A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

216 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
learning and teaching in various different disciplines, thus helping you to develop DPK.
In this chapter, a model for linking your generic knowledge of learning and teaching with
the specific characteristics of your discipline is presented. This is done to provide you with
tools to relate what you have learnt about learning and teaching in general with the
requirements of learning and teaching in your discipline. In the end, this should help you
grow as a disciplinary specialist who knows how to teach and facilitate learning in a
specific disciplinary area.
A MODEL OF DISCIPLINE-SPECIFIC PEDAGOGICAL
KNOWLEDGE (DPK)
In educational research, the notion of DPK has traditionally been examined within one
of two distinct lines of research: research on the knowledge base for teaching (e.g. Hiebert
et al., 2002; Munby et al., 2001; Shulman, 1986) or research on disciplinary specificity in
university teaching (e.g. Becher and Trowler, 2001; Donald, 2002; Neumann, 2001). Within
research on the knowledge base for teaching, three components have been found to play
a particularly crucial role in guiding an academic’s thinking about teaching. These
components include the teacher’s knowledge about teaching (the body of dynamic,
relatively consensual, cognitive understandings that inform skilful teaching – many of
which are considered in Part 1), his or her beliefs relating to teaching (personal and most
often untested assumptions, premises or suppositions about instruction that guide one’s
teaching actions), and his or her goals relating to teaching (what a teacher is trying to
accomplish, his or her expectations and intentions about instruction, be they short- or
long-term).
Within research on disciplinary specificity, two types of characteristics have been found
to affect what one can do when teaching a given discipline. These include the sociocultural
characteristics of the discipline (characteristics that are socially constructed
through the establishment of norms, practices or rules within a group of individuals) and
the epistemological structure of the discipline (characteristics that directly depend upon
how the field is structured) – see below and other chapters in Part 2.
Yet each of these two lines of research is limited in its ability to represent the notion of
DPK in its full complexity. Neither are they consistently brought together, either in
professional development activities, in educational research or through the reflection of
university teachers. However, using these two lines simultaneously enables us to examine
the phenomenon of DPK more accurately, since linking elements of the knowledge base
for teaching with elements of disciplinary specificity provides a way to consider internal
and external factors contributing to the formation of DPK.
This is what the empirical model of DPK presented in this chapter does. But the model
goes further by including elements from a third source, namely the teacher’s personal
epistemology – his or her beliefs about knowledge and its development (e.g. Baxter-
Magolda, 2002; Hofer and Pintrich, 2002; Perry, 1998; Schommer-Aikins, 2002). This
dimension is essential to articulating the link between the knowledge base for teaching