Structure of the disciplines
I’ve been reading about Jerome Bruner’s work on the structure of the disciplines, which he wrote about in his 1960 book The Process of Education. His work doesn’t seem to get much play in teaching and learning theory for Higher Education and is much more influential with regard to compulsory education. However, I can see that the ideas more contemporary authors have taken from Bruner would quite nicely flesh out what I have understood from Meyer and Land (2003) on threshold concepts. So, both the idea of the structure of the disciplines and the idea of threshold concepts are concerned with core ideas of a subject, as well as it’s specific ways of thinking and being, or what counts as proper inquiry. Bruner also introduces the idea of the spiral curriculum, where key ideas are revisited at greater levels of complexity over time, which sounds like a very useful way of approaching troublesome knowledge.
What seems to be important for teaching, which doesn’t necessarily come through clearly from the work on threshold concepts, is not only understanding what the core or threshold concepts in your subject are, but also understanding how to stage out delivery of these. So we’re concerned not only with what to teach, but how to teach it and when to teach it.
PG Cert Learning and Teaching at GSA
We were in Scotland this week leading the PG Cert for some good people from the Glasgow School of Art. It was great that everyone got involved in thinking and talking about what it means to be a teacher in HE these days and how we try to respond to the challenges we face.
There were some passionate agendas round the table which always makes things interesting, but I liked it that people were willing to think in spacious terms about the work they find themselves doing. I suppose my agenda is to run a course in which ontology is more important than epistemology and that is not always going to sit comfortably with everyone.
But it is a tricky balance because if we come in and tell people how to teach, that can only ever be a partial and limited response to the complexities and specificities of people’s teaching practice. Much better in my view to create a space for exploration, innovation, reflection, but perhaps also more risky.
