Teaching as Modeling Disciplinary Practice

One of the key differences between secondary education and university is that in the former, students tend to be taught about a subject, while in the latter, they are taught what disciplinary practitioners do. Usually, the teaching of this practice is, in an important sense, pretend. When students study a laboratory science, the outcomes of the experiments they conduct are largely predetermined. Similarly, in a literature class when students analyze a classic work, the instructor presents standard arguments. This past semester I had the opportunity to teach in a way that more genuinely modeled disciplinary practice. I taught a senior seminar in international finance, where we organized the class as a research team to investigate the global implications of the 2008 financial crisis and economic recession, an event which was unfolding in real time while we studied it. As such, there were no texts to read. Indeed, one goal of the project was to create a written analysis of the crisis, which we will publish online. The dynamics of nearly all aspects of the course, from selecting the material we studied to conducting class sessions to grading, were different from normal courses. Students were given small research tasks, the results of which they posted on the course wiki. Class time was spent figuring out what those results mean as we constructed ‘the story’ of the financial crisis. Grades were based on what students contributed to the group’s understanding. This experience provided many lessons about how to improve the teaching of other courses.