Intuitions and Instincts: Considerations for Decoding Disciplinary Identities

Abstract

Interviews of teachers seeking to help students overcome learning bottlenecks are the first steps in a process of Decoding the Disciplines (Pace and Middendorf 2004) pioneered in the History Department at Indiana University. The aim of a Decoding interview is to build precise understanding of the bottleneck in question and to identify the operations or steps experts would take and students must master to get through the bottleneck. Teachers then determine how, as experts, to model the operations or steps for their students, how to provide effective opportunities for students to practice and receive helpful feedback on the operations or steps, how to assess student progress, and how to share results with other teachers in the program or discipline. The steps needed to get through the bottleneck may be identified in a Decoding interview by inquiring of the teacher interviewee what steps she took in overcoming the difficulty when she was a learner or apprentice herself, or by asking her what an expert would do to overcome the difficulty, or both (Diaz, Middendorf, Pace, and Shopkow 2008).Decoding the Disciplines interviews conducted with faculty members at Mount Royal University (described in Miller-Young and Boman, this issue) bumped up against not only the interviewees' professional identities as teachers, always by definition in play in the interviews, but specifically their disciplinary professional identities as, say, nurses or journalists.Interviewers in these situations (including the present author) did not pursue discussion of disciplinary professional identities as such in much depth or breadth. We might have done, though, because unpacking the ways and means by which disciplinary professional identities are