This final chapter synthesizes the findings and implications derived from applying the Decoding
the Disciplines model across disciplines and within communities of practice. We make practical
suggestions for teachers and researchers who wish to apply and extend this work.
Learning from Decoding across Disciplines and within Communities of Practice
Janice Miller-Young and Jennifer Boman
We suggested at the beginning of this issue that the “Decoding the Disciplines” model not only
provides a framework for inquiry into teaching and learning disciplinary concepts, but also holds
much potential for bridging thinking and teaching practice across disciplines. The chapters
subsequently presented have extended the Decoding model in several ways, using it for
epistemological and ontological bottlenecks. By analyzing interviews about seven bottlenecks
from diverse disciplines, we uncovered common themes that illustrate experts’ ways of thinking,
practicing and being (Chapter 2, this issue). For example, these expert approaches required not
only the ability to perform tasks such as deconstructing problems and recognizing patterns, but
also the confidence to take agency in pursuing knowledge and to take time to explore different
perspectives before coming to a decision. These ways of thinking, being, and practicing were
employed even when thinking through concepts which our interviewees initially thought were
relatively ‘simple’, cognitive bottlenecks. Also, by analyzing these interviews through different
theoretical lenses, we have proposed several new lines of questioning for use in Decoding
interviews (see below). Finally, by applying the Decoding interview within two different
communities of practice we have shown how it can influence both teaching and curriculum. In
all cases, we have been struck by the power of the Decoding interview in revealing basic
assumptions about disciplinary thinking as well as the role it can play in developing the
community and trust necessary for collaborative teaching and/or research projects.

Implications for teaching and curriculum
Use of the Decoding framework has much potential as a tool to help close the gap between
expert and novice thinking. As Middendorf and Pace (2004) indicate, making disciplinary
operations explicit and finding ways to model these can help move students towards mastery and
success. We have suggested in this special issue that the benefits of Decoding can be realized
both at an individual teacher level as well as across programs and curricula. We raise the
following three implications for teaching and curriculum based on this work.
Teacher reflection. Looking at patterns in teachers’ tacit thinking within and across
disciplines can help provide a starting point for understanding one’s own hidden assumptions
and beliefs. The themes illustrated across this issue provide a number of specific ideas for
teachers to reflect on - from common themes related to expert ways of thinking, practicing, and
being (Miller-Young and Boman), or the role of lived experience and embodiment in one’s
practice (Currie), to deepening our understanding of how students experience our disciplines
(Yeo).
In particular, the role of experience, which ultimately led to experts’ confidence and
seemingly intuitive ways of thinking, emerged as a strong theme across all chapters. Our findings
highlighted the importance of instructors becoming more conscious of how their experience
helped to develop their expertise, and for instructors to think more purposefully about how to
support such learning experiences for our students. Articulating these reflections could help us to
be more explicit about our own experiences with our students. As MacDonald (this issue)
suggests, telling our own stories of learning and identity development may be another strategy to
improve students’ experience by reducing affective bottlenecks such as those which were
strongly evident in the interviews with athletic therapy instructors (Yeo et al this issue).

The literature suggests that keeping journals, thinking deeply about our teaching, and
considering feedback from students and colleagues are important ways for faculty to critically
reflect on our ways of practicing and further, that reflecting on and sharing our own educational
stories can help us understand what we bring to our work (Shadiow 2013). We suggest the
Decoding interview could be added to this list of strategies. We found the Decoding interview,
even when the interviewee is not involved in the research project, to be a powerful tool to help
faculty become more conscious or, and thus able to critically reflect on, an aspect of their
practice (Currie this issue; Haney 2015). In the words of Yeo (this issue), this kind of inquiry
could open us up to being more generous with our students; to not only being focused on
explaining concepts better, but being “focused on understanding the students better and how they
are experiencing the discipline” (pp).
Supportive communities. While others have emphasized the importance of reflecting on
one’s own Decoding efforts within a supportive community (Middendorf and Shopkow in press),
we have also shown how reflecting on others’ interviews within a community of practice can
challenge our assumptions and generate new insights. The service-learning (Chapter 6) and
athletic therapy (Chapter 7) communities of practice both conducted collaborative self-studies in
connection with Decoding, which seems to have played a powerful role in the impact of the
interviews. As the service-learning group reported elsewhere, the Decoding interview itself can
be important to the functioning of a collaborative learning community because it can help
generate a climate of trust (Miller-Young et al. 2015) which is important when we are
confronting the risks of learning and changing. Together, these findings suggest that Decoding
has much potential for further use in professional development as well as research initiatives.

Curriculum development. Students need time to integrate the disciplinary knowledge
they are learning with disciplinary ways of practicing and being. However, ways of thinking,
practicing, and being are not often considered in curriculum planning. As we write in Chapter 2,
“we might consider whether our teaching decontextualizes knowledge from the practices to
which it relates, whether we prioritize content and ‘efficiency of transmission’ over deep
understanding, and whether we focus on epistemology and narrow conceptions of knowledge at
the expense of ontology… these themes could inform curriculum planning and related teaching
and learning research in one’s course, program, or discipline” (pp). As one example, the athletic
therapy program has become more intentional about designing practical learning activities in
lectures and tutorials rather than leaving students’ experiential learning to chance exposures in
clinical or practicum placements (Yeo et al.).
Implications for Decoding
While the scholarship of teaching and learning started with a focus on students’ learning and
learning processes (Kreber and Cranton 2000), the field has evolved to include a range of
methodologies and epistemologies (Poole 2013; Miller-Young and Yeo 2015) and recognizes the
need to address discipline-centered “ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving” (Coppola and
Krajcik 2013, 628) as well as common goals such as critical thinking (Middendorf and Shopkow
in press). There are several new ways Decoding could be used to address these topics.
Extending the model. While traditionally the focus of the Decoding interview has been
on cognitive or procedural bottlenecks, our interviews with disciplinary experts also explored
what could be considered epistemological and ontological bottlenecks (Miller-Young and
Boman, this issue). In doing so, we also suggested new lines of questioning for Decoding
interviews based on both our intuitive exploration and the use of different theoretical lenses. For

example, Currie (this issue) proposed the addition of sensory and experiential questions, Yeo
(this issue) put forward questions about how experts interpret texts, their orientation to questions,
and sense of play, while MacDonald (this issue) indicated how narrative identity theories might
be used to help interviewers focus on uncovering and translating our disciplinary identities. It
will be useful to further explore the utility of these lenses and questions in Decoding interviews,
particularly for such non-cognitive bottlenecks, and to examine the impact of extending the
interview in this manner for both the instructor and, ultimately, his or her students.
Decoding non-experts. While the premise behind the Decoding framework is to help
make expert thinking visible, we have also explored Decoding of faculty members who were not
experts on the bottleneck (i.e. reciprocity in service-learning) and discovered the utility of the
Decoding interview, followed by critical reflection, to generate new learning and influence their
teaching practice. This potential should be further explored for other contexts and participants.
As one example, these findings suggest that conducting Decoding interviews with novices such
as students throughout their development as learners in a discipline or program would also be a
productive avenue to explore.
Future work
In this special issue, we have shown how Decoding is one tool to help us uncover and translate
our disciplines, our experiences, and our ways of thinking, being, and practicing for our students.
We have also suggested ways to extend this tool through theoretical lenses, new lines of
questioning, and with communities of practice. As such, it will be important to intentionally
inquire into the effectiveness of these suggested strategies in helping to uncover our disciplines
for our students.

While this issue has largely focused on role of the Decoding interview, it is also valuable
to consider the subsequent steps in the Decoding model, particularly how to use our learning
from Decoding to improve how we give feedback to students and assess their learning. For
example, the Athletic Therapy team is continuing their study by collecting longitudinal data from
students as they progress through the revised program, while Rathburn and Lexier from the
service-learning group are collecting data about students’ understanding of service-learning, and
will be able to compare similar data sets from before and after their Decoding self-study.
Teaching and learning are multifaceted phenomena, and knowledge is “in part a product
of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used” (Brown, Collins, and
Duguid 1989, 32). With this in mind, we have identified several possibilities to further the use of
Decoding in innovative and influential ways. We hope this issue, together with several other
Decoding resources soon to be available (Middendorf and Shopkow in press, Pace in press),
provides the resources and inspiration for others from diverse backgrounds to experiment with
the framework in their own contexts in order to improve teaching and learning, build
communities of practice, and contribute valuable scholarship that informs and transforms higher
education.
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JANICE MILLER-YOUNG has been a faculty member at Mount Royal University since 2002
and the Director of the Institute for SoTL since 2013.

JENNIFER BOMAN has been a faculty developer and faculty member in Mount Royal
University’s Academic Development Centre since 2010.