although both the disciplinary and departmental context likely exert an influence on the ways in which faculty approach teaching and assessment, individual teachers’ “personal theories of teaching” as well as their perceptions of self, surely also play a significant role. “Personal theories of teaching” refer to how we conceptualize teaching and learning (e.g., do we think of teaching as transmission of information and of learning as accumulation of facts, or do we think of teaching as promoting conceptual change and of learning as a transformative process possibly leading to the creation of knowledge?)’

- Kreber, 2009, drawing on Prosser and Trigwell, 1999

Activity 8: What are your personal theories of teaching?

•Please jot down 2 or 3 ‘personal theories’ or general principles that characterise your approach to learning, teaching and assessment.

Identity, disciplinarity and the curriculum

•‘Traditionally for a would-be academic the process of developing that identity and commitment may well begin as an undergraduate, but is likely to be at its most intense at the postgraduate stage, culminating in the award of a doctorate…’ (Becher and Trowler 2001)

Postgraduate study and academic identity formation

Structures that determine the nature of a PhD also have an impact on the type of researchers that are accepted onto PhD programmes and the type of research that is carried out. (Frederico Braga de Matos, unpublished PhD, 2012)

•What kind of subject specialists are you hoping that your graduate courses inspire?

•What would be the attributes of a newly qualified PhD in your field?

•How does your graduate curriculum support the development of these qualities?

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Activity 9: Disciplinarity as part of the curriculum

Please consider a teaching programme on which you work. (This could be an entire degree course or a subsection.)

•Where are the opportunities for students to talk about what it means to be a discipline specialist (eg. A biologist, an engineer, a historian, etc.)

•How could tacit awareness of the discipline (or disciplines) be made more explicit for students?

References•B

echer and Trowler (2001) ‘Academic Disciplines’ in Academic Tribes and Territories. 2nd Edition. SRHE/Open University Press.

•Braga de Matos, Frederico (2012) Unpublished PhD: Change and Perception of Change in the PhD in Social Sciences. A case study. UCL.

•Henkel, M. (2000) Academic Identities and Policy Change in Higher Education. London: JKP.

•Kreber, C. (2009) The University and its disciplines: Teaching and learning within and beyond disciplinary boundaries, Ed. Kreber, C., London: Routledge.

Learning Resource MetadataField/Element Value:Title Disciplinary Thinking – Academic identity and disciplinarity: presentation

Description Presentation slides for a workshop on academic identity, disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in HE teaching and learning.

Theme Academic identity and disciplinarity

Subject HE - Education

Author Colleen McKenna & Jane Hughes: HEDERA, 2012

Owner The University of Bath

Audience Educational developers in accredited programmes & courses in higher education.

Issue Date 24/05/2012

Last updated Date 07/08/2012

Version Final

PSF Mapping A5, K1, K2, K3, PV1, PV3

License Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Keywords ukoer, education, discthink, disciplinary thinking, hedera, university of bath, academic identity, disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity