What is (Name of Discipline)?

From IAE-Pedia

Introduction

The quote given above provides a good summary of the purpose of this IAE-pedia page. A good education contains both breadth and depth. Of course, the totality of accumulated data, information, knowledge, and wisdom is so vast that one now must think very carefully about what a current meaning of Thomas Huxley's advice might be.

This page serves as an introduction to a potentially large collection of IAE-pedia articles that help students and teachers to gain a deeper insight into the disciplines they are learning and teaching.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is affecting the content of many different disciplines. It is affecting how one learns various disciplines and how one demonstrates knowledge or uses their knowledge in many different disciplines.

A What is article is designed to:

Provide a brief introduction to a discipline. The emphasis is on building a foundation upon which the learner can construct new knowledge and understanding.
Provide a little insight into how ICT is affecting the discipline.
Communicate effectively with a lay person (teacher or student) within the discipline.

Examples

As you think about your own education and the education of others, think about breadth and depth. Breadth is an aid to communicating with othre people and with the accumulated knowledge stored/represented in various media. Depth helps to produce a level of expertise that is both personally satisfying and may support a career or hobby.

As a personal example, I have watched many movies over the years. Thus, I have some breadth of knowledge about this media. I think about my insights into a movie versus those of a highly qualified film critic. What does the film critic know, see, hear, and feel that I don't? Is it possible for someone to write a relatively short article that I can read that will significantly increase my insights into being a film critic, or my level of expertise in that discipline?

Here is another personal example. A few years ago, I was the major professor of a high school history teacher. In our long discussions about his dissertation research work and writing his dissertation, from time to time he taught me a little bit about how he thinks about and understands history. Thus, I learned about, causality, legacy, responsibility, and investigation. Learning history is not memorizing a bunch of names, dates, and places.

Thus, I now have added a little depth to my breadth of knowledge in the discipline of history. Learning a little bit about causality, legacy, responsibility , and investigation has helped me better appreciate and understand what historians do and some of the foundations of history education.

I became particularly aware of the breadth with a little depth issue as I taught preservice elementary school teachers. They need to have great breadth in order to deal with the breadth of curriculum topics they teach and the breadth of knowledge and skills needed to be an effective teacher. They also need to have insights into the foundations of depth in the various content areas that they teach.

As an example, consider the discipline of math. What is math? An elementary school teacher needs breadth and some depth of math knowledge and skills to teach the math curriculum. However, the typical elementary school teacher has little insight into the foundations of depth in math. Thus, most of the ideas in the What is Mathematics? page in this iae-pedia are new to them.

The Work of E. D. Hirsch

Eric Donald Hirsch is an American educator who gave careful thought to the breadth issues of a good education. What does one need to know in order to understand contemporary writings and to carry on intelligent conversations with the general public? Quoting from the above reference:

Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986, and wrote Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know in 1987. He also co-wrote The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy in 1988. Cultural Literacy became a best-seller, but Hirsch's ideas were extremely controversial. Although himself a liberal, he was attacked as a neo-conservative and advocate for a conservative, lily-white curriculum, a promoter of "drill and kill" pedagogy and a reactionary force. His theories have been criticized for not addressing supposed differences in learning styles and for a lack of information about minorities.

Beginning in 1997 Hirsch began publishing books in the Core Knowledge Series. Each book focuses on the content knowledge that should be taught to each particular elementary grade level. There are different books covering kindergarten through sixth grades, plus at least one book outlining an overview of what should be covered in the whole elementary curriculum.

In 1996, Hirsch published The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. In it, Hirsch proposed that Romanticized, anti-knowledge theories of education prevalent in America are not only the cause of America's lackluster educational performance, but also a cause of widening inequalities in class and race. Hirsch portrays the focus of American educational theory as one which attempts to give students intellectual tools such as "critical thinking skills", but which denigrates teaching any actual content, labeling it "mere rote learning". Hirsch states that it is this attitude which has failed to develop knowledgeable students.

A focus on breadth in education tends to cut across all disciplines. It also cuts across informal and formal education. What does one need to know to understand the types of information discussed in a typical newspaper, news magazine, or news broadcast? What does one need to know to be a reasonably well informed and responsible adult citizen and voter? What does one need to know in order to effectively cope with major changes going on in the world due to changes in technology? What does one need to know to understand issues related to the changing world environment and issues of sustainability?

These questions are difficult to answer. To be reasonably up to date in one's general breadth of informal and formal education requires a lifelong approach to continuing learning.

Dividing Knowledge into Disciplines

The accumulated data, information, knowledge, and wisdom of the human race is broken into a large number of disciplines. The disciplines themselves are broken into sub disciplines and sub sub disciplines. This is a convenient way to organize a physical library, a precollege school program, or a high education institution.

As a personal example, when I was in elementary school, at each grade level I had a teacher who taught language arts (sub disciplines included reading, writing, speaking, and listening), art, math, science, social science, health, and physical education. However, we had a special teacher who came in to teach music, and another who came in to teach Bible studies.

In junior high school, we had specialists in each discipline, and this continued through high school. In my undergraduate and graduate education, the universities had separate departments with a number of faculty who were specialists in the the overall discipline of the department (such as math) and then further specialized into sub disciplines such as algebra, analysis, number theory, statistics, and topology.

When I mention a category such as art, health, language arts, math, music, physical education, science, or social science, the term probably conjures up in your mind a definition, perhaps accompanied by pictures, remembrances of a course or teacher, and so on. For most of us, most of the time this suffices for communicating with others and for meeting our own needs. Most of us have little need to know finer details of the subdivision of math named topology.

Topology is the mathematical study of the properties that are preserved through deformations, twistings, and stretching of objects. Tearing, however, is not allowed. A circle is topologically equivalent to an ellipse (into which it can be deformed by stretching) and a sphere is equivalent to an ellipsoid.

Rather, we are pleased if we happen to understand the following joke:

Q: What is a topologist?

A: Someone who cannot distinguish between a doughnut and a coffee cup.

Explanation: The assumption is that the cup has a handle with a hole in it. Thus, the doughnut and the cup each have one hole.

However, suppose that you are a teacher in a specific discipline or sub discipline. In that position, you have a duty of helping students to build (learn, construct in their minds, understand) a foundation that can be built upon and added to by the students in the future.

You have heard of the idea, "The tree grows the way the twig is bent." A students initial introduction to disciplines, sub disciplines, and ideas can be thought of as bending the twig or laying the foundations. A teacher has an awesome responsibility!

This awesome responsibility situation is especially true for parents and other child caregivers, preschool teachers, and primary school teachers. In educationalize, these people provide quite a bit of the primary socialization of the child. Suppose, for example, that a child's primary socialization in art, music, or math is facilitated by a teacher who is inept in and sort of hates the disciplines, and who conveys the message "I can't do art, music, and math."

The importance of primary socialization can often be seen in children growing up in a "musical family" or an "athletic family" or in an academic, egghead family." In such cases, the early bending of the twig is done by a parent or parents who have a high level of expertise in a discipline. The relatively early and continuing excellent coaching and teaching empowers the child.

What is a Discipline?

Each academic discipline or area of study can be defined by a combination of general things such as:

The types of problems, tasks, and activities it addresses.
Its accumulated accomplishments such as results, achievements, products, performances, scope, power, uses, impact on the societies of the world, and so on, and its methods of preserving and passing on this accumulation to current and future generations.
Its history, culture, and language, including notation and special vocabulary.
Its methods of teaching, learning, assessment; its lower-order and higher-order knowledge and skills; and its critical thinking and understand. What it does to preserve and sustain its work and pass it on to future generations.
Its tools, methodologies, and types of evidence and arguments used in solving problems, accomplishing tasks, and recording and sharing accumulated results.
The knowledge and skills that separate and distinguish among: a) a novice; b) a person who has a personally useful level of competence; c) a reasonably competent person, employable in the discipline; d) an expert; and e) a world-class expert.

Notice the emphasis on solving problems, accomplishing tasks, producing products, doing performances, accumulating knowledge and skills, and sharing knowledge and skills.

Also, notice the emphasis on increasing one's level of expertise in a discipline. There has been a lot of research on how long it takes, how much effort it takes, and roles of good teachers and coaches as a person works to be as good as he or she can be in a discipline or sub discipline. The research-based estimates for the time it takes to bee all you can be" in a discipline tend to be about 10,000 hours or more spread out over ten years. A typical University professor who has a doctorate and has gained promotion to an Associate Professorship has likely spent more than 15,000 hours in gaining this level of expertise.

Within any broad discipline, there are many different sub disciplines where one can achieve a high level of expertise. Thus, for example, one can become a historian within any discipline. One can become a coach, referee, or judge in the various sporting events. One can be come a teacher within any discipline.

In performance activities such as gymnastics, playing a musical instrument, and swimming, it is clear that it takes some natural ability (a good genetic disposition) and good instructions starting at a relatively young age to achieve world class.

In the sciences, it is often suggested that a researcher tends to peak by about age 30. That is, many researchers in these areas have done their best research by the age of 30. For such people, the twig needs to be bent at a fairly young age to allow academic coursework up through a doctorate (and, possibly postdoctoral work) and then a significant amount of time on the job before passing the age 30 line.

Project-based Learning

Project-based learning helps to create a teaching and learning environment that has both breadth and depth, and that readily cuts across many disciplines. Thus, PBL is a good vehicle to help students gain the types of breadth of knowledge that will be of use throughout their lives, and to build some of the depth needed to better understand a particular discipline.

For example, suppose that a team of students is working on a project and they have access to relatively modern ICT facilities. They will be learning to work in a group and to communicate with each other about a variety of academic topics. They will be learning to make use of ICT to communicate and to retrieve information. They will be learning to budget their time. They will be learning about the idea of "revise, revise, revise" that is importatn in carrying lout any substantial project. All of these ideas are interdisciplinary and of long lasting value.

Current List of "What is?" Articles

Here is the current list of "What if?" articles available in the iae-pedia. People interested in adding to this list are strongly encouraged to do so!

What is Mathematics? (Two short articles provide different answers.)
What is Science?
What is Computer Science?

In addition, the page Digital Filing Cabinet/Secondary School History provides some insights into "What is History?"

References

Academic Disciplines (n.d.). list of academic disciplines. Retrieved 8/25/07: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_discipline. Quoting from the reference:

An academic discipline, or field of study, is a branch of knowledge which is taught or researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties to which their practitioners belong.

Fields of study usually have several sub-disciplines or branches, and the distinguishing lines between these are often both arbitrary and ambiguous.

Denning, Peter J. (2008). CACM IT Profession Columns. Retrieved 2/16/08: http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/PUBS/CACMcols/. This site provides access to a number of the columns that Denning has written for the Communications of the ACM. For example:

Who Are We? (February 2001) The IT profession is not simply a community of people who make their livelihood by developing, deploying, serving, operating, and repairing information technologies. It is several dozen diverse specialties in IT-core, IT-related fields, and IT infrastructure. It does not have a coherent identity but can develop one with leadership from ACM and its allies. The tensions between software engineers and computer scientists come from a misunderstanding of the difference between core of principles and core of practices.

The Field of Programmers Myth (July 2004). Quoting from the article: "Are you concerned with the widely held public view of our field: “Computer science equals programming”? You ought to be. It is firmly lodged in movies, novels, news reports, advertisements, political speeches, perceptions of other scientists and engineers, and in the minds of prospective entrants to our profession. What’s more, many people believe computer science is only a technology field without much science and engineering of its own; the word “science” in our title is undeserved."

Links to Other IAE Resources

This is a collection of IAE publications related to the IAE document you are currently reading. It is not updated very often, so important recent IAE documents may be missing from the list.

This component of the IAE-pedia documents is a work in progress. If there are few entries in the next four subsections, that is because the links have not yet been added.