This chapter describes four concepts from the learning sciences that provide research-based recommendations for instructional practice. The authors explore how these teaching approaches manifest in different institutional, disciplinary, and course contexts.

This chapter describes how seven disciplinary bottlenecks from four diverse disciplines were analyzed using a phenomenological perspective and includes a discussion of embodied knowing and implications for educators.

Using the TBC, we compared students' and teachers' perceptions of excellent teaching in different disciplines at a private university in Colombia. Faculty and students in all fields rated being respectful and being a good communicator as the two most important qualities of excellent teachers. Differences in students' and faculty's perceptions…

This chapter argues that expert practice is an inquiry that surfaces a hermeneutic relationship between theory, practice, and the world, with implications for new lines of questioning in the Decoding interview.

Deciphering teachers' paths to their disciplinary professional identities can make important elements of their tacit knowledge explicit and available to their students.

This chapter presents the bottlenecks identified by seven faculty members from diverse disciplines and an inductive content analysis of their Decoding interviews. Representative quotations illustrate themes in the interviews and we consider the implications for both faculty development and pedagogical research.

In this chapter we describe the Decoding the Disciplines Faculty Learning Community at Mount Royal University and how Decoding has been used in new and multidisciplinary ways in the various teaching, curriculum, and research projects that are presented in detail in subsequent chapters.

This article focuses on curriculum-based learning communities (LCs). In these LCs, manipulation of the curriculum is intentional and often innovative, with the overarching goals of developing meaningful connections among students, between students and faculty, and between students and their coursework. The variety of curriculum-based models…

In this chapter, the author focuses on intersectionality as a heuristic means toward an open and affirming classroom and as a model grounded in a larger history of calls for anti-oppressive pedagogy. Three critical pivots set the background to this article. The first is Paolo Freire, who clearly connected social justice with pedagogy and contended…

There are unique moments in curriculum development when an opportunity for a fresh start or a major turn in design fleetingly presents itself. These moments opened up in different locations across McMaster University at different times and eventually led to several quite different initiatives in inquiry-guided learning (IGL). Well-travelled…

Over a decade ago, Lenning and Ebbers (1999) envisioned that information and computer technology (ICT) could be used to create virtual learning communities (VLCs) as a "future" form of learning communities. Indeed, almost all academic departments--including psychology--depend heavily on the use of ICT to create and sustain connections among…

Student resistance to critical thinking emblematic of a liberal arts curriculum is often painfully obvious in freshman writing classes that impose a process-based approach to writing and thinking. Criminal justice students, like their peers in other majors with strong vocational orientations, often resist taking any more than the required liberal…

The University of Gloucestershire, located in the southwest of the United Kingdom, is a small university with approximately 7,500 full-time students and 400 teaching staff. It has three faculties, all with a professional or applied focus: (1) Media, Art, and Technology; (2) Business, Education, and Professional Studies; and (3) Applied Sciences.…

In 2006, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) launched a major initiative, the Top 25 Project, to embed inquiry-guided learning (IGL) into its largest-enrollment courses across the university. These are generally entry-level classes and thus affect many students: 75 percent of incoming students on its main campus in 2010 were in at least one Top 25…

Efforts to reform and improve teaching and learning in the undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines have grown increasingly stronger and more focused over the past two decades. Since the early 1990s, some notable unifying developments have given coherence to such initiatives, as well as other developments…