Exploring Signature Pedagogies book

My co-editors (Regan Gurung and Aeron Haynie) and I stood in the ISSOTL 2006 book exhibit and talked about doing a book together. We brainstormed what issues inspired us and made us wanted to know more, and quickly came to signature pedagogies. Two years later, the book just came out--thanks to ISSOTL!--Nancy Chick

Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind
Edited by Regan A. R. Gurung, Nancy L. Chick, and Aeron Haynie
Foreword by Anthony A. Ciccone

From the Foreword
“These authors have clearly shown the value in looking for the signature pedagogies of their disciplines. Nothing uncovers hidden assumptions about desired knowledge, skills, and dispositions better than a careful examination of our most cherished practices. The authors inspire specialists in other disciplines to do the same. Furthermore, they invite other colleagues to explore whether relatively new, interdisciplinary fields such as Women’s Studies and Global Studies have, or should have, a signature pedagogy consistent with their understanding of what it means to ‘apprentice’ in these areas.” --Anthony A. Ciccone, Senior Scholar and Director, Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

How do individual disciplines foster deep learning, and get students to think like disciplinary experts? With contributions from the sciences, humanities, and the arts, this book critically explores how to best foster student learning within and across the disciplines. This book represents a major advance in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) by moving beyond individual case studies, best practices, and the work of individual scholars, to focus on the unique content and characteristic pedagogies of major disciplines.

Each chapter begins by summarizing the SoTL literature on the pedagogies of a specific discipline, and by examining and analyzing its traditional practices, paying particular attention to how faculty evaluate success. Each concludes by the articulating for its discipline the elements of a “signature pedagogy” that will improve teaching and learning, and by offering an agenda for future research. Each chapter explores what the pedagogical literature of the discipline suggests are the optimal ways to teach material in that field, and to verify the resulting learning. Each author is concerned about how to engage students in the ways of knowing, the habits of mind, and the values used by experts in his or her field.

Readers will not only benefit from the chapters most relevant to their disciplines. As faculty members consider how their courses fit into the broader curriculum and relate to the other disciplines, and design learning activities and goals not only within the discipline but also within the broader objectives of liberal education, they will appreciate the cross-disciplinary understandings this book affords.

“This volume sets out to create conceptual and empirical bridges between the scholarship of teaching and learning and the emerging study of signature pedagogies. The editors present a pioneering extension of the concept of signature pedagogy from the professions to the academic disciplines.” —LEE S. SHULMAN, President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

“The authors challenge all of us to look carefully at our teaching, leading us in thoughtful questioning of inherited pedagogies and urging us to design intentional practices based on actual disciplinary priorities and evidence of student learning.” —JENNIFER META ROBINSON, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University

“What does it mean to think like a historian? Like a mathematician? Like a sociologist? The engaging essays in this extraordinary book pull back the curtain on twenty years of work on college and university teaching in fourteen disciplines, and highlight innovations that are turning classrooms, labs, and field sites into spaces where students practice what in earlier days professors simply preached. An invaluable resource for faculty and graduate students who are deepening and intensifying their own involvement with teaching as serious intellectual work. I really do love this book.” —MARY TAYLOR HUBER, Senior Scholar, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

“Exploring Signature Pedagogies is a remarkable achievement that is sure to find its way onto everyone’s short shelf of essential books on teaching and learning. This is the perfect book to give to faculty members who are dubious of ‘faddish’ education research. It also belongs in the hands of every beginning teacher or anyone wanting a good road map to the problems and possibilities of teaching the liberal arts.” —LENDOL CALDER, Associate Professor of History at Augustana College