What is (Name of Discipline)?
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[edit] Purpose of this Page
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.
As an example, I have watched many movies over the years. 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?
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, and primary resources. Learning history is not memorizing a bunch of names, dates, and places.
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.
[edit] 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 an 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), attention, math, science, social science, 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, sort of hates the disciplines, and 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.
[edit] 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.
- 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 figures quoted for time tend to be about 10,000 hours spread out over ten years.
Within any broad discipline, there are many different sub disciplines where one can achieve a high level f 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.
[edit] List of "What is?" Articles
- What is Mathematics? (Two short articles provide different answers.)
- What is Science?
- What is Computer Science?
[edit] 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."
[edit] Author or Authors
The initial version of this page was created by David Moursund.
