Chris Correa has a thought-provoking post on something called “signature pedagogies.” Here’s an excerpt:
Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, shared some of the preliminary results from the foundation’s studies of professional education (including the education of lawyers, doctors, clergy, teachers, and others). He introduced the notion of signature pedagogies, or (as I understood it) the unique and prevalent ‘rules of engagement’ in the education in each of these domains.
For example, there are certain activities and patterns of discourse that law students engage in that differ from the patterns experienced by medical students. In a law school lecture, a professor might begin a lecture with a “cold call” and ask a student to summarize and analyze some text. This process might be repeated several times so that students are summarizing other students’ contribution and generating their own analysis. This is one element that makes up the ‘signature pedagogy’ in the field of law.
This sounds an awful lot like educational pattern languages to me. One thing I like about this approach is that it focuses on discipline-specific differences. Disciplinarity is one factor that absolutely should influence the educational patterns employed. (Learning styles/preferences, age level, and skill level are a few other factors that might have an impact.)
Anyway, good stuff.
