Tuning  in  to  Tacit   Knowledge:     Decoding  Across  the   Disciplines   Genevieve Currie, Janice Miller-Young, Jennifer Boman, Michelle Yeo, Ron MacDonald, Stephanie Zettel (Mount Royal University) Decoding  the  Disciplines   (Middendorf  &  Pace,  2004)   O A framework used to help experts unpack the crucial operations in their disciplines in order to make them more visible and accessible to students Middendorf & Pace (2004). Image from http://www.iub.edu/~hlp/model.html The  Decoding  Interviews   O Steps 1 & 2 O What is a bottleneck to learning in your class? O As an expert, how do you do it? O Research Study O Interviews with 7 faculty members from a variety of disciplines O Transcripts analyzed through different lenses Inductive  Analysis:   Common  themes   O 7 common themes identified O e.g. provisionality: O participants valued the importance of taking time when engaging in disciplinary thinking O e.g. withholding judgment before coming to a conclusion, exploring possibilities, trusting a process Theme:  Valuing  Provisionality   O “Remember to draw the free body diagram and not just make that initial assumption… the more and more complex these systems get, the more valuable drawing this out becomes… I don’t assume. If you are not told something, or something isn’t given in the question, don’t assume. Don’t assume the tension is equal to the weight. Don’t assume anything!” -Patricia, engineering Theme:  Valuing  Provisionality   O “I try not to make assumptions and I try not to have already decided what is wrong with the person before I have talked to them… You start and say “How can I help you today? What would you like? What is the most important thing you want me to focus on today?” - Wendy, nursing Theme:  Valuing  Provisionality   O “I am really friendly with all my story ideas, like I just really respect them and think ‘yeah, this could be, this could be… so I am very friendly with them… things don’t pop into my head that I immediately reject as stupid or not worth pursuing.” - Bonnie, journalism Phenomenology,  Embodiment   and  Disciplinary  Knowledge   O Ways of knowing became embodied into how faculty practiced within their disciplines O Faculty personally experienced disciplinary concepts O Disciplinary knowledge was lodged in embodied bottlenecks Phenomenology   In the practice of phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyze structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ “...  I have seen it and I learned from experience, I learned from practice and, I guess, you know, you learn from examples, either from your own practice or from watching others and how they have dealt with things before.” Louisa, nursing faculty describing her knowledge of disease “...I am conscious of voice in journalism...I am conscious of the machinery and the process by which the journalism is produced, and I have seen it all from the inside and so I know what it is, and that is where a true critique of any piece of writing, I think, has to start, with an understanding of the conditions of production of it – of that piece.” Juan Carlos, journalism faculty “Being  in  the  World”   “We interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger(Being &Time, 1927), phenomenology resolves into what he called “fundamental ontology.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ “There is lots of theory to back that up as well, and research to back that up – lots of research on the determinants of health and what affects health – and so we talk about that in class, but again, it is not real, I guess. I think if you yourself have not – and this is what I am assuming – but if you haven’t been exposed to those issues within your own childhood, or your own adolescence, or your own school then sometimes you don’t really know that even is there.” Wendy, on teaching and living nursing Conscious  Experience   To be human is to be embedded and immersed in the world and an understanding of life experience is based on a process which is contextual, subjective, intersubjective and evolving. (Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 1945) “…conscious recklessness is generative and powerful because it is doing it because you know that it is of use.” Colin, drama faculty explaining about character development Embodiment   “Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world.” (Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, p. 408) Embodiment   “Our own experience spreads out from conscious experience into semi conscious and even unconscious mental activity along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ “I don’t actually know if I could ever actually decode this because it is so innate I don’t know what I do, but I just have this innate understanding that the forces are not necessarily balanced anymore because the object is moving and there has to be some unbalanced force working on them to cause that movement..” Patricia, engineering, explaining the concept of Newton’s Second Law “Well  I  guess  I  iden/fy  tension  …  by  being  able  to  recognize   discord,  disharmony;  I  iden/fy  tension  …  I  guess  I  actually   iden/fy  tension  by  what  it  is  that  I  feel  in  response  to  the   idea,  like  I  can  feel  …  and  I  have  had  people  too  say,  ‘Oh   that  doesn’t  work  as  a  story  idea,’  but  they  can’t  tell  you   why,  and  it  is  probably  because  it  does  lack  that  tension,   but  I  just  don’t  emo/onally  engage  with  it.  Like  when  there   is  a  good  idea  and  there  is  tension  I  emo/onally  engage   with  that  idea,  as  a  producer,  as  a  faculty  member,  as  a   journalist  I  can  just  emo/onally  engage  with  that  idea   quickly.” Bonnie, journalism faculty “I just don’t see that they(students) really get it. Like I see when somebody puts something up there they kind of go, ‘Yeah, that is not okay,’ like everyone goes, ‘No, that is no okay,’ but when it comes to them speaking it I sense they are still not quite… it is still not quite in them that they understand how difficult it is. It is easy to say, ‘No, that is not okay,’ but when I have to do it, it is actually … it is not okay...” Monique, nursing faculty describing using the Code of Ethics Theme:   Intertwined   Identities     “It’s in my DNA.” Theme:  Intertwined  Identities   "I walk down the street and I see people with large abdomens and I am thinking, 'You have heart failure or liver failure,' right? ... I see people with grey skin and I am thinking, 'You need to stop drinking. You need to stop smoking.' Like these are things... you are always assessing." - Louisa, nursing Informing  Practice   O1. Informing the decoding interview process O2. Curriculum and pedagogical applications at Mount Royal University References   O Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and time. New York: Harper & Row. O Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. New York: Routledge. O Middendorf, J., & Pace, D. (2004). Decoding the disciplines: A model for helping students learn disciplinary ways of thinking. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 98, San Francisco: Jossey Bass. References  continued   OStanford Center for the Study of Language and Information(2014). The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retreived from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ phenomenology/