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

Teaching in the disciplines
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and disciplinary specificity since, for instance, beliefs that are present about teaching
may interact with the body of knowledge that is formed by an academic’s discipline. As
such, an academic’s way of seeing knowledge and its development (their personal
epistemology) may act as a mediator between his or her thought processes about teaching
and the specific characteristics affecting teaching that he or she perceives in his or
her discipline. For example, this could explain why chemists do not necessarily all
think alike with regard to chemistry and therefore end up teaching similar topics
differently.
Within research on personal epistemology, three aspects have been found to play a
particularly important role, namely an individual’s beliefs about knowledge and knowing
(how one views what constitutes knowledge and the various actions associated with
being able to know), his or her beliefs about knowledge construction (how one views
the development or accumulation of knowledge), and his or her beliefs about the
evaluation of knowledge (how one attributes more value to certain forms of knowledge
than others).
The model of DPK presented in this chapter thus incorporates the three lines of research
identified above and their various components. In this sense, the DPK a university teacher
develops corresponds to a complex web of relationships between the various components
coming from these three sources (see Figure 15.1 on p. 219). The model of DPK presented
in this chapter was validated by interview research described in Case study 1.
Interrogating practice
Consider the sources of information and inspiration you draw from when
teaching. In light of these, think of instances in which you seem to be making
links between your knowledge base for teaching, the disciplinary
characteristics of your field, and/or your personal epistemology.
Consider how much the institutional/departmental context in which you
find yourself affects your thoughts and teaching actions.
Case study 1: The DPK research
The model of DPK outlined in Figure 15.1 was validated with the help of a multicase
study of four university professors from four disciplines. Their disciplines
represented each of the four groupings of university disciplines identified in the
Biglan (1973) and Becher (1989) taxonomy, namely Hard-Pure (Mathematics),
Hard-Applied (Civil Engineering), Soft-Pure (Political Theory), and Soft-Applied
(Social Work) (see Chapter 2 for further explanation of these groupings).