Working Across the Cultural Divide: Looking at Faculty Development From Disciplinary Perspectives

• In Event: Developing a Research Agenda for Cross-Professional Development

Abstract

The perspectives that different disciplines bring to teaching and its development can sometimes work at cross purposes when faculty with different epistemologies come together to work on a project. (Donald, 1992) Some disciplines view teaching as an inborn talent or art; some as a learnable skill; some as an independent discipline with its own beliefs, assumptions, and standards, and some haven’t thought much about it at all. The same is true for faculty developers; they have a wide range of perspectives that they bring to the table. Unless both groups recognize this area as possibly complicating their work, either side might come away from an encounter confused and dissatisfied. The assumptions about what teaching is drive the practices that we use to develop and explore it. For example, in disciplines, like the humanities, where textual interpretation is the method of analysis, qualitative data are the dominant form of studying and interpreting an event, In the natural science, quantitative data dominate the research in the field. (Braxton & Hargens, 1996). Bringing these two groups together to plan a study on some aspect of teaching could lead to very different preferences in what data to collect and how to collect it. Faculty developers often have to educate themselves and those with whom they work about these differences in order to them to be able to talk across the cultural divide (Borrego, 2007). This segment of the panel will summarize what researchers in the field have concluded about the underlying perspectives of teaching held by different disciplines and ways in which very different disciplines can draw on the best strategies of each for a richer understanding of teaching and studying it.

Author

• Marilla D. Svinicki, The University of Texas - Austin