Building Bridges from the Decoding Interview to Teaching Practice

Abstract

This chapter describes a multidisciplinary faculty self-study about reciprocity in service-learning.The study began with each co-author participating in a Decoding interview. We describe how Decoding combined with collaborative self-study had a positive impact on our teaching practice. The experience of this group of students and their professors, two co-authors of this chapter, is all too common and not an isolated incident. This is not surprising given that it has been argued that "service learning pedagogy requires and fosters learning-often transformational, paradigm-shifting learning-on the part of everyone involved, including faculty" (Clayton, Bringle & Hatcher 2013, 245). Indeed, given that service-learning necessitates faculty giving up control and working reciprocally with partners, sometimes much more than bridges need to be shifted and changed. Recognizing this, and due to our commitment to developing our teaching practice, we, the authors of this article, set out to investigate our own thinking with regard to reciprocity through a collaborative self-study, which included the use of a Decoding interview (Pace & Middendorf 2004). Building Bridges from the Decoding Interview to Teaching PracticeOur initial research examined how the Decoding interview followed by our self-study process generated learning about reciprocity specifically (Miller-Young, Dean, Rathburn, Pettit, Underwood, Gleeson, Lexier, Calvert, and Clayton 2015). In this chapter we report how Decoding had an impact on four areas of our teaching practice: 1) our identity and role as teachers, especially in an experiential learning setting; 2) the discovery of similarities and differences we shared with colleagues from diverse disciplines; 3) new strategies for forging meaningful and truly reciprocal relationships with partners in global service-learning field schools; and finally, 4) our design, delivery and assessment in field schools. Background and Methodology

Understanding How Program Factors Influence Intercultural Learning in Study Abroad: The Benefits of Mixed-Method Analysis

“…Our analysis did not account for differences among the four service-learning programs. Given the growing field of international service-learning scholarship, including studies of intervention strategies (Sturgill & Motley, 2014), intercultural competence development (Deardorff & Edwards, 2015), and building reciprocity with local partners in service learning (Pettit et al, 2017;Tiessen, Lough, & Cheung, 2018), we believe we have much to learn by further exploration into our programs' structures of interaction and activities. Finally, our findings related to effects of intra-group dynamics were unexpected, in that they only emerged in our final round of qualitative analysis.…”

Evaluating the Decoding the Disciplines paradigm that is used for developing disciplinary habits of mind: A systematic literature review

“…Miller-Young's (2015) self-study found that group dialogue during interviews generated deeper understandings of the disciplinary concept of reciprocity and states that expert thinking is "inclined towards an epistemology in which knowledge construction is never finished or complete" (Miller-Young 2015, 40). Similarly, Pettit (2017), Lee-Post (2019), Pace (2011), Schlegel (2004) and Grim et al (2004) found that active participation amongst students generates new forms of questioning that appear to be powerful tools for reflection. Without precluding the importance of autonomous learning, such team effort facilitates disciplinary skill development (Schlegel 2004) and allows tasks to be skilfully analysed, dissected (Grim et al 2004) and deconstructed.…”

“…The remaining 8 studies (Attas 2018;Diaz 2008;Fischer 2018;Sturts and Mowatt 2012;Miller 2018;Miller-Young 2015;Middendorf and Pace 2004;Pettit 2017) identified tacit mental operations that are often mistakenly assumed in student learning: The disciplinary practitioner knows that prescribed scholarly material do not represent the only opinion on a matter (Attas 2018;Schlegel 2004;Pace 2004;Pettit 2017) and that learners should seek other conflicting perspectives. By voicing their own interpretations (Diaz 2008), learners would soon realise that they are not passive consumers of knowledge but that they are able to become active contributors to scholarship.…”

“…As mentioned earlier in this article, the habit of deconstructing knowledge allows complex processes and phenomena to be transformed into manageable chunks of information (Miller-Young and Boman 2017;Miller-Young 2015;Pettit 2017;Lee-Post 2019;Pace 2011;Schlegel 2004;Grim et al 2004). Miller-Young and Boman's (2017) study found that knowledge construction involves the expert's ability to recognise patterns and connections amongst various pieces of information; examine problems from different points of view, and engage consciously with their surroundings (Miller-Young and Boman 2017).…”

“…Fischer 2018;Sundt 2010;Miller 2018; Diaz 2008;Sturts and Mowatt 2012;Yeo 2017;Riegler 2019;Yeo 2017;Cameron 2019;Pinnow 2016;Burkholder 2011;Middendorf 2015;Rousse 2017;Lee-Post 2019;Verpoorten et al 2017;Pace 2004;Zhu et al 2012;Attas 2018;Pace 2011;Pettit 2017;Miller-Young and Boman 2017) applied the interview technique (Step 2) to unlock the disciplinary unconscious of the expert practitioner.…”