EuroSoTL pre-conference workshop: "Using Decoding the Disciplines to Ease Students Through Key Transitions"
Date and time
Location
UCC Brookfield Health Science Complex
Brookfield Cork IrelandDescription
On the Threshold of College: Using Decoding the Disciplines to Ease Students Through Key Transitions
Facilitated by Professor David Pace, Indiana University
Like exposure to a new Threshold Concept, the transition into college can be traumatic. It often requires students to abandon existing ways of operating and to enter a potentially threatening liminal world. This transition can be eased if the “rules” of the new “game” that they will be playing are clear and unambiguous. But instructors often find it difficult to make the mental operations of their disciplines explicit because these processes have become so automatic that they are invisible to experts in the field.
Decoding the Disciplines is now used in at least eight countries to bring to the surface the implicit mental operations that students must master to succeed in particular disciplines and to convey these effectively to students. In this session, the Decoding process will be presented, and its application to the problem of student transitions will be explored. Participants will be shown how Decoding was systematically used in a two-week course, designed to introduce first-year students to the skills needed in history courses and, more broadly, to help them think about adjustment to disciplinary knowledge. They will see videos in which students share their own experiences and will have an opportunity to work together to develop strategies for smoothing the transition of new college students into work in a discipline.
References
David Pace and Joan Middendorf, (Eds.) (2004b). Decoding the disciplines: Helping students learn disciplinary ways of thinking. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 98. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Arlene Diaz, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Leah Shopkow, “The History Learning Project ‘Decodes’ a Discipline” in Kathleen McKinney, Ebbs, Flows, and Rips: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2012)